Exam Experience – VCAP6-DCV Design exam beta

As a certification junkie I can’t avoid doing the beta version of the VCAP6-DCV design exam (3V0-622). Most of you reading this are familiar with this kind of exam so I will keep the introduction short.

General exam info

Exam duration is 240min plus an additional 30min for people where the primary language is not english. In total there were 31 question and according to other exam experience posts it was split between 9 visio tool design questions and 22 normal drag & Drop questions. I have done my first VCAP5-DCD back in 2012 when it was released so my experience from that exam is almost 3 years old. In the VCAP6-DCV design exam you will not find any multiple or single choice question. Looks like they were removed in VCAP6 or maybe earlier in VCAP55-DCD exams. I also heard of a master design question which was available in VCAP55-DCD but I can’t say if there was any in VCAP6-DCV design.
As far as I heard the GA exam should be only 2 hours long with less questions. From my point of view this will be an improvement because sitting in a testing center for 4,5 hours is not much fun. 🙂

Experience

I really enjoyed this exam. It was little bit different then the one I did 3 years ago but it is doable. I can’t agree with some of the experience post going around that it is harder than VCAP5-DCD but maybe this is because of my experience I have with the topic and with this kind of exams. One of the big issues in previous design exam was that when you go back and forth the question the answers will mix-up somehow. I didn’t experience this issues in that exam but to be honest I didn’t move forward or back the exam. Maybe because I knew of this issue and don’t want to push one’s luck.
Make sure you read the drag & drop questions and the instruction on the left-hand side carefully. For some of the question I had to read them two or three times.
In earlier version of the VCAP5-DCD exam the visio design questions were sometimes not really clear, which means you didn’t know what you had to connect. This ended sometimes in a visio full of connections. In the VCAP6-DCV design beta this was a really improvement because in the requirement section you find now information that clearly defines the connectivity required between objects.
But there were also some issues. Some of the questions were not completed so they ended right in the middle of a sentence. I hope this will be fixed in the final exam. Some of the questions were also little bit vague and it was not clear what was really required. I would love to see a dictionary for non-native english speaker during the exam because I had 2-3 words I didn’t understand but I think were important for the answer.
From my personal feeling I would say that I have passed the exam but let’s see what really the final score is. Beta scoring takes approx. 6-10 weeks after the beta period ended.

Preparation

Because I had done several design exams before and I hopefully know how to design an virtual infrastructure I only took an hour to go through the following documents:

• Functional versus Non-functional Requirements
• Conceptual, Logical, Physical: It is Simple
• Constraints, Assumptions (Risks, Requirements) & Dependencies
• Systems Architecture Fundamentals – Conceptual, Logical, Physical Designs
• VCDX Design defencee blueprint (Availability, Manageability, Performance, Security, Recoverability)

Here are some other exam experience posts I would recommend to read:

• Rene Van den Beden – VMware VCAP6-DCV Design Beta Exam Recap
• Carel Maritz – VCAP6-DCV Design beta exam review
• Kim Bottu – VCAP6-DCV DESIGN – Beta exam
• Andras Herceg – VCAP6-DCV Design – 3C0-622