VCP Help

How hard is it to pass the VCP exam?

by VCP Help on 11/01/09 at 4:56 pm

Passing the VMware Certified Professional exam was quite a bit more difficult than I was expecting!

Even having worked hands-on with VMware products for just under a year, I passed the VCP exam with a more narrow margin than I expected. You are required to get a score of 70 on the test to pass and I got a 77. Considering my fairly extensive daily hands-on experience and passing by only 7 points, that may give you an idea of the difficulty.

I studied the VCP test preparation kit and other materials for about three or four days for a couple hours each time to get the results I did. Had I not used the test prep kit, I am 100% sure that my score would have been lower. The VCP includes a number of questions which are things that you’d just never think to read-up on and the sample exam in the test prep kit opens your eyes to those questions. Like most computer nerds, I don’t often open the manuals for products and if I do, I skip the introductory chapters. Well, some of the VCP questions come from those chapters!

Simply taking the VCP exam without any preparation or seeing an example test would not be something I recommend. You could always take the exam to see the questions and plan to re-take it, but that is more expensive than simply grabbing one of the test preparation kits and passing the first time. Even if you are a VMware guru with years of advanced hands-on experience, there are questions from those introductory manual chapters which will get you because you never worry about the “minimum RAM required to run Virtual Center” since no good nerd gives anything the “minimum RAM required” (for example).