Practice Tests for VCP

There are more than 25000 VCPs worldwide, and more people "join the club" every day. Certification is big business, and not just to those that get the certification. There's company after company on the internet that will sell you brain dumps and practice tests, but I would advise to be careful if using them to help you study and pass the VCP exam.

The attraction is obvious, you want to get an idea of the kind of questions you're going to get when you take the real thing. The danger is that the questions you see are not representative of the real thing, or more worringly the test you are using has invalid questions or the wrong answers!

From my experience, practice tests are never perfect, they all contain errors in varying numbers - I've seen some that had as many as 25-30% of the questions that were wrong or invalid in some kind of way. This means that you could be studying from pratice tests that are designed to help you pass but could actually help you fail.

All of the resources you need to pass the exam can be found in various places on the VMware web site:

The exam blueprint which will tell you what you need to know and where to find it:
http://mylearn.vmware.com/lcms/mL_faq/1714/VCP3.5Blueprint.PDF

The VI3 documentation which will provide you with the answer to every question:
http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pages/vi_pubs_35u2.html

The official mock exam which will show you the exam and question format:
http://mylearn.vmware.com/quiz.cfm?item=639&ui=www

The mock exam is produced by the same team that produce the real exam, some of the questions have previously appeared in the real exam.

VMware are not stupid, they know that unofficial practice tests exist, and there's not exactly a huge amount they can do to stop them. From conversations I've had with some of the guys and gals at VMware, they review these practice tests and when they find questions that are identical to those in the real exam they remove them from the real exam. BUT if practice tests contain incorrect or invalid questions they deliberately leave those questions in the real exam - they want to catch out anyone who is memorizing practice tests.

There is another way of focusing yourself on the exam, you could come and attend a preparation workshop with us at Global Knowledge:
http://www.globalknowledge.co.uk/Default.aspx?page=461&coursecode=VMEXP

The workshop will help you develop a technique to help you pass, there are lots of practice questions that we go through on the day, and the session is run by a VMware Certified Instructor - and although the regular passing score is 70 we have to get 85!!