I passed the VCAP5-DCD exam on July 25th!
I found the exam to be extraordinarily challenging. Design has never been a primary focus of my job, and much of what I learned for the exam was completely new to me. If your primary job is vSphere administration, you are in for a bit of a rough ride. Terms like requirement, constraint, risk, and assumption obviously had English meaning for me, but they meant nothing in the context of a vSphere design.
The exam requires a *TON* of reading. Scenarios are extremely lengthy, far longer than any VCP or VCAP-DCA scenario. You have to be able to quickly extract the important details. If you are a slow reader, you are at a crippling disadvantage for this exam.
For exam preparation, I relied heavily on Cody Bunch’s vBrownBag series. The Asia-Pacific version of the vBrownBag sessions was run by Alastair Cooke and covers the entire VCAP5-DCD exam blueprint. It consists of 15 1-hour sessions and they are all recorded for you to download. You can either watch them streaming, or @nickmarshall9 has converted them to MP4 format, you can download here. I downloaded all of the vBrownBag sessions and saved them out to my Dropbox. I kept two of them marked as favorites on my Droid at all times so I could listen to them while commuting.
Another resource that has a ton of awesome exam-relevant content was the DRBC Design – Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Fundamentals course. Unfortunately it’s not free, but you are in luck if you work for a VMware Partner. The course is free at the Partner University.
For the exam itself, I followed my typical method of answering questions as quickly as I could. If I had any doubt at all, I flagged the question for review and moved on. One tip for this exam is to read the multiple choice answers first – it helps focus your reading so you can spot the answer. I didn’t even attempt any of the diagramming questions on my first pass, I marked them for review and moved on.
Many people have complained about how kludgy the Visio-style diagramming tool is, and my experience was no different. I lost diagrams multiple times and I had very strange behavior with objects moving themselves around on the canvas. There is a video demo of how to work with the diagramming tool on the VCAP5-DCD site, I strongly recommend you watch the short video to familiarize yourself with the tool.