Okay, so I'm probably the last person who wrote his VCP-410 exam on the planet, but at least I've done it with an awesome score! 481 out of 500!

I've been rescheduling this exam since November 2009 due to many factors, but mainly because of the lack of time! Today I had to sit the exam anyways to get the certificate without sitting the ICM course, and voila!

As I see from the VMware community forums, this is not an easy score to achieve, and that it also qualifies me (along with other requirements of course) to become a VMware Certified Instructor! Well, I never considered that before, but after a very recent discussion with one of the VMware'ians in my region, I was kind of enthused about this idea.

Now, I can't tell you anything about the content itself – as per the agreement that you accept at the beginning of the exam – but I can at least share with you some thoughts about my preparations and the materials I used. I always find these kind of blog post an inspiration and encouragement for me to sit my exams, so I hope it will motivate you in a way or another:

My thoughts:

• The overall exam was way easy than I expected. I remember I had a quite hard time in my VCP-310 exam, but for this one I felt very comfortable.
• The diagrams that I've been designing till date gave me an incredible knowledge about the very specific details in the subjects, and consequently helped me a lot to nail down many questions in the exam related to vDS, memory management and HA.
• The blog posts from my fellow bloggers are also very useful; I can tell you that I answered one question about the PVSCSI from Scott Sauer's awesome article here.
• If you are new to these kinds of IT exams, you have to read the questions extremely careful, especially if English is not your native language. You will get so many tricks in the wordings, and you may also be miss-directed to points that are not essential to the question being asked.
• I saw many blog posts talking about horror stories related to the config maximums questions, but I can tell you that I got only one or two of them, and they were related to information everyone should be aware of. I found Simon Long's practice tests very useful in that regard and definitely better than reading through a boring flat PDF file.
• I can tell you that 99% of the exam will come from the official VMware documentation. I can't stress enough on the importance of reading these documentations.

The Materials/facilities I used:

• Hands-on experience on vSphere since its early Beta (lab + production).
• VMware vSphere Documentations (a must, must, MUST read from a-z)
• Scott Lowe's Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0 book.
• Forbes Guthrie's vReference Card.
• Uncountable number of VMworld 2007-9 sessions

Congrats to all my fellow VCPs, and good luck for all the candidates. Don't hesitate to email me if you need any help!