VMworld

After a bit of a rocky start (missed my flight and the partner day due to tendonitis in my knee) I arrived in Barcelona for my 2nd VMworld Europe. I headed straight from the airport to the PernixData party and caught up with the rest of the Xtravirt guys.

Tuesday morning started as ever with a keynote address. It was a little disappointing, but not unexpected, that there were no real announcements or reveals in the keynote. It was essentially a repeat of the VMworld US keynote with a couple of new betas announced. Nothing really revolutionary, a new vCloud Air datacenter in Germany and some new partners for EVO:RAIL. It’s interesting to see that the pace of traction for both cloud and hyperconverged is increasing for VMware’s portfolio though.

Today was always going to be a bit of a funny day as I scheduled the VCAP5-DCD exam for 10am this morning. I am happy to say that I passed! I’m a bit light on VMworld to report today, so forgive my DCD experience to pad it out!

Preparation

I have to confess my prep for this exam was light – I literally only watched the TrainSignal course by Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) and just about finished that last night in the hotel! I don’t spend much time focussing on design during my day job, so I approached this exam as a bit of a learning experience rather than a serious bid to pass. I decided to book the exam here at VMworld just because you can get 75% off – if you’re funding yourself it’s not a discount to be dismissed easily!

I flew from Gatwick to Barcelona last night to my very first VMworld!

I’m staying in a hotel that is actually quite far from the conference, it’s a metro, train and bus journey away from the conference center and it takes about 40 minutes to get here. On the plus side I was only 5 minutes away from the VMUG party last night so I went over there for an hour or so. Note for future years - stay a little closer to the conference!

After my previous post about studying and the exam experience of the VCAP5-DCA exam (and 3 weeks of waking up to check my phone for the email all night) I am pleased to say that I received my Exam Score last week and it was a pass! I was really pleased to see that I passed with a  very decent margin too, which was great! The rushed nature of the exam and long wait for the results leaves you going over the exam in your head convincing yourself how badly you’ve done, so it came as a huge relief and surprise.