VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: Exam VCP-550

This is a great book for studying for the VCP exam. The flow of the book is good, although necessity dictates that there are some parts of the book contain things that you haven't actually learned how to configure. The beginning of the book glosses over a few things because you go into detail about configuring them later on.It is helpful to actually understand the tasks and questions rather than memorizing the answers. The actual exam questions, while similar, are not the same as the ones that are included in the book. If you can dedicate a good portion of your time to going through this book, you'll have a good chance of passing the exam.

The book is a good guide for studying for the test, but to get the full use of it you'll need the setup necessary to run several virtual machines, with multiple physical boxes. If you don't have this, and access to a licensed copy of VMware, many of the labs can't be done. So, if you're trying to use this to study on your own time (say, at home) to learn more or get certified for work, you may have some trouble with that.Otherwise, great book, just loses a star because there's no way to do the labs without a lot of pre-existing equipment.

A deep text into the topics covered in questions on the VCP550 exam for VMware Certified Professional. Built in test questions on CD are good practice to get familiar with the exam question structure. I have been to Boot Camp for this certification and find the focus of this text and the Official Cert Guide are different even though they are related to the same product base. There is one page in this book that in matrix form describes the different "Kits" offered and the components supported within them such as HA, vMotion, FT for the exam this is the one thing that must be drilled into your mind to pass. You get flash cards from this book with questions and answers in addition to test questions for each chapter.

I'm going to give this an average review. This book will get you the foundation information you'll need to prepare, but not pass the VCP550 Certification. I took the Fast Track Course and then purchased this book to study for my exam. Luckily through work I was able to play around and look at setting of our vSphere environment. There are practice exams at the end of each chapter. Here's where the book lacks. The actual exam is nothing like the practice exams or examples laid out. I had to take the test twice before I passed it (passed on the second time). VMware has a habit of throwing in curve-ball questions and/or statements that have nothing to do with the answer. That's where this book lacks in preparing you for. The book will ask straight one to one questions but doesn't prepare you for the actual exam. I would have given this book a higher rating had it done that. I had to purchase several more sources and then passed with a 416 out of 500 score. Passing is 300.

EXCELLENT, Read this over twice in two weeks. Ran through the labs for 10 days completing all of them at least twice. Also have 4 years of experience using VMware in Production environments.Passed the Exam with a 452 out of 500 on the first try. Would recommend this for anyone looking to learn vSphere 5.5 for the first time or anyone looking to brush up to upgrade from VCP410

The book arrived on-time and was in very good condition. I would rate the seller with 4-5 stars!. However, I am only giving the "Author" of the book 3-stars. The author first covers "Planning and Configuring vSphere Storage" in Chapter 5, but storage needs to be setup much earlier to follow along with earlier chapters' tutorials? In addition, this book was used along with a hands-on tech collage class I took which appeared to cover several of the chapters in a single 3 hour period - so my question is: Why did it take the author nearly 800 pages to explain things when my instructor covered it in a fraction of the time, including hands-on labs?I think their are probably better VMware books to be had, but I ordered it because it was part of a class that I took. If I was looking to just start out and learn VMware for the first time, this book would not be my first choice.

I bought this book as a requirement for a college class. It has a lot of pictures and steps to follow along to learn how to do things with VCP5-DCV. There are some explanations, but it seemed to me that most of the book was walk throughs of doing things. This was not a good book for me as a beginner, and based on the title it was probably never meant for beginners anyway. Someone looking to get certified may find it a lot more useful, although VMware has already released newer versions of the software.

The book is poor for passing the test VCP5-DCV, while it is excellent for anyone who wants to learn the skills related to Data Center Vitalization with VMWare. The book does not capture the style and context of the actual test with its flash cards or practice exams. I have taken and passed the test as well as VCP-Cloud and all four Associate exams. Many people buy these books for the express purpose of passing the exam and this book misses the mark for that. It is however, very good at a step by step and hands on way of learning in a non-production environment.

good book does what it says it will do

What you Expect from a Manual

Helped me with studying, and what I like about this book is I still use it as a reference. There is no getting away with the fact that you will still need some practical experience with the product.

very useful for the preparation of the exam and as a future reference.

Upon going through the first 6 chapters, I am being surprised how little it seems to take these days to publish such a close-to-useless book. How can it pretend to be called "Study Guide" while there's evidently not enough information to get even half the score necessary to pass the VCP exam ?? It might be sufficient to serve as a roadmap to objectives and topics that need to be studied to prepare for the exam but the content is clearly lacking the detail. I've had to constantly go for such details, clarifications and error checking to the book by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall "Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5" that I also bought here from Amazon.Just a few examples...Chapter 5 "Planning and Configuring vSphere Networking":- p.201, Configuring vSS and vDS Policies, NIC teaming and available load-balancing policies - no consideration whatsoever to some bare specifics of each (e.g. Route Based on IP Hash requires EtherChannel; respective ESXi uplinks must be connected to the same physical switch, etc.), pros and cons of each method compared to others, etc.;- p.181, the so-called Real World Scenario is a far-fetched, extremely unlikely situation which, on top of its artificial nature, contains an error (max number of port groups supported by VSS) that may cost a valuable point at the exam;- on same p.181, a misleading statement re: use of VSS port groups for VLAN trunking;- p.210-211: VLAN Configuration - types of Ethernet tagging are given out of the context of the VLAN configuration options provided much earlier on p.181, thus making the reader wonder how one relates to the other;p.235-236: SAN Zoning and Masking - not even 1/4 of the page (12 lines to be exact) is allocated to this important topic. After which the author writes: "Now that I have covered zoning and LUN masking, we will identify the hardware and software iSCSI requirements". Are you kidding me ?? Unless you already know this stuff, that's for sure a couple of questions on the exam just for this and/or related subjects...In the end, the reader is left wondering: what 800+ pages have gone for ?...I will probably have more to add as I go through the rest of the book, but for now my strong advise is definitely avoid this "study guide" and look for other titles with more solid and credible content. One such example would be the book by Scott Lowe I noted above.