Tonight I sat the beta exam for the second of VMware’s series of certifications for the enterprise desktop, the VCP4-DT.  This exam is designed to test your knowledge of View and the infrastructure needed to support it.

One of the requirements to attain the VCP4-DT is a VCP4, so there isn’t much about the vSphere infrastructure in this exam.  The other requirement is the VCA4-DT certification, which I took as a beta exam at Partner Exchange back in February (being a beta exam, I still have yet to received those results).  The VCA4-DT is geared towards testing your knowledge of managing View, which it did very well.

As with many other VMware beta exams, there was little warning and a very short timeframe in which to take the exam, so I didn’t get much preparation.  Fortunately, I do a lot of design and implementation of VIew.  I found the exam questions on the whole to be very good.  They met my expectations of what the certification should mean very well.

The questions were all multiple choice questions, except for two or three “Match column A with Colum B” style questions.  Several of the multiple choice questions seemed to have more right answers than were allowed, but perhaps that is the nature of a beta exam.  There were a few min/max questions and several questions about ThinApp (specifically in regards to integration with View).  I would have liked to see more questions on what type of pool to create in a given scenario.

Overall, a good exam.  Not quite as challenging as the VCP4, but there is also a lot less content to cover (and know) with View than with vSphere as a whole.  I am now looking forward to trying out the final of the three desktop exams: VCAP4-DT.