VMWare Certified Professional vSphere 4 (VCP-410) Exam Prep Resource Guide
The latest VMWare vSphere 4 certification exam (Exam ID: VCP-410) has proven to be an extraordinarily popular virtualization technology exam since its release in April 2009, yet so far only a few books have been published on this topic. Despite a relative paucity of paper publications on the VCP-410 exam, there’s a plethora of digital materials available online, including exam tips and advice, practice tests, and question banks, as well as online and classroom training materials of all kinds. In this resource guide, I attempt to make sense of this cornucopia and point out some particularly useful and helpful sources of information and learning.
What About Brain Dumps?
A certain class of websites (and prep materials) may be described as “brain dumps.” As is my practice in reviewing and even investigating exam prep materials of any kind, I steer clear of brain dumps entirely. For the record, a brain dump is a collection of verbatim questions (and answer options) as reported by one or more individuals who claim to have taken some particular certification exam. Their impetus is not just to provide you with information about what is covered on the exam but to provide literal versions that are as close to what appeared on some actual exam as memory will permit.
Though you can find brain dumps for just about any exam, including the VCP-410, I don’t believe they are worth consulting (or taking seriously) for all kinds of reasons. Chief among these is that exam takers are asked to forgo sharing exam details with the public as part of taking any modern cert exam these days, so by posting such information, individuals who create brain dumps do so in violation of their promises to the contrary. Ethical issues aside, brain dumps are seldom exposed to the kinds of serious editorial and technical review to which commercial and professional exam prep materials are routinely subjected, and are thus also highly questionable from the standpoints of technical completeness, accuracy, and coverage. If you read the fine print on exam agreements for Prometric and Vue, you can’t also help but notice that both of them reserve the right to invalidate exams (and the certifications they support) if evidence of cheating[md]including access to brain dumps[md]can be substantiated. Thus, my final word on brain dumps is: “Steer clear!”