I by no means is an expert at VCP or what to do. My experience so far by studying for VCP is this. I first took the course and with the recommendation of our instructor purchased the VCP5 study guide by Atkinson and The offical VCP5 guide by Ferguson. I have also built a home lab. I have also looked at train signal. The company that my instructor teaches for highly recommends CramMaster and they guarantee you will pass if you can pass their exams with a score of 85%. They even put a free voucher behind this. I have not looked at their questions yet but will later. With this all said, it comes down to what Scott continues to say in this community.
1. Blue Print
2. Documentation
3. Practice with a home lab.
4. Check out his blog, VMware Training and Certification: VCP - Common Questions
So, what I am I using.
1. Blue Print - reading all of the documents in the tools section
2. VCP-5 | - great job of putting everything in one place and referencing the documents for further reading.
3. Home lab. - there are many labs out there to build from but all you really need to do is
- Get workstation
- Download evaluation of ESXi and vCenter from Evaluate and Download VMware Products for a Virtual Infrastructure - VMware and choose VMware vSphere with Operations Management
- download vcsa
- download evaluation of Microsoft 2008 Server
- build a DC with dns, dhcp, active directory
- Start with #1 above and #2 and start learning
4. Register for your exam and put that date in stone and work back from it. That will keep you focused.
5. Leverage Youtube for videos on how things work if you want to see it visually or hear someone speaking about it.
Bottom line, do not make this more complicated than it is. When I first started out in March I thought what Scott said was to basic and that I would need more. Well, the further I have gotten into it and the more I know, his simplistic approach is spot on. If you need a book, get one but you really do not need one with all due respect to the authors.