Been spending the past week cramming as much information into my head as possible in order to get my VCP5 certification. I already hold a VCP in VI3 (pretty outdated now), and I did the vSphere 4: What’s New course, which would have qualified me for the VCP4, but I never sat the exam!
As such, when vSphere 5 came out, I didn’t qualify to be able to do the VCP5 through only doing the What’s New course and had to do the full course to qualify. I did that, and then put off doing the exam for a while. Anyway, the free exam voucher I had was expiring soon, so I went and sat the exam, and passed - by a comfortable margin.
I can recommend the VCP5 Study Guide by Brian Atkinson for this. On the whole, this guide was pretty good, but it does cover some stuff you don’t need for the exam. Notably, since the release of 5.1, VMware will only test you for things that are common between 5.0 and 5.1, so you will not be asked any questions where the answer will have changed between the two versions. This cuts out many of the configuration maximum and licensing type questions straight away.
The most important bit of advice I can really give is to read each question very carefully, and read the possible answers even more carefully. Go through and select the answers you think are right, then go through in the review and cross off the answers you know are wrong. VMware seems to love trying to trip you up on grammar, little technicalities and other minor things. Things like remembering the maximum size of a VMDK in VMFS-5 is 512 bytes short of 2TB, not 2TB exactly. Be careful with that sort of technicality, they love it.
Next up, study for XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp. Phew.