There’s an info on the Internet that says it’s possible to pass Vmware VCA certs for free. It’s been a while now and Vmware retired this offer.

However, there are some folks that say they could get around and pass without spending a penny. They say it’s a matter of combining promo codes.

I’ve been trying all the codes. Pearson Vue warned me that they’re going to shut down my account if I do another attempt.

Today I successfully passed the exam. I got a score of 420. Alhamdulillah.

How I studied for the exam: I watched the Vmware E-learning fundamental videos, took notes, reviewed them with a big mind map, then registered and sat for it. I sat studying in many small sessions.

It’s great to sit for an exam and pass it from home :) it’s also great to see there are other folks out there who are sharing the same experience.

I found some interesting blogs about this topic:

• davidecisco blog
• ciscoshizzle blog
• gns3 website
• Host-only/Bridged Vmware networking

Notes:

• Router IOS should support voice. I’m using 12.4 Advanced Entreprise IOS version,
• Vmware network adapter: set to “host only” mode. Remember that during the installation of CUCM on Vmware, we set the network adapter to “bridged”, so it can connect to Internet and contact an NTP server,
• After adding the cloud component in GNS3, you may find that no adapter is seen under NIO Ethernet. GNS3 mentions that it needs “Administrator or root access”. Solution: close GNS3, right click and choose “run as administrator”. Then you’ll see the list of adapters under NIO Ethernet.

I struggled a couple of weeks before I came across a great post about installing CUCM on a vmware workstation. I needed this for CIPT1 labs.

Strangely, the website has been taken down due to a hacking attempt.

Well, everything seemed to work fine until the NTP configuration step. Here, I’ve discovered that , when configuring NTP server, make sure your guest machine can connect to the internet and check the public NTP server. So if you have a computer firewall, disable it.