I'm going to be writing in a few short days, and will be keeping up to date with the community and the threads within it while I continue to prepare. I usually never go to VMware's communities, but I decided to finally sign up and here I am.
My preparation so far:
-Muck around quite a bit on two hosts running ESXi 5.1 (R200 and R300 servers, respectively)
-Each host has two vmnics. One vmnic going to a flat network on a /24 subnet (House network), the second is directly attached to the other host (this goes both ways). I use the second vmnic as a storage and vMotion network.
-I have a nas4free VM that I use to present a VMDK on a local datastore (R300 has a 1.8TB local datastore, it's a RAID 0 array with two 2TB 7.2K SATA drives) as a lun to both hosts. It's here I've set up Fault Tolerance with a few Ubuntu VM's. I can't run more then one or two VM's on this datastore without things getting really slow, but either way it serves it's purpose pretty well for the lab.
I'm going to dig more into the vDS and cmdlet's later tomorrow. I'm fairly nervous about the types of questions to encounter, and I haven't reviewed any threads in this community yet. I'd like to see what other's have done that has yielded results. I'm also using the study guides from Valco Labs, along with the Blueprint materials from VMware's certification site. I find the majority of information can be found on the official documentation.
I'll continue to update this thread with any new information. If you have any study tips please share I'll be checking this thread again while I continue to lurk in the shadows.