Happily I can report that I’ve passed the VCP5 exam last week, now I’m logging into VMware daily eagerly awaiting confirmation that I’m a certified VCP.
I’m not going to rehash study techniques as there are plenty of blogs covering that in detail. I will say that hands on practice is the best way to confirm you really understand the concepts. Since vsphere5 can be run inside a esxi host there’s very little you can’t do without spending a large amount of money or being lucky enough to have a full set of servers and FC storage.
24 by 7, 3 6 5 
Congrats Craig, well done 🙂