Virtual Musings

Today I sat and passed VMware Exam 2V0-33.22 to obtain the certification VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud 2023.

In this post I’ll list the resources I used to study for the exam to help you on your journey to this certification. It’s relatively new so not a lot of material is out there.

VMware Study Material

When studying for any certification the first thing you should always look at is the Exam Blueprint. This details all the topics you need to study that could appear in the exam. Work through all the sections in this.

Some of the sections are pretty straight forward if you are familiar with VMware, NSX, and HCX. However, many of the sections about VMware in the Cloud may not be. For example, objective 1.7 is “Explain Hybrid Linked Mode for the VMware SDDC.” If you have never worked with VMware on a cloud provider such as AWS this may be a new topic for you, so I would recommend before sitting down to study to read through the blueprint and highlight terms like this if they are not immediately familiar.

A valuable recourse often overlooked is the VMware Documentation. Especially for AWS this can be really useful if you are not familiar with it.

The biggest resource is the courseware that as of February 2023 is being offered for free by VMware – Designing, Configuring, and Managing the VMware Cloud. This training is a MUST! For one, if you currently don’t hold any VCP or higher certification this will satisfy the class requirement. Also – this is currently the only training out there, and really is a good combination of reading, videos, as well as simulations on how to set things up.

What’s on the Exam?

So as you would guess, this is a cloud exam. What that means is that basically 100% of what you will be tested on relates to how you would order, configure, and manage VMware on AWS, Google, and Azure. IBM Cloud, Alibaba, and Oracle are also covered, although I personally did not get any test questions on them.

If you work on the cloud today, no matter which provider, a lot of the techniques will sound familiar and they should – many of the providers have ‘solved’ the same problem the same way. So knowing that a Direct Connect on AWS is an ExpressRoute in Azure or a Dedicated Interconnect in GCP all are really the ‘same’ thing, just different provider approaches. But the focus here is for sure on AWS, and you are likely to get the most test questions on that.

You’ll also need to know HCX pretty well. What are the different virtual machine migration types, and what do the different capabilities of HCX require. You should also at a high level know the different component of the Aria (former vRealize) suite, and when you would use which application to solve a problem.

None of this requires you to have a cloud account on any provider, but I will say as an employee who works on one everyday it was a huge help to my learning for this exam. Most of the scenarios they tested on I’ve personally run into, and so had practical experience on them. Same thing for NSX and HCX – since I use the products and deploy them on a pretty regular basis.

I would say you ‘could’ study it and pass without any cloud resources, but it would be a bit of a struggle. I never felt in my personal case I needed to deploy anything to help my learning, and the simulations did a good job of walking you through the VMware Cloud console for example. But this is due to experience I already had, and that may be a bit hard to acquire just through free resources.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the exam, it was a nice combination of using what I knew from previous classes and exams mixed with new learning which really helped to put things together. Good luck!