Virtual Musings

I’m writing this blog less than an hour after taking (and passing) the VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator 2024 exam. I wanted to share my thoughts and advice about the exam while it was as fresh in my mind as possible, as I’m sure many people will be deciding over the next few months whether studying and taking this exam is for them. Given the recent changes with VMUG Advantage and the VMware vExpert program, this exam is likely to become a hotter topic than in the past.

As a background, like many people I took the formal courseware and training prior to the changes by VMware removing the requirement to sit a class prior to taking any exam. That was a few years ago when I took the traditional path of sitting VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, and Manage and then taking my VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization exam. Since then, I’ve taking several other VMware exams including my vSAN Specialist and VCP – Cloud exams. I’ve also taken advantage of the online recorded courses offered as part of my employer being a VMware partner.

Why am I saying all of this? Because simply put this exam was not what I expected at all.

The format is pretty standard for a VMware exam – 70 questions, a little over two hours to take the exam, and a score of 300 out of 500 to pass. That is all clearly documented on their site and was exactly what I expected. What I did not expect was the skill level required to successfully answer the questions, and the format of many of the questions themselves.

Skill Level

On the skill level, I’d have to say this exam was all over the map. There were questions that were very specific to VMware Cloud Foundation, and you’d likely only get those right if you studied the administrative guide or took the VMware Cloud Foundation: Deploy, Configure, and Manage class (as a side note – the online recorded version of this class was just updated to 5.2 November 21st). On the other hand, many of the questions were extremely basic from a VMware administrator point of view, meaning they were questions that I would have expected more on a entry level data center virtualization exam than one focused on VCF.

There was also a lot more questions about implementing Tanzu than I would expected, especially considering the courseware only had 1-2 sections on this topic. I guess I should have expected that a bit since given the direction of the offerings it makes total sense, but still was a bit more than I planned or anticipated on seeing.

Finally, expect a healthy amount of troubleshooting questions. Again – these question were ranging from very basic issues you’d expect a junior administrator to be able to handle, to much more advanced topics both on troubleshooting and support.

Question Format

The question format itself was also all over the place, and a bit unexpected. For multiple choice there was the traditional choose one, but there were also many questions that wanted you to select two, and some even three answers out of the list. So less of choosing the ‘best’ answer and much more of choosing the best answers to solve problems.

The biggest surprise was the amount of questions which asked you to put a task in the correct order step. Now, again having taken multiple VMware recorded classes and familiar with their assessments this was a very common question type there. But to see so many on the exam I was really surprised given it’s a bit of an unusual format. Now, those may have been unscored, but since there is no way of knowing that it was an interesting approach I have not seen a lot of in previous exams.

Study Advice

So how would I recommend going about studying for this exam? First of course is experience with the products. But what courses or material would be worth using to prepare?

To begin, I don’t see this exam replacing the need for someone to be skilled enough to pass the VCP-DCV exam. Matter of fact my recommendation to my own teammates would be to study and pass that exam first before taking on VCP-VCF Administrator. The reason for this is many of the questions I got asked were not covered at all in the VCP-DCM course. I figured before the exam that was because they wanted to focus on the features and operations that occur with the VCF tooling such as Cloud Builder and SDDC Manager. Turns out they simply didn’t cover that in the VCP-DCM course because they just assumed you already knew it, but also that it was still fair game for the exam.

I’d also recommend spending a lot more time on Tanzu than you think you may need to. It’s not necessarily an afterthought on this exam. Personally it’s not an area I’ve spent a lot of time on, and I struggled with those questions on the exam.

NSX and vSAN are definitely fair game as well, and this was another disconnect with the VCP-VCF course material and the exam. I again expected it to stick to how you deploy and manage those services in SDDC Manager, but I was wrong here as well.

In general, if you don’t have a few years under your belt managing vSphere, vSAN, NSX, the Aria suite, and Tanzu outside of VCF, you will likely struggle. I’d say you need to know at least three of those five items very very well, and at minimum a passing familiarity with the last two you may not be as strong in.

Conclusion

So what did I think of the exam overall? I thought it was a very fair exam if you are or are planning to become a VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator. It really did test across the entire stack of the offering, and covered from installation to troubleshooting.

But, like I said earlier, if you just took the VCF-DCM course and expect to pass this exam, you’re likely not to succeed. Conversely if you are a traditional VI Admin that’s used vSphere for years, you’ll struggle because of the amount of material specific to VCF.

What I hope VMware does is get a better roadmap together for learning the VMware Cloud Foundation stack. Before there were very traditional paths you could take combining real world experience and courses to get to the level of, say, VCP-DCV, and then branch out from there. But this exam covers the entire suite, so determining where someone should start their journey really needs to be mapped out better by VMware. For now I’d say it’s still the traditional know the material from the vSphere Install, Configure, and Manage course, then the Optimize & Scale course, but then it gets murky. Do you jump right into VCF? Move into vSAN or NSX, or the Aria suite? Or switch to Tanzu? So many of the product interact with each other now, especially when it comes to this exam, that you really need to know all of them. That’s the part I think folks will struggle with, and is going to require some serious preparation before taking this one on.