Since I’ve been on this Professional Services path, as a sub contractor for VMware, I’ve normally been pretty busy. In fact, the majority of last year I spent on the road visiting customers, and so my Monday through Thursday was spent away from home. This made it incredibly difficult to find the motivation to continue my education. This year I’m making use of all the home time during the pandemic to level up. I really love working from home!

In May 2020 I was able to re-certify and pass the VMware Data Center Virtualization Exam for 2020. I spent weeks on prep, and it paid off as I scored 357 out of 300. This was also my first certification at home, rather than going to a testing center.

In July 2020, I decided to go after my first VMware Specialist class certification – Cloud Provider 2020. This certification centers around VMware Cloud Director, and its associated components VMware Cloud Availability and NSX. I’m no longer in the VMware Cloud Provider space, however that’s really where I cut my teeth on VMware technologies, and spent 2014 to 2018 designing, deploying, managing and upgrading five different vCloud Director based cloud environments. I’ve been told that this is a rare skill in VMware’s Professional Services, and have been able to work on a few vCD engagements for VMware as a result, so I felt it was important to have this. Oddly enough assignments I’ve had were not with Cloud Providers, but I’ve gotten to see some pretty unique ways the platform is used outside that space.

I am focusing on prepping for the vSphere VCAP design and deploy certifications. This Cloud Provider specialist cert was a nice distraction. I also have a class scheduled for NSX-T in the fall as I hope to get certified on VCP-NV 2020 as well. I might try and go for the vROps specialist exam this year too, but I really want to get at least one VCAP out of the way first.

Update 11/18/2020

I forgot to post here, but in August I finally completed my certification for the VMware Advanced Professional – Data Center Design 2020.

I was hoping that the VCAP- Deploy 2020 would also be made virtual, but I will have to schedule something at a testing facility.

I was able to attend a NSX-T 3.0 Data Center: Install, Configure, Manage course. However the week that I scheduled it, my customer had an outage, so I wasn’t able to focus 100% on this.

I was also able to take an NSX-T 3.0 live fire course, but this too came second to my customer’s needs. Such is Professional Services life I suppose. I was hoping to get the NSX cert this year, but it’s looking like I will need to push that off until 2021.