Blog Date: December 2024

Those of us who have taken the VMware Certified Professional Data Center Virtualization exams, can attest to those exams testing your knowledge and experience with vSphere, ESXi, and vSAN. We now have a new certification that tests our administration skills with VMware Cloud Foundation. Well, sort of…

What this exam got right: I do believe it was a good move to pull out questions regarding advanced deployment considerations around networking and VSAN stretch clusters, because those questions belong in a VCAP level exam that test our abilities around design and deployment. The exam also stayed away from questions that quiz us on deployment sizing, ports, and other factoids that in the real world, we would just consult the documentation for. I was also happy to see that there was significantly less “gotcha questions” than previous versions.

What I believe the exam got wrong: I do not believe this exam should have questions regarding the benefits and usage of add-ons like HCX, the Aria Suite, and Tanzu. To me, those questions should have been moved out to individual specialist exams that target those specific skillsets when used in conjunction with VCF. The exam did not go deep enough into the daily administration tasks like managing certificates and passwords, resolving trust issues between the SDDC manager and the VCF components like ESXi, vSAN, vCenter, and NSX. There should have been more questions on basic troubleshooting and questions regarding how to perform upgrades. These are basic administration skills that engineers should have, and are the area’s where I see engineers get themselves into trouble by coloring outside the VCF lines, especially coming from traditional vSphere environments with SAN storage.

Final thoughts: I do believe that this certification is a lot better than the VMware Cloud Foundation Specialist exams that have been retired, but this exam lacks focus on core skillsets necessary to administer VMware Cloud Foundation. This feels too much like an associate/specialist level exam. I would like to see a larger focus on testing an engineers skills administering VCF like what configurations should be done by the SDDC manager versus doing the configuration manually in the individual components. I would like to see questions that test an engineers basic VCF troubleshooting skills like what log files to look at for failed tasks and upgrades. The SOS command line tool in the SDDC manager is very powerful and VCF engineers should be aware of it’s basic functions. I would also like to see questions around the requirements and sequence of deploying hosts to a workload domain, decommissioning hosts, performing host maintenance, and some of the VSAN considerations engineers need to take into account for each. VMware Cloud Foundation is the modern private cloud, and although it is not feasible to have deep knowledge in each of the individual components that make up VCF like ESXi, vSAN, vCenter, vSphere, and NSX, I do believe we need to level-set on a basic set of skills to be successful.

I would highly recommend taking the VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator: Install, Configure, Manage 5.2 course. Many of the topics in the certification exam are covered in this training course. In its current form, you should also have a basic understanding HCX capabilities, and Aria Ops, Logs, and Automation. The exam also touches on the basic knowledge of the async patch tool and its function.