Last Monday I sat and passed this exam (https://www.nutanix.com/support-services/training-certification/certifications/certification-details-ncm-mci#) and I am writing a small article for anyone interested in doing this exam and looking for what to expect.

First of all, I sat this exam at home, so I had my own setup that I could use for the exam. It is not an exam with multiple choice questions, where you have to select the right answer, it is scenario-based.

You get between 16 and 20 scenario’s where you have to do stuff in a real life environment, with multiple clusters.

Setup

It helped me tremendously that I have a large and wide monitor, if you have the opportunity to take the exam in such a manner, that comes highly recommended. If you have just a laptop monitor, you will likely be switching between screens a lot. In my case, I was able to have the scenario’s on the right part of the screen, while still having enough space to have a working area on the rest of the screen.

The scenario’s are different in the time it will take to solve each of them. Some are fairly short, others might take a long time. I don’t know how they score, but remember, time is short (I had 3 hours and ran out before I was able to finish everything). If you near the end of the time (say around the two hour mark), make sure you check the remaining tasks to see if there are “easy” assignments to complete, they might make the difference between passing or failing.

Preparations

Then the preperations. I followed two courses on Nutanix University that helped me with the theory, but I don’t think that in itself will be enough to pass the exam. These are the courses:

Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) Online
Advanced Administration & Performance Management (AAPM) Online

I also followed some of the training-videos that are available on-line. This is the playlist:

NCP-MCI Certification Exam Prep

Not all are relevant (far from it), but pick and choose the ones you feel are good additions to your skillset to pass the exam.

But apart from that, and most important of all: get hands-on. In my case, I have a lab environment that I have used during the courses, to look at the theory explained, but also to test out some own scenario’s. That gives you the hands-on experience required to pass the exam. If you have the hardware, I have written some blogs about setting up a lab environment. If you don’t have a lab-environment or the hardware to create one yourself, you can use “Test Drive”: https://www.nutanix.com/one-platform. I would especially recommend using NCP.

Know how to use “Advanced Search” within Acrobat Reader. All documentation is available to you, with one good search question from getting to some of the answers.

Content

As to the content. Of course I can’t go to much into details, but know your way around the graphic interface of both Prism Central and Prism Elements. Know how to analyse and report on issues in the environment.

But also know your way around the command-line and using API’s to do stuff within the environment.

Final thoughts

Read the questions multiple times. Some of them contain a lot of different assignments you have to fulfill and it is important to read through them several times and validate that you have touched on all of stuff that needs to be done. Also read carefully and look for instructions about what exactly to do. Sometimes you have to leave files on the desktop of your working environment to get credit.

Don’t get overwhelmed. There is a lot of things you have to do. And you only have three hours. That might seem like a long time, but it flies by. So at a certain stage you may feel that you are not going to be able to finish everything. That is okay. You don’t have to finish everything to get to a passing score. Keep doing the work and when time is up, that is the best you can do.

Have patience. It does take a little while before the exam results gets shared with you. There is a real life person that has to evaluate your efforts and give you a passing (or failing) score.

I am very happy to have this under my belt, at the first try. To be honest, when I finished the exam (or actually, when time ran out on the exam), I was in doubt if I had done enough…