As a VMware by Broadcom employee in the VCF Business Unit, you can do three free exams per calendar year, on a voucher, so it makes it fairly riskless to try them out, without (a lot of) preparation. So in my case, I first tried the VCF VCP Administrator exam (2V0-11.24, https://www.broadcom.com/support/education/vmware/certification/vcp-vcf-administrator) in October, and today (about a month later) I tried the VCF VCP Architect exam (Exam 2V0-13.24, https://www.broadcom.com/support/education/vmware/certification/vcp-vcf-architect). In this blog, I’ll give a little bit of insight into my experience.

VCF Administrator

The first exam (VCF) was not very hard, in my opinion. Especially if you know a lot about and have a lot of experience with vSphere 8, most of the questions will be fairly straightforward. Expect some other components in there as well, like NSX and Aria (and of course deployment of VCF is covered as well), but most of my questions focused on the core capabilities of vSphere and vSAN.

That said, I do expect people that have little to no hands-on experience, to struggle with the exam. My main experience stems from deploying VCF in my lab environments, but because I have done that several times, the knowledge stuck with me and sometimes I needed to close my eyes just to envision the right screen, to get the answer needed.

And knowledge from previous versions of both VCF and its components helps here as well. I have deployed VMware-based infrastructures for well over a decade, so a lot of the knowledge that I got from that helped me reach the goal:

VCF Architect

The exam I took today was a totally different animal. Again, I have done nothing to prepare (only glanced over the Exam Guide once) and was not expecting to pass this one. It was intended to get an idea of what the exam was about, to do some studying, and use the third and final voucher this year, to sit this exam again.

Even at the moment I clicked “Finish” I expected a failure, but I was very pleasantly surprised when I saw:

So, what are the key takeaways from this exam? First of all, it is not (all) about the technology. Yes, it is very important to know a lot about the components that make up VCF. That includes vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and the Aria components, from a design perspective. But it is equally important to know the process that you go through when designing/architecting a VCF environment.

Know your “Requirements, Constraints, Assumptions & Risks” and the “Availability, Manageability, Performance Recoverability & Security” design qualities.

I could go and explain all of these, but one of my fellow Dutchmen (Jeffrey Kusters) did this already and far better than I could https://www.jeffreykusters.nl/2018/06/25/breaking-down-the-conceptual-design-rcars-and-amprs-vcdx-style/

Then, as always, read the question and think about what they are asking. Don’t select an answer just because it would be a good idea to do something in an environment that you would be designing, but choose based on what you read. If the requirement doesn’t ask for it, it is not the answer to the question.

Read and read again. Understand what is being asked. Sometimes it helps to look at the actual question first before you read the text leading up to it, sometimes it helps to read the text, then the actual question, and then the text again. You have time, there are 60 questions in total, and you get about 135 minutes (in the Netherlands), I used about 70-75 and took my time to read each question thoroughly. Also go back to the beginning of the question, if you loose your train of thought. That happened to me a couple of times, because there can be a lot of information in the text.

And maybe a silly thing to remark, but on another exam I stated that a big screen would be a big help (that was on a Deploy type exam), but for this exam a big screen is not a benefit. It is even hampering the experience, in my opinion. I have a fairly large screen and since the exam is full screen, it means reading a question is more difficult than with a smaller screen. You have to move your head from one side of the screen to the next and go back again for the actual question. And although it’s not a big problem, if I had the choice, I would choose a smaller screen, that I can read without moving my head.

That’s my experience. If anyone has stuff to add, please do so in a comment. Reach out if you want some specific information, happy to help out.