Exam

Introduction Towards the end of 2019, I made a decision to aim for a certification in one of the primary public clouds. The decision on which cloud to focus on was relatively simple for me for a couple of reasons: Microsoft certianly seem to be doing awesome things with Azure and it feels like there is a lot of hype around Azure in the circles I travel in, at least more so than GCP or AWS I work for a partner and while not specifically in the team that are delivering public cloud solutions and managed services, we are currently 100% focused on Azure and are a Microsoft triple gold partner. It makes sense for me to skill up in the public cloud that the company I work for is fully invested in I don’t want this to become a discussion around whether certifications are “worth it”, but specically on the second point above, when you work for a partner, almost all vendors still put requirements on partners to have ‘x’ amount of certified staff at different levels to achieve different partner statuses. The reality is, if you are a technical staff member working for a MSP / VAR, you should absolutely expect your employer will want to you become and remain certified with key partner vendors. ...

Last week I sat the VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy ( VCAP6-DCV Deploy) exam in Auckland and I’m happy to say I passed the exam. I thought I would do a bit of a write up below of my experience. I’ve been reasonably heavily focused in the VMware space for about 2 years now. Prior to that I was a stock standard Windows Sys admin. 2 years ago I was working for a University and I ended up in a role change that saw me take on a bit more in the VMware and storage space, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never had any industry certifications and in 2016 I made it a bit of a personal goal to chase a few down. Towards the middle of the year I decided to pursue the VCP6-DCV certification. Because I was new to the certification track, I had to do the foundations and VCP exams. I passed both in June. From there I was looking at doing a Microsoft Exchange / Office365 certification because I worked a lot in this space at the University, but July was when I changed jobs and my focus shifted. ...