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VMware Skyline Advisor Pro Technologist Badge

Brian Owen Leave a comment

VMware is offering free Skyline training and a Skyline badge. There are training modules and questions after each module. I spent around three hours to get through it all. Score at least 80% on the questions and you will earn the VMware Skyline Advisor Pro badge. The offical article for it called it a certification, but it’s deiniftely a badge. It took 6 days after I completed the course for it to show up on my Credly account. The course showed up on my course transcript summary in Customer Connect Learning. However, the badge did not display there and did not on myTransript at mylearn.vmware.com. All of my other certificates and badges are there.

Make sure to hit the ‘Complete video’ button after each video for it to count. At first, I did not and had to go back.
Should receive a check mark after each module is completed.
Completed.

The first three modules are unnecessarily repetitive. The last three modules dive into more areas: API, security, and vROps intergration. I got the most out of the vROps intergration module since I did not know this was possible. vROps can display a dashboard with a subset of Skyline data. Though, this module doesn’t go deep enough to be able to implement this intergration and the documentation I found is spotty. I will do a separate article on this topic.

I recommend all VMware users to go through this course. It’s definitely worth the time. I am sure everyone will get something out of it and receive a new, shiny badge.

VMware vSAN 6.7 Specialist 2019 Exam Preparation and Experience

Brian Owen 2 Comments

I recently passed the VMware vSAN 6.7 Specialist 2019 Exam (5V0-21.19) with a scare of 440. Despite the exam’s name, I earned the VMware Specialist – vSAN 2021 badge. Fortunately, VMware is now keeping up with the names of the badges and certifications by matching it with the calendar year, even if the test wasn’t yet updated. This is a nice change because I previously took the vSAN specialist exam in 2019 and earned the 2017 badge, which immediately looked out of date.

The exam was very straight forward. A lot of it is what engineers do on a weekly or monthly basis for many of the exam objectives. I had more than enough time to finish the exam. I don’t think there was any surprises so I recommend to know the exam objectives inside and out. Some exam objectives are not deep so don’t think too much into them. For example, objective 7.5, describe the effect of maintenance mode options; only need to know the three maintenance mode options and what they do. Though, there are some questions that were not worded the best, but that shouldn’t make it or break it for anyone.

The exam is based on vSphere 6.7 and vSAN 6.7 U1. Keep that in mind as there was a lot of changes in newer versions, especially in 6.7 U3. You are probably running a newer version at work and VMware’s HOL are no longer running the exam version of vSAN from what I saw. Though, VMware still has the lab manual for their retired vSAN 6.7 HOL. I found a lot of good information and screenshots in there.

There are only two requirements for achieving the vSAN 2021 badge; pass the 5V0-21.19 exam and have one of the pre-requisite certifications. The badge page says it needs to be a current VCP. However, there are many other certifications that also count, such as VCAP and VCDX certifications. Check out your certification manager on VMware Learn and you can see more details on what’s covered. Also, I wrote about this in a previous article about the vSAN 2017 Specialist badge.

VMware Cloud on AWS – Software Defined Data Center 2019 Badge

Brian Owen Leave a comment

I recently passed the VMware Cloud on AWS Management Exam 2019 (5V0-31.19) with a score of 478. The exam is scored the same as every other VMware exam. There are actually no prerequisites to take the exam and the exam is taken online. I assume VMware has these two differences to appeal to a larger crowd that are not on the traditional VMware certification tracks. The exam is only 30 questions, but only 45 minutes to complete the exam. Definitely have to think quick and harder than I expected. The exam followed very close to the exam guide. I previously took the VMware Cloud on AWS: Deploy and Manage class, which I feel helped me prepare for the exam. However, the class only has lab simulations that are basically click through animations. I did have access to a real VMware Cloud on AWS account so that also greatly helped me to get ready for the exam.

vmware_Skill_AWS_SDDC_2019