I received an email recently reminding me that my VCP5-DCV will expire come October.  I knew this was coming, but I was holding out on upgrading my VCP6-DCV because VMware offers a certification upgrade path too good for me to refuse.

I’m a VCAP5-Data Center Design.  In fact, my VCP5 two year clock to renew or upgrade in fact was reset when I passed that exam in October 2014.  VMware has a new certification on your way to VCDX called VCIX (VMware Certified Implementation eXpert) that indicates that you’ve completed all VCAP exams for a track.  For example, within the Data Center Virtualization track, if you pass both the VCAP Data Center Deployment and the Design exams, you get VCIX-DCV certification.

For VCAP5 holders like myself in Data Center Virtualization, if you passed one of the two exams, you can simply pass the other, and you get VCAP6-DCV Design AND Deployment certifications, which also nets you VCIX, AND it upgrades your VCP to version 6 as well.  That’s right, if I pass VCAP6-DCV Deployment (the replacement for VCAP5-DCA), I net four new certifications. It’s hard to say no to that.

The downside of course is if I go this route and don’t complete it by October of 2016, I’ll lose all my VMware certifications.  YIKES!

On top of all that, this exam is brand new.  The objectives are completely rewritten from the VCAP5-DCA exam it replaces.  There’s no books or anything to follow, and I really don’t want to play the waiting game to see if any become available in time for me to get this done, so I’m going to have to make my own study resources, which honestly I do anyway.  And since I blog now, I’m going to share it with my readers and the community.

Expect to see a lot of VCAP6-DCV Deployment material and blog entries coming!  I’m also setting up pages within my site for all of this info here.  Each exam objective will light up as I complete my notes for each one.

Enjoy!