I’ve been doing some work with vCloud Air, which got me really reading up on everything, and taking advantage of learning resources available.  It occurred to me that maybe there’s a cert for this, so I looked into it, and there is – VMware Certified Associate 6 – Hybrid Cloud (VCA6-HC).

I’ve not taken any VMware Certified Associate exams because I was a VCAP by the time this certification level became available from VMware, and I’ve stayed within the Data Center Virtualization track.  But in this case, I had no plans to jump higher in the Cloud Management and Automation track in the foreseeable future, and it would be nice to validate skills and knowledge I’d acquired over the past week of work and my weekend learning, and I scored an 88% on the practice exam, so why not?

VCA exams, if you’re not familiar with them, are paid exams you take on your computer, and are effectively “open book”.  I didn’t prepare for this VCA6-HC exam exhaustively like I normally do, but I did go through the exam topics, ensured I felt comfortable with the topics, and I had already read through most of the documents they suggested specifically to read (the vCloud Air Users Guide and the vCloud Air Networking Guide), but there were a few more that were more marketing type stuff, so I glanced through those.  I also did some stuff on VMware’s Partner Portal for VTSP for Hybrid Cloud, too, which I think covered me on the marketing side.

The VCA6-HC exam is 50 questions, and you have 75 minutes to complete it.  The exam interface is pretty much exactly like a VCP exam.  There are multiple choice, select X out of the following option type questions.  You can mark questions to go back to for review in case you don’t want to waste time on it right then.  I had absolutely no problem finishing the exam within 75 minutes.  I completed the exam first pass within about 30 minutes, reviewed the ones I marked and then reviewed all of my answers one more time within about 45 minutes, and went ahead and ended it.  You need to score at least 300, and I received a 400.

How difficult is VCA6-HC?  It’s not a tough exam, especially with it being open book.  A few tips I’d offer would be:

• Be very familiar with the networking basic concepts.  You’ll likely fail if you don’t.
• Know the different services and basic options offered for vCloud Air.
• Know the basic functionality and architecture of all the management tools related to vCloud Air the video training covers.
• Do the free video training they have.  Pretty good chance you’ll fail if you don’t.

All and all, it’s a pretty straight forward exam.  I’m not wild about VMware/Pearson charging $120 for this exam.  I just think that’s an awful lot to charge people for a basic exam like this that’s proctored online.  IMO, these exams probably should be free, or dirt cheap.

But, at least there’s a certification out there to vet familiarization with vCloud Air, so it’s back to VCAP6-DCV Deployment, which I REALLY need to get cracking on!