As I alluded to in my previous post, I recently obtained the EMCIE – Unity Solutions certification from EMC by passing E20-393. I wanted to give my thoughts on the certification process for anyone else interested.
What do you need to get the certification?
It’s pretty simple. To get EMCIE for Unity, you simply need the EMCISA base level exam (common to all EMCIE certifications), and then pass the E20-393 exam. Since I had the EMCISA certification for years on my way to getting EMCIE for VNX and RecoverPoint, I simply had to pass E20-393.
What study resources are available?
EMC has free elearning for partners on their certification site. If you are not a partner, you can pay for instructor led training as well. There are no exam prep type books on Unity that I’m aware of. I did the free partner elearning, and I found it sufficient for the instructional needs for the exam. You should have hands on experience with Unity, too. The partner elearning alone doesn’t provide that.
Besides the training, what else should be done for exam prep?
Other than the obvious studying of the training material, you should get some hands-on experience with Unity before attempting E20-393. Be very familiar with the interface, where you go to do everything you need to do, how you do initialization, configuration, etc. While you could try to memorize everything in the training material, it’s hard to beat getting familiar with Unity by working with it. Thankfully, UnityVSA is freely available to run on an ESXi server. Also, EMC offers a freely available simulator to run on Windows. This is great for anyone who doesn’t have access to an ESXi server. Simply download and install the simulator, and you’ll have access to Unity’s interface for studying!
How difficult is the E20-393 exam?
The E20-393 exam is multiple choice. Not terribly difficult, although you shouldn’t underestimate it.
I completed the elearning during downtime between customer appointments and in my spare time. I did take good notes within OneNote to study afterwards. I played around for a few hours with the simulator to make sure I knew where everything was. You must score 60% or higher to pass, and I scored a 78%.
The best way I could explain the exam is about half of the exam asks questions that you conceptually understand the array and how to do things. Most of the remainder of the exam asks very specific questions that would be difficult to answer all of them unless you’ve been working with the array for a long time and know details about the array just from sheer repetition through every option of the array. You should be able to answer though enough of those to pass with some practical experience with it coupled with answering most of the conceptual type questions.
Hope this helps!