VMware Cloud on AWS Management Exam 2019

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. Earlier on this month I wrote about sitting the VMware Cloud Provider Specialist Exam and continuing on from that I decided to pursue the VMware Cloud on AWS Management Exam.

As I previously discussed with the Cloud Provider exam it falls into a new collections of exams from VMware that are aimed at providing skills and achievements rather than certifications. Now if you’re a little confused let me clarify it a little more. Unlike the Cloud Provider which would require you to hold a VCP and provides you a badge denoting you as a Specialist. The VMware Cloud on AWS exam has no prerequisites and gives you a Skill VMware / Acclaim badge. All straight-forward right?!?! If you’re still confused, don’t worry about it for now, many people are.

Covering off some of the fundamentals of this exam. It’s a non-proctored web based exam. Meaning you can sit it whenever and where ever you like. You have 30 questions with 45 minutes which to complete it in. So while not many questions, you have only a minute and a half on average to answer each question.

Being honest, it’s a fairly basic exam comparative to other VMware exams available. You’re not going to be overly challenged over the 45 minutes. We do have to put this exam into context a little here though. As I mentioned above this exam is classed as a Skill. It’s not a certification so the question count and difficulty of those questions are kind of reflected here. I would rate this Skill exam a little below the level of a Specialist exam like that of the Cloud Provider I took recently.

If you look at what it’s trying to achieve as an exam it does hit the mark. Prior to studying and sitting this exam I really knew little about VMware Cloud on AWS. I had been to many sessions and presentations on VMC over the last year or so. In all the sessions I’ve seen they did a great job of explaining what it is but I still really didn’t know how to use it or all the little intricate things it was capable of. Having now studied and taken the exam, I have a much more thorough understand not just of the product but how it’s actually used and managed.

The types of questions you will see in the exam can be broken up into two basic categories. Simple high level questions of what VMware Cloud on AWS can do and what those services are. Then the slight more technical, but still relatively simple, questions on how to actually perform a task.

My study consisted of the VMware Cloud on AWS: Deploy and Manage three day course. It’s a paid course which you can do in the classroom or on-demand, the latter which I did. This was the bulk of my study which I crammed over three nights after work. The course covers 95% if not 100% of what is in the exam. I supplemented this with a very short demo of the VMware Cloud on AWS -- Getting Started Hands-on Lab and briefly looked at the VMware Cloud on AWS Sizer and TCO site and the VMware Cloud on AWS | FAQs.

Final Thoughts:
While far from being a deep technical exam. It does a decent job on testing your knowledge of the product and validating those skills. Certainly from my view point it encouraged me to actually spent some time studying VMware Cloud on AWS which I had been otherwise avoiding until now. Don’t expect to become a guru on the product afterwards but take the exam for what it is a learn something new if you haven’t delved into it until now.