The other day I happened to jump onto Jeffrey Kusters’ blog and saw his post about him passing this test last year. The post got me thinking. I was lucky to get some hands on experience with HCX late last year albeit not to the cloud from legacy on-prem to VCF on-prem. I also have had experience with SRM and more recently with NSX over the years during my time in the trenches. It looked like I checked off the main boxes for having the skills to get through the test.
Jeffrey’s compiled links and notes came in handy, so did Manish Jha’s blog posts located here. Jeffrey’s mind map was very useful too to make it all sort of come together. My mates, Bilal and Chris have been doing their blogging too, read here for the good sauce. Here’s a quick compilation of the HoL and links I used to read up:
HOL-2005-01-SDC – VMware Site Recovery Manager – Data Center Migration and Disaster Recovery
https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/resources#reference-architectures
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/services/hcx-user-guide.pdf
https://cloud.vmware.com/vmware-site-recovery
https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/resources#guidese-books
Thoughts and tips:
The test is not hard. It’s on par with the AWS SAA test in terms of difficulty. Some of the questions are vague and open-ended, they make you go TF?! I don’t know what they were thinking when they decided to call it the “Master Services Competency Specialist”. I don’t think I’m an expert on VMConAWS or HCX, at least not yet. There’s no “Master” level thing to it. Anyway..
They test you on things like:
- Datacenter migration with HCX – what you need, requirements and limitations (big part of test)
- AWS services you can use with VMConAWS to satisfy business requirements
- Data protection in VMConAWS
- The MSP program
- The Hybrid Cloud Readiness Assessment Service
- Site Recovery for workloads in VMConAWS (big part of test)
Summing it up, you don’t need to be a wizard at VMConAWS or any VMware product for that matter though some hands on will definitely help. If you can’t get real hands on, then the HoLs are your best bet.
Passing the test alone doesn’t grant a cert, successful attendance of a workshop delivered by a partner is also required. I’m not going to do this because it’d probably be too expensive to be of immediate value. If I end up working with a VMConAWS partner/MSP, then yes I’ll do it. The resultant badge for the VMware Cloud on AWS – Master Services Competency Specialist Exam 2019 would be this:
Lemme know if you have any questions via the comments section.
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