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imfaisal87
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Enthusiast

VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist - Worth in 2019 or wait?

I was planning on getting this cert for sometime but didn't went through.

We are planning to finally deploy vSAN in our environment.

Considering that preparing for on-premise management, it would be good to evaluate the skills over giving the Specialist exam as well.

Question: Is it worth to certify a 2017 version in 2019 or should I wait for a 2019 edition (not sure if it will come or when)

Different answers from experts out there will be a good decision to take then.

Thanks & Regards

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sk84
Expert
Expert

It's been a while for me, but as far as I remember that most of the questions were about design, best practices, and configuration maximums. So I think this certification is less suitable for operational use, because then the vSAN cluster is already in operation and doesn't change much. But maybe my memory is misleading and I only remembered these questions because I found them the hardest.

Generally, I don't think that much has changed on the basic concepts and best practices between vSAN 6.2 and 6.7 either. Just a few features were added. I therefore think that more than 50% of the questions do not need to be changed and also applies to vSAN 6.7.

--- Regards, Sebastian VCP6.5-DCV // VCP7-CMA // vSAN 2017 Specialist Please mark this answer as 'helpful' or 'correct' if you think your question has been answered correctly.
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TheBobkin
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Hello imfaisal87​,

"Question: Is it worth to certify a 2017 version in 2019 or should I wait for a 2019 edition (not sure if it will come or when)"

In my opinion this exam is well worth studying for if you want to get a better grasp of the fundamentals and many specifics of vSAN - there will likely be a delta for any new exam anyway. From a user/administrator perspective, most of the fundamentals concepts and mechanics are fairly agnostic for all of 6.x other than core changes like Unicast/Multicast, so whatever you learn studying for this exam will make any future exam easier.

"It's been a while for me, but as far as I remember that most of the questions were about design, best practices, and configuration maximums. So I think this certification is less suitable for operational use, because then the vSAN cluster is already in operation and doesn't change much. "

sk84, I feel that (where possible) any administrator of any environment should understand as much as they can about the products their workloads rely on - this helps make them more capable and efficient administrators. Thus I would tend to disagree that the content is only useful before deploying/designing vSAN as the blueprint covers a lot of topics:

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/certification/vmw-vsan6x-badge-exa...

It is of course entirely possible your exam had more questions from the design perspective than average, I recall mine (2 years ago) being quite varied - but then again it's not that long an exam so it is potentially more possible to be (or seem) skewed.

Bob

sk84
Expert
Expert

TheBobkin​, I agree with you and I may have expressed myself in a misleading way.

Of course the knowledge about concepts, basics and designs is always useful and helps to be a better admin in the daily work. I also didn't want to say that imfaisal87 shouldn't do this exam or that it's a bad exam at all.

But if you look at the exam blueprint, you can see that out of 9 sections, only 3-4 focus on daily operations (4, 5, 7 and maybe 8). That's what I wanted to say. But that doesn't mean that the other 5-6 sections are useless, because the knowledge about vSAN fundamentals and design concepts helps to make better decisions as administrator. Like you said before, Bob.

--- Regards, Sebastian VCP6.5-DCV // VCP7-CMA // vSAN 2017 Specialist Please mark this answer as 'helpful' or 'correct' if you think your question has been answered correctly.
imfaisal87
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Thanks to both of you for your feedback.

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