In search of a vROps technical proficiency assessment for job candidates

[compassgrx16]

Hello Community!

My company is working with a client to identify a resource who's highly skilled in implementing and administering vRealize Operations Manager within a large enterprise environment. This client requires all potential employees and consultants to take technical assessments to give a quantifiable view of their knowledge and abilities. As of now, the only VMware assessments that we have access to are focused on ESX 4.1 or 6.0 and do not cover any aspect of vROps.

Has anyone taken a technical assessment over vCOps or vROps? If so, do you remember the vendor that created/administered the assessment?

If you are currently in a role where your main focus is on vROps, would it be a reasonable expectation for you to do well on an ESX 6.0 assessment?

Any input, opinion, or insight into this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[virtualg_uk]

I work with vROps and ESXi on a daily basis and while a dedicated vROps professional should know vROps well, I wouldn't expect expert level ESXi knowledge however they should have a good understanding of all alarms and metrics that ESXi offers.

As you know vROps is capable of monitoring a large array physical infrastructure (switches, routers, storage systems etc) via management packs so to have detailed knowledge of everything would be unrealistic in my opinion.

I hope this helps.

[MichaelRyom]

I would expect a vRops expert to be knowledgable in ESXi also. A vRops consultant should in my book be able to pass an assessment on ESXi.

[sxnxr · Accepted solution]

If you are looking someone to mainly do capacity management, set up dashboards and alerts then having a deep technical understanding on troubleshooting ESXi (and you already have ESXi engineers) then being an ESXi engineer not realy needed. In this case then knowing allocation, demand, contention, ready, wait co-stop, CPU sheduling and the effects of each is more impotent. Also knowing super metrics and metric configs is a must.

In my opinion a vrops engineer is there to support the virtualisation team with evidence that the problem is/is not virtual one and then to empower other teams to self troubleshot there support area (Storage, Networking, Storage, Storage oh and did i mention storage etc)

I have been doing vrops since capacity IQ and i have been working with ESXi,vcenter since 2.x. For the last 5 years 90% of my job is vrops development and i have not used my ESXi knowledge during my day to day work on vrops.

I dont think a vrops engineer should have to pass a ESXi assessment (at vcp level) as it is not the ESXi alerts that you need to worry about but the vrops ones. But as the other reply's say i would expect them to know the basics.

There is no real assessment that i know of. The only time i have been asked any questions on vrops were approx 2 in a vcp exam.

[compassgrx16]

Thank you all for your responses; It sounds like a vROps resource should be knowledgeable in ESX but not necessarily to the point where they would score high on an in-depth ESX assessment covering advanced concepts. When we send out the ESX assessments, it's common for our candidates to get in the neighborhood of the score we need, but rarely do they exceed it.

If anyone has another moment to respond, are there any vROps specific questions you would ask candidates to gauge their knowledge of the tool? We may be able to negotiate on assessment results if we have supplementary screening questions that give us strong confidence in the candidate's abilities if they don't quite meet the assessment threshold.

Thank you all again for your responses. I have made sure to mark these as "helpful" and like them as well.