Failed by 12 points the first time and I'm not going to pretend it wasn't demoralizing. I'd been working in vSphere environments for two years and figured the practical experience would carry me. It didn't. The exam cares about very specific configuration details and best practices that you might never encounter in a typical SMB setup.
Second attempt I spent 6 weeks doing focused prep. I went through every VMware official objective, made flashcards for anything involving storage policies, host profiles, and vCenter architecture. The networking section hit me hard both times — NSX concepts show up more than people warn you about.
What really moved the needle was drilling timed practice sets. The exam has 60 questions in 75 minutes and that sounds fine until you hit a multi-part scenario question that eats 4 minutes. Time management matters almost as much as knowledge.
If you're in the middle of studying, don't skip the VMware documentation on vSAN. It's dense but 8-10 questions came directly from that material on my sitting.
Congrats on getting through it! The storage policy section destroyed me on my first attempt too. I kept confusing RAID-1 FTT=1 with the space requirements versus RAID-5. Did you find the Pearson VUE test center experience was consistent with the practice environment?
Appreciate you sharing the breakdown. I'm 3 weeks out from my test date and the vSAN documentation tip is exactly what I needed to hear. Going to block a whole day for that this weekend.
The NSX content is brutal for people whose day job doesn't touch it. I asked my manager to let me spin up a lab environment and that helped more than any reading. Even basic NSX-T segment setup gives you the mental model you need for the questions.
Also — the objectives document is worth printing out. I crossed off each one as I felt confident. It made the prep feel less like a wall of stuff to learn.
Second attempt here too. Mine was a 7-point miss the first time, which honestly hurt more because it felt so close. The vCenter upgrade scenario questions are where I kept losing points. Once I memorized the exact upgrade sequence the second run went fine.
Honestly the biggest shift for me was stopping the "I know this already" attitude and actually reading the official docs cover to cover for vSAN and NSX-T configuration specifics. I'd been doing this stuff in production for years and that almost hurt me because I'd developed my own shortcuts that don't match what VMware considers correct procedure. Second time around I treated it like I knew nothing and just drilled the configuration workflows from scratch.
The other thing that helped was doing practice questions under timed conditions starting about two weeks out. I wasn't just checking if I got it right, I was paying attention to why the wrong answers were wrong, because VMware loves to put in distractors that are almost right. That's where a lot of points leak. If you failed the first time don't assume you just need more study hours, you probably need to study differently.