Got my results back yesterday — scored 365 out of 500, passing score is 300. I've been working with vSphere for about 4 years in a mid-size enterprise environment so I wasn't starting from scratch, but this exam goes well beyond day-to-day admin work and I want to be upfront about that.
Weeks 1-3 I focused purely on the official VMware exam prep guide and the vSphere 8 documentation. Boring but necessary. Weeks 4-6 I shifted to Udemy courses — Pluralsight is solid too but I found the Udemy pacing better for retention. Last two weeks were exclusively practice exams and flashcard review of anything I kept getting wrong.
The networking section caught me most off-guard. Distributed switches, NSX-T integration concepts, and traffic shaping policies are all fair game and aren't things most admins touch daily. Storage policy-based management and vSAN were also heavier than I expected — those two topics showed up across maybe 30% of my questions combined. Budget serious time for them.
Total study time was probably 90-100 hours over the 8 weeks, about 2.5 hours on weekdays and a longer session on Saturdays. Hands-on experience helps but it doesn't replace studying the edge cases and exam-specific scenarios.
Congrats. Distributed switches are exactly what got me on my first attempt. I'd been running standard switches in my environment and thought I could just read about distributed ones — you really need to lab it if you can spin up a nested environment.
365 is a solid score. I hit 310 last year and passed but felt like I'd barely made it. The exam tests whether you understand what's happening under the hood, not whether you can click through the vCenter UI — that's a different kind of preparation.
Did you use the VMware Hands-On Labs? I'm 3 weeks into prep and wondering if they're worth the time or if I should stick to video courses and docs.