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.
Honestly I was ready to bail around week 5. I kept bombing the storage policy sections and was seriously questioning whether 4 years of vSphere experience even counted for anything. What actually turned things around for me was grinding through free vmware certified professional 2v0 21 20 certification question and answers until the question patterns started feeling familiar. It's not glamorous but it works.
If you're hitting that wall where you feel like you're studying but not retaining anything, don't quit yet. I passed with a 352 and there were still questions on test day that felt like they came out of nowhere. You won't know everything. The goal is knowing enough, and that threshold is lower than it feels when you're in week 6 doubting every decision you've made.
Honestly I almost quit around week 4. I've worked with vSphere for years so I figured the exam would mostly be stuff I already knew, but nope. The first practice exams I took were brutal and I scored way below passing, like embarrassingly low. I remember sitting there thinking I'd wasted my money and that the cert just wasn't worth the headache. What kept me going was realizing my gaps weren't the hands-on stuff, it was the edges I never touch day to day. Distributed switch deep dives, vSAN config, and weirdly the policy and conduct material too. That vmware certified professional vcp professional standards ethics set actually filled a hole I didn't know I had.
So if you're staring at a low practice score right now, don't read too much into it. It doesn't mean you can't pass. It means you found the things to study, which is the whole point. I kept grinding the topics I kept missing instead of redoing the ones I already knew, and that's what moved the needle. Took me 8 weeks and I wasn't confident walking in. Passed anyway. You'll get there if you just don't stop.
Congrats, 365 is a solid score. I passed back in March and honestly the one thing that made the biggest difference for me wasn't the labs or the official course, it was doing timed practice tests over and over until the question style stopped surprising me. The real exam loves those "what's the FIRST thing you'd do" and "which two of the following" formats, and if you've only studied docs you'll know the material but still burn time second-guessing the wording. I didn't figure that out until week 5 or so and my practice scores jumped like 15% once I did.
Also don't sleep on the softer stuff. I almost skipped it because I figured 4 years of hands-on would carry me, but there were a few questions on professional conduct type scenarios that I only got right because I'd run through a vmware certified professional vcp professional standards ethics practice set the week before. Free points if you prep for them, easy misses if you don't. Good luck to everyone still studying, it's very passable if you drill the format.
Congrats on the pass, and yeah this exam humbled me too. I failed my first attempt with a 280 and honestly it was because I studied it like a hands-on test. I've got 5 years of vSphere experience so I figured labbing everything would carry me. It didn't. The exam kept asking about maximums, edge-case behaviors, and features I'd never touched in prod like vSphere with Tanzu and some of the newer lifecycle manager stuff. Knowing how to do something day to day isn't the same as knowing how VMware describes it in the exam blueprint.
Second time around I changed two things. I went through the exam guide line by line and made flashcards for every topic I couldn't explain out loud, which felt tedious but exposed way more gaps than I expected. And I stopped skipping the "boring" sections like certificates and identity federation, because that's exactly where I bled points the first time. Passed with a 340 about six weeks later. If you're mostly an ops person like me, don't assume your experience covers the blueprint. Read the actual documentation for the stuff you never use, it's dry but it works.