VCIX-NV Exam Recap

!(/images/2016/04/vcix-nv-292x300.png)What a effort that was! Today I sat and passed the VCIX-NV (VCXN610) exam and I can say that this exam has taken a fair bit out of me over the last month or so. I had been aiming to take this exam late last year but other commitments got in the way and I took my first shot at the am a couple of weeks ago…more on that first attempt below. Back to todays attempt, no more than 45 minutes after walking out of the local testing center here in Perth I had the Score Report email in my inbox with a Pass score. As mentioned above this was my second attempt at the exam as I failed my first try falling just short of the 300 pass mark. I’ll be honest and say that the fail was mostly on me and as I walked out of that first attempt I knew that I had screwed things up and that a pass wasn’t likely.

Just got out of the VCIX-NV …Was a horrible exam experience. I’ll let it settle then give some thoughts.

— Anthony Spiteri (@anthonyspiteri) March 17, 2016

As people know with the VCAP/VCIX lab based exams, some questions are linked and you need to be careful to not screw up or incorrectly complete a question as it may impact you further down the track. This happened early on in my first attempt and I knew that I would scramble to make the pass mark however I did have some legit issues with a couple of the questions which (http://virtualpatel.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/another-vcix-nv-fiasco-at-pearson-vue.html). The issues where related to the Web Client and a service account which impacted my ability to attempt a couple of questions. I raised a ticket with VMware Education and managed to get a resit voucher which was pleasing as I wanted to tackle it again as soon as possible and the price of the exam had risen from $485AUD to $618AUD in the space of 3 months between bookings. With that behind me I went into today’s attempt a little more confident but that confidence quickly evaporated as I ran into an issue with a core piece of NSX infrastructure about 20 minutes into the exam. I knew what I needed to do to fix the issue but I had lost time and remembered a conversation in the (http://www.virtualisedgeek.com/vexpert/vexpert-on-slack/) around the fact that you can ask for a time extension from VUE if you run into unexpected technical issues…which I did and after a bit of going around in circles with the local DDLS team I was granted some extra time to complete the exam. I was able to power on from that point and exited the exam room after about 4.5 hours after I had initially started…as someone mentioned in a previous post…this exam is like being in a time vortex. Exam Thoughts and Tips: I won’t sugar coat this exam…it’s tough! I have been working with NSX day and and day our for almost two years but found that the actual exam questions where not aligned to my (http://anthonyspiteri.net/nsx-bytes/) work on the NSX platform. The fact that it’s based on NSX-v 6.0.2 also poses a challenge for those of us lucky enough to have worked through 6.1.x and now 6.2.x NSX-v updates…all I can say is the Web Client experience should be much better for the new VCIX-NV exam thats coming in June. My tip for those who are yet to take this test or future lab based VCAPs/VCIXs is to try and not use the Web Client if you can help it. I spent a lot of time in the VI client which meant less browser redraw times leading to quicker task completion. I would also suggest using ssh over the VM console as the redraw of the SUSE linux background is also a pain. Obviously for NSX you need the Web Client so to save time have multiple browser tabs open for quicker transition and load times. A quick word on the latency…it wasn’t too bad even though I am located on the West Coast of Australia with an approximate 600-700ms RTT back to the Pacific coast US. I’m not going to go through the exam (https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=VCIX-NV+resources) as many guys have (https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=VCIX-NV+resources) in addition to knowing the Blue Print off by heart…but the one thing I will say is the the VMware HOL are like gold…specially if you don’t have the resources or entitlement to run up NSX in a home or office lab. A final word of advice is that you do need to get up to speed on networking basics to pass this exam…just knowing how to administer NSX in a vSphere environment won’t be enough. All in all I’m pretty happy to have this notch on my belt as I felt it was a long time coming, thanks to all that helped in my preparation and good luck to all those taking the VCIX in the future. To be sure it was a tough, brute of an exam…I still had fun getting through it. #RUNNSX