Five Exams, One Stack: My Path to Full VCAP-VCF 9 Certification

Five Exams, One Stack: My Path to Full VCAP-VCF 9 Certification

I am thrilled to share that I recently closed out the full VCAP-VCF 9 stack — all five VMware Certified Advanced Professional certifications on VMware Cloud Foundation 9. I posted about the last two milestones on LinkedIn as I crossed the finish line:

Now that the dust has settled, I wanted to put the whole journey into one place — what the five certifications actually cover, how I prepared for each one, and why I think this is one of the most practical certification tracks Broadcom has put out in years. I’ll also cover something a lot of people are asking me about: the three new role-based VCAP certifications that just joined the family.

Why the VCAP-VCF Track Matters

When Broadcom rebuilt the VMware certification program around VCF 9, the advanced tier stopped being a single generic “design and deploy” exam and became five deep, domain-specific credentials that mirror how VCF environments actually get built and run day to day. Instead of one broad badge, you now prove hands-on mastery of each pillar of the stack — automation, operations, storage, networking, and Kubernetes — independently.

That matters because VCF 9 environments are rarely owned by one person wearing one hat. The person tuning vSAN policies isn’t always the person building tenant automation workflows, and the person running VKS clusters is not always the one troubleshooting NSX segmentation. Earning all five is really a statement that you can operate across every layer of the platform, not just the layer you happen to touch most at work.

The Five Certifications I Completed

#CertificationExam CodeWhat It Validates
1VCAP-VCF Automation3V0-21.25Building tenant/provider automation, service catalogs, and orchestration workflows on VCF Automation
2VCAP-VCF Operations3V0-22.25Monitoring, capacity, cost, and day-2 optimization across a live VCF environment
3VCAP-VCF Storage3V0-23.25vSAN and storage lifecycle design/operations within VCF
4VCAP-VCF Networking3V0-25.25NSX-based networking, segmentation, and connectivity for VCF workload domains
5VCAP-VCF vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)3V0-24.25Deploying, securing, and operating Kubernetes clusters natively inside VCF

How I Prepared: A Repeatable Method, Not a Cram Session

I used the same three-step approach for every one of the five exams, and it is the part I get asked about the most, so here it is in full.

1. Start With the Official Exam Guide — Every Time

Before touching a single lab, I pulled up the official exam guide for that specific certification from the Broadcom certification portal and read it top to bottom. Each guide breaks the exam into sections and objectives, and that structure became my study outline. I did not move on to labs until I had a checklist of every objective listed in the guide — because that list is the exam, just without the specific questions.

A tip here: the exam guides get revised as VCF 9 point releases ship, so always re-pull the guide right before you start a study cycle rather than relying on notes from a few months back.

2. Map Every Section to a VMware Hands-on Lab

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that made the biggest difference for me. For every objective in the exam guide, I found the matching VMware Hands-on Lab (HOL) and actually worked through it — not just skimmed the manual.

The current VCF 9.0 HOL catalog includes labs that map cleanly onto the certification domains:

  • HOL-2610-01 — VCF Platform Lab: core VCF concepts, VCF Installer-based deployment, VPCs and Transit Gateways. Great foundation before any of the five exams.
  • HOL-2610-02 — VCF Automation Lab: tenant onboarding, Provider Portal, deploying VMs and Kubernetes clusters through automation — this one lines up almost one-to-one with the Automation exam objectives.
  • HOL-2610-03 — VCF Operations Lab: monitoring, network analysis, storage management, security operations, and chargeback — directly relevant to the Operations exam.
  • HOL-2633-01 — vSphere Supervisor Lab: unified VM and Kubernetes management via vSphere Supervisor — solid prep ground for the VKS exam.
  • HOL-2630-01 — vSphere Lab: licensing, Memory Tiering, Live Patching, and Lifecycle Manager — useful underlying context for Storage and Operations topics.

The labs are free, on-demand, and don’t require any prerequisites, so there is no excuse not to run through the relevant one before you sit an exam. My process was simple: pick an objective from the exam guide, find the closest matching lab module, complete it hands-on, and only then mark that objective as “covered.” If an objective didn’t have a direct lab match, I built a scaled-down version of it in my own VCF lab environment or a nested lab instead of skipping it.

3. Close the Gaps With Deliberate Practice

Once I had worked through the labs mapped to every section, I went back through the exam guide one more time and honestly rated my confidence on each objective (1–5). Anything below a 4 got another pass — either a repeat of the lab, a deeper read of the product documentation, or a conversation with a colleague who’d already been through that domain. This last 10% is usually what separates a comfortable pass from a nail-biter.

Guidance for Anyone Starting This Track

If you are thinking about going after one or all five of these, here’s what I would tell you directly:

  1. Do not try to do all five back to back without a break. Each domain uses a different part of your brain — automation is workflow logic, storage and networking are architecture and failure-mode thinking, operations is pattern recognition. Give yourself a short reset between exams.
  2. Pick your first exam based on your day job, not the “easiest” one. You will retain more and build real confidence faster if the first certification maps to something you already touch weekly.
  3. Treat the Hands-on Labs as your primary study tool, not a supplement. Reading about NSX segmentation and actually configuring it are very different levels of understanding, and the exams test the latter.
  4. Keep a running objectives checklist across all five exams. A lot of foundational VCF concepts (workload domains, lifecycle management, the VCF Installer) repeat across every exam guide. Once you have nailed those foundations for exam one, you’re not starting from zero on exam five.
  5. Join or start a study group. I found it invaluable to compare notes with others working through the same objectives — especially on the trickier troubleshooting-style questions.

What’s Next: The Three New Role-Based VCAPs

While I was finishing up the last of the five domain-based certifications, Broadcom announced a second wave of VCAP credentials — and this set is structured differently. Rather than being organized around a product pillar (Automation, Storage, Networking, and so on), these three are organized around the role you actually perform in a VCF environment:

  • VCAP-VCF Administrator (3V0-11.26) — for the operations professional running day-to-day lifecycle management, workload domain operations, and platform monitoring across the VCF stack.
  • VCAP-VCF Architect (3V0-12.26) — for design and planning professionals, covering workload domain strategy, network segmentation, storage architecture, and disaster recovery design.
  • VCAP-VCF Support (3V0-13.26) — for the troubleshooting specialists, focused on diagnostics, performance optimization, and root-cause analysis across the platform.

This feels like a genuinely useful complement to the domain-based track rather than a replacement for it. The five certifications I completed prove deep expertise in a specific technical pillar; these three role-based credentials prove you can operate — or design, or support — the entire platform end to end, from the seat of a specific job function. For anyone building a team, that distinction is useful: you might look for Administrator or Support-certified engineers to run day-2 operations, and Architect-certified engineers to lead greenfield VCF designs, while still valuing domain specialists for deep-dive work in automation, storage, networking, or Kubernetes.

I’ll be adding at least one of these three to my own list next — and I will write up the same section-by-section, HOL-mapped preparation approach once I have been through it, so keep an eye on this space.

Let’s Build a Study Group

If you are working toward any of the VCAP-VCF certifications — domain-based or role-based — or you have just started exploring the Hands-on Labs, reach out. I am always happy to compare notes, share how I mapped labs to exam objectives, or just trade war stories from exam day. The VCF 9 certification path is genuinely one of the more practical, hands-on-focused programs VMware/Broadcom has released, and it’s a lot more fun to work through with company.

Resources referenced in this post:

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