vcdx or bust

techfiend

Congrats! I see it took about 20 months to climb the complete NV ladder. I have about 3 years of vSphere administration experience and have designed 2 small environments. I'm on the DCV route and hoping to get VCAP deploy soon. I have hopes of VCIX within 2 years, VCDX within 5 years as long as vSphere still has mass relevance.

How many hours of study does this merit?
How many years of solid experience is suggested?

Essendon

@techfiend - 5 years is probably too long. A VCDX is highly regarded, whether on NSX or vSphere. Just do it. The journey will benefit you in ways you'd never have imagined. It did to me.

I'll be taking my 2nd go at the VCDX: DCV possibly at the end of October (VMW are trying to get a panel together) or definitely in December (usual scheduled defense).

There's no suggested years of experience, quality > quantity. I've got about 7 years total experience with vSphere, the last 4-4.5 years in a design role which has helped greatly. It isn't a 'study' certification per se, you've got to be able to defend your design decisions while adhering to design principles and fulfilling business requirements and SLAs. Sure they may ask you indepth tech questions too, but that's not the primary intention.

Get the VCIX out of the way quicker than 2 years, the Deploy exam should be easy for you, the design one has had its format changed recently and is now devoid of those pesky Visio-style questions, might even be slightly easier now. I went from VCP > VCAP-DCA > DCD in I believe 2 years which included failing the VCP once and the DCD twice. The chasm between the DCD > VCDX is huge and that's what's taken me awhile to get decent experience for. Hope this helps and lemme know if you have further questions specific to the DCV track.

techfiend

Knocked out the VCAP6-DCA. I might conquer the VCAP6.5-DCD later this winter when I'm bored. It's that or CCNP to renew the CCNA next summer. It really depends on what I'm doing at my next position, currently in between jobs and have a lot more experience with vSphere than Cisco.

What I really like about the VMware track is the advanced certs don't expire, they just get a bit out of date. The 5 series of certs from 5 years ago is still very relevant. As opposed to Cisco's that keep expiring, I can't imagine having to recertify CCIE every 3 years.