During Nutanix .NEXT I had the chance to sit a few exam sessions, to try to earn some of the certifications I was still missing.
Unlike last year at .NEXT in Barcelona, where I had managed to pass only one exam, this year I achieved far more significant results; no fewer than 4 certifications earned in 3 days:
- NCM-MCI 6.5 (Nutanix Certified Master – Multi Cloud Infrastructure 6.5)
- NCP-US 6 (Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage 6)
- NCP-DB 6 (Nutanix Certified Professional – Database Automation 6)
- NCS-Core 6 (Nutanix Certified Services – Core Associate 6)
The most important of the 4, as you can easily tell from its name, is the NCM-MCI: a Master-level certification covering the skills needed to manage Multi Cloud environments (focused on Nutanix topics, of course). In particular, this certification is earned through an exam made up of hands-on tasks, so it’s quite different from the usual multiple-choice exam. Given the different type of exam, the time available is also much longer than for the usual exams, going from 2 hours to 4 hours. I have to say it wasn’t particularly easy to pass this exam, mainly because the questions range across many topics and require advanced skills (running commands via CLI, Flow, etc…).
For me, NCP-US turned out to be a fairly easy exam. I’ve been working with Nutanix Unified Storage for quite some time (although, to date, I haven’t yet had the chance to try out all of its features in the field), and what I know proved enough to pass the exam comfortably and without much effort.
NCP-DB is an exam on the features of Nutanix DBaaS; I didn’t find it particularly easy, even though I passed it, since so far I haven’t had much to do with this kind of environment; still, having passed it gives me the confidence to talk to customers about these solutions without the risk of talking “nonsense”.
NCS-Core, on the other hand, was a renewal for me. I earned the previous version, NCS-Core 5, more than a year ago and it felt right to renew it, since it’s a prerequisite certification for delivering Nutanix professional services. Nothing too different from the previous one, but not a trivial certification either.