Thursday, September 3. The San Polo Ballrooms on Level 3, three-thirty in the afternoon, on the last day of the show and after three full days on the floor. At the end of the last post I called it the one room all week with no conversation in it. Inside the room, that held up. This post is about the way in and the way out.
Monday night
With the hackathon off the table, Monday evening was suddenly mine, and I opened my exam booking to check the details. The day matched the plan. So did the time. The exam didn't match anything I'd been writing about.
All summer, in this series, I called 2V0-16.25 a VCF Administration exam. In the first post I said it would cover NSX lifecycle management and SDDC Manager automation. The cert prep map was built on the same assumption. The booking said otherwise. 2V0-16.25 is the VMware vSphere Foundation 9.0 Administrator exam, the VCP-VVF track, and my second time through the vSphere Foundation admin exam. There's no NSX in its blueprint and no SDDC Manager.
So here is the correction, in the same series where I made the mistake.
Redrawing the map
Monday night turned into a rebuild. I'd already put together a 60-question practice exam with Claude, aimed at the exam I thought I was taking. I pulled the official exam guide and rebuilt it against the real blueprint.
The guide was blunt about where the points live. Only two sections, 2 and 4, carry testable objectives. VCF Operations and Operations for Logs together make up the single biggest block, more than a third of the objectives. vSAN is in, and not only ESA: the original storage architecture, OSA, is still in scope alongside it. And the hypervisor is called ESX again. Old habits, officially restored.
I ran the rebuilt practice exam on Tuesday morning, before the floor opened.
Here's the part I didn't expect. The cert prep map was drawn for the wrong exam, and it still pointed at the right ground. The two domains it flagged as weak were vSAN and VCF Operations. The real blueprint's biggest block turned out to be VCF Operations, and vSAN came with both architectures attached. Even the Wednesday sessions I'd picked for the wrong exam, storage at nine and rightsizing and capacity at four-thirty, landed squarely on the right one.
The labels were wrong. The terrain was right.
Thursday, 3:30
What impressed me was how well it ran. You check in at the registration desk and walk into the ballroom where the exam is proctored. There were more than enough seats to choose your own, and the room was quiet. Set the backpack down. Make sure the phone is off. Copy the exam code from the whiteboard, sit down, and start when you're ready. Nobody rushes you.
I'm not going to describe the exam itself. The candidate agreement covers that, and it should. The next person deserves to walk in the same way I did.
When you finish, you print your result, gather your things and walk out. Mine said I'd passed: VCP-VVF Administrator, on 9.0. What I typed the moment I saw it, unedited: "Yahooooooooo! I can breathe again! Whew!"
The hallway
The fun came after, decompressing with the other people who had just walked out. We compared notes the way the agreement allows: what worked in our study plans, what didn't, and what each of us is taking on next. We traded contact information and said we hoped to see each other at Explore 2027.
The exam room was the one place all week built for silence. The conversation was waiting right outside it.
That's the whole review. Three days on the floor, an exam I'd been calling by the wrong name all summer, a pass, and new contacts to look for in May.
Open the official exam guide the day you book, and build your study plan from its objectives, not from the exam's nickname or what you assume a track covers. Then confirm the exam itself along with the date, the time and the room. I put the second half of that advice in The Week, Mapped. I learned the first half on Monday night.
One loose end is left from that week: the keynote I traded for a points game. Next post, I finally watch it, and grade it against the wishlist I wrote in June.