VMworld

VMworld: gotta get those fluffing CEUs to keep the cert.

The Certification Industrial Complex

The VMware certification track was real and it meant something. VCP — VMware Certified Professional — was a credential that required passing a proctored exam after completing a required training course. Not just the exam: you had to do the training first, and the training cost money, and the exam cost money, and the recertification every two years cost more money because you had to retake training or accumulate CEUs from VMworld sessions and VMware User Group events.

The pipeline was elegant if you squinted: you go to VMworld, you attend sessions, the sessions count as CEUs, your cert stays current, and VMware gets to count you as an engaged community member in their marketing materials. You get the badge. They get the attendance numbers. Everyone needs those enterprise monies to stay in business.

The conference itself was genuinely useful for a long time. VMworld was where the product roadmap got announced, where the hands-on labs ran, where you could spend two hours in a deep-dive with a product engineer who actually understood why vSAN had the behavior you'd been fighting in production. The trade show floor was a tire fire but the technical content was real.

The Broadcom Chapter

Broadcom acquired VMware in November 2023 for $69 billion. Broadcom's approach to acquired enterprise software companies is not complicated and was not a surprise to anyone who had watched them acquire CA Technologies or Symantec: focus on the largest enterprise customers, restructure licensing toward subscription bundles, and rationalize everything else. The rationalization began immediately.

Perpetual licenses went away. The product lineup was consolidated into bundles. The smaller tiers that mid-market customers had been using disappeared or became significantly more expensive. The renewal conversations that enterprise procurement teams had been accustomed to conducting in a certain way became different conversations. VMworld itself was already renamed "VMware Explore" before the acquisition closed, which in retrospect was less a rebrand and more a weather vane.

Every large VMware shop started an "evaluate alternatives" project in Q1 2024. Nutanix. Proxmox. OpenShift Virtualization. The hyperscalers for whatever could move to cloud. Most of those projects are still running. The migration timeline consistently exceeds the renewal deadline, and Broadcom's pricing is set with full awareness of this fact. The hypervisor hums. The invoices arrive.

The VCP You Got in 2016

It is still a real credential that reflects real knowledge. The technology it certifies still runs in production environments worldwide. The CEUs required to maintain it now flow through a conference that is called something different and has a different energy than it had when VMware was an independent company setting its own direction.

The cert is worth maintaining if you work in environments that still run vSphere, and many environments still do. Whether it opens the same doors it opened in 2016 depends on which doors you're trying to open. The VMUG attendance badge is collecting dust. The production environment is still running ESXi 7. The upgrade to ESXi 8 is on the roadmap for next quarter.