Broadcom’s current VMware certification path map lists five VMware Certified Professional credentials, and none of them carry the names most administrators studied for. The professional tier now runs VCP-VVF Administrator (2V0-16.25), VCP-VCF Administrator (2V0-17.25), VCP-VCF Architect (2V0-13.25), VCP-VVF Support (2V0-18.25), and VCP-VCF Support (2V0-15.25). Everything is organized around two product lines, vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, split by job function rather than by technology.
The practical problem is that a lot of study material still teaches the old structure, and candidates keep booking exam codes that no longer map to a live credential. Let’s break down what is actually on the current path, what the exams test, and what to do if the credential on your resume came from the previous program.
Two decisions matter before you book anything. Whether your environment is vSphere Foundation or full Cloud Foundation, and whether you sit the exam cold or take the recommended course first. The second decision changes what your badge says.
What Changed in the VMware Certification Program After Broadcom?
Three separate shifts happened, and they get blurred together in most write ups. One was a rules change announced for May 6, 2024, which reset prerequisites and pricing across the entire program. Another was a portfolio carve out that pulled End User Computing away from VMware altogether. Running underneath both is the rebuild of the certification catalog around Cloud Foundation, and that piece is still working itself out.
On the rules change, Broadcom removed the mandatory training requirement. Before that date, earning a VCP meant completing an official course, and a VCAP required holding a VCP first. Both requirements are gone. Broadcom’s announcement also set a single global exam price of USD $250 for VCTA, VCP, VCAP, and Specialist exams, covering new registrations, renewals, and retakes. VCAP exams previously ran $450, so advanced candidates got a real price cut. VCDX kept its own pricing at $995 each for the application and the defense, on the grounds that reviewing and delivering those takes considerably more effort.
There is a wrinkle in that change worth understanding before you decide how to prepare. Certifications earned by exam alone carry a [v2] suffix in the credential name. Broadcom’s own certification FAQ states plainly that the marker separates candidates who came through the historical route of training plus exam from those who passed the exam only. Nobody has published data on whether hiring managers read that suffix, and my read is that most do not. Anyone who works with the program daily knows exactly what it means, though, and that includes the people running technical interviews at partners and service providers.
The carve out affected End User Computing. That portfolio was explicitly excluded from the May 2024 changes because the business unit was being sold, and it now operates as a separate company under the Omnissa name. Horizon and Workspace ONE credentials left the VMware program along with it. If your certification path ran through desktop or digital workspace, you are following a different vendor’s rules now.
Which VMware Certifications Are Current?
Broadcom’s published certification path document is the authority here, and it maps five professional level credentials across three roles.
Notice what the support credentials signal. Broadcom built a professional level exam specifically for troubleshooting and diagnostics, which the old program handled inside the general VCP or pushed up to VCAP Deploy. That tells you something about where the vendor thinks the skills gap sits in production environments.
VVF or VCF: Which Track Matches Your Environment?
The split follows the product bundles, not a difficulty ladder. vSphere Foundation covers the hypervisor, vCenter, and the operations tooling that ships with it. Cloud Foundation adds the rest of the private cloud stack, which brings NSX, vSAN, SDDC Manager, and the automation layer into scope.
Candidates routinely pick the wrong one, and the error runs in a predictable direction. An administrator who spends the working day in vCenter managing clusters, storage policies, and VM lifecycle looks at the two options and reaches for VCF because it sounds more advanced. Then the exam asks about SDDC Manager workflows and network virtualization decisions they have never touched. Test against the stack you actually operate. If your organization has not licensed Cloud Foundation, the VCF exam wants you to demonstrate skills you have no environment to practice in. A nested lab covers some of that gap on the compute side and very little of it on networking and storage integration, where the questions assume you have seen how the components behave together under load. Seniority is not what the two tracks separate, so treating VCF as the senior option misreads the whole map.
One exception applies. If your employer is mid migration onto Cloud Foundation and you will be operating it within the next two quarters, take VCF and use the study time as ramp up. That is a different situation from certifying on a stack you may never see.
What Happened to VCP-DCV?
Here the published record and the secondary coverage disagree, so I want to be precise about what is confirmed and what is not.
Data Center Virtualization does not appear anywhere on Broadcom’s 2025 certification path map. Every professional credential on that document belongs to the vSphere Foundation or Cloud Foundation families. Broadcom’s retired exams and certifications document, last updated July 2025, does not list VCP-DCV among retired credentials. The one December 15, 2025 retirement Broadcom published applies to the vSphere Foundation 5.2 Administrator exam (2V0-12.24), with new registrations closing October 31, 2025, and that exam was succeeded by 2V0-16.25.
Several third party sources have attached that same December 15 date to VCP-DCV. I could not verify that against Broadcom’s own documentation, and the two claims may simply have been conflated somewhere upstream. Treat the practical guidance as settled regardless. DCV is off the current path map, the successor credentials are named above, and anyone planning to book a legacy exam code should open the specific exam page on Broadcom’s site and confirm it is still open for registration before paying. Exam retirement notices go on the individual exam pages first and reach the consolidated document later.
On credentials you already hold: a certification with a year in the name stays valid as issued. It does not vanish when the program restructures, and it still documents that you passed a proctored exam on that platform version. What it stops doing is signaling current skills, since a 2023 or 2024 credential describes a product generation the vendor has moved past. Our breakdown of what happens when a certification expires covers how to handle the resume side of that.
What Do the Administrator Exams Actually Test?
Both administrator exams share three objective areas, which makes the blueprint easier to work from than the older domain lists. Broadcom labels the opening area install, configure, and manage the solution. Optimization comes next, covering performance and efficiency across the platform. The remaining area is solution knowledge, meaning you can identify the components and articulate the use case each one serves.
That third area is where candidates lose points, and the reason is structural. Working administrators build deep procedural knowledge of the tasks they perform weekly and thin knowledge of the components they never configure. Ask them to deploy a cluster and they are fine. Move the question to which component owns a given function in the platform, or which use case a particular service was designed for, and the answer turns into a guess. The exam is written to catch exactly that gap, because Broadcom wants people who understand the architecture rather than people who memorized a click path.
The optimization objective causes a second, quieter failure pattern. Questions in that area rarely have a single correct configuration. They present a constraint and ask which change best serves it, which means you have to reason about tradeoffs between performance, capacity, and availability rather than recall a default value. Candidates who prepared by memorizing maximums and recommended settings tend to read those questions as ambiguous and then second guess themselves. Study the reasoning behind a setting, not just the number.
Do You Still Need to Take a Course?
Not to earn the credential. The requirement is gone and a $250 exam voucher is the only mandatory cost. Whether you should is a separate question with an honest answer that depends on your access to the platform.
Administrators running these products in production every day can absolutely pass on experience plus blueprint study. That was true before the rule change and the rule change just made it official. The candidates who struggle without structured training are the ones coming from adjacent roles, where the gap is not effort but hands on time with components they cannot spin up at home. Cloud Foundation makes that worse, since the licensing and hardware needed to build a representative lab put it out of reach for most individuals. For that group the course is buying lab access as much as instruction, which is also why our vSphere Foundation boot camp runs on live environments rather than slides.
Factor the badge suffix into the decision too. Passing by exam alone produces a [v2] credential, and while I would not pay four figures purely to avoid two characters in a badge name, it is a real difference in what the credential documents. Weigh it alongside the lab access question rather than as its own reason.
Is a VMware Certification Still Worth Pursuing?
This question comes up in every virtualization conversation now, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. Licensing changes pushed some organizations to evaluate alternatives, and a portion of them will migrate. A far larger portion will not, because moving a mature vSphere estate off the platform is a multi year program with real risk, and the workloads sitting on it are frequently the ones nobody wants to touch.
What that produces is a market where the installed base stays large while the number of people entering the skill set shrinks, since new administrators keep being pointed toward public cloud instead. Scarcity on the supply side is not a bad position for a certified engineer. The honest caveat is that virtualization alone is a narrower career than it was a decade ago, so pair it with something. A migration or troubleshooting specialization inside the stack works. So does branching outward, and the same reasoning we applied to the CCNA version change decision holds here, because the question is always whether the credential matches the work you will be doing rather than the work you did.
Anyone weighing this against other options should look at what else is landing in the same window. Our roundup of new certifications worth your time puts the tradeoffs side by side.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a VMware certification exam cost?
VCTA, VCP, VCAP, and Specialist exams are globally priced at USD $250, a flat rate Broadcom introduced on May 6, 2024 covering new registrations, renewals, and retakes. VCDX is the exception, holding at $995 each for the application and the defense.
Do I need to take a VMware training course before the exam?
No. As of May 6, 2024, neither a training course nor a lower level certification is required for VCP, VCAP, or Specialist credentials. Certifications earned by exam alone carry a [v2] suffix in the credential name, and Broadcom still offers upgrade paths through official courses.
What is the difference between VVF and VCF certifications?
VVF credentials cover VMware vSphere Foundation, meaning the hypervisor and vCenter layer. VCF credentials cover VMware Cloud Foundation, which extends to the full private cloud stack including network virtualization, software defined storage, SDDC Manager, and the automation and operations tooling built on top.
Is my old VCP still valid?
A credential you earned remains valid as issued and appears in your Certification Manager account and Credly badges. Program restructuring retires the path to earning a credential rather than revoking credentials already awarded, though a certification naming an older product generation carries less weight with employers hiring for current platforms.
What happened to VMware Horizon and Workspace ONE certifications?
The End User Computing portfolio was excluded from the May 2024 program changes because the business unit was being sold, and it now operates as the separate company Omnissa. Desktop management, digital workspace, and Workspace ONE credentials follow that company’s rules rather than Broadcom’s.
Do I need a VCP before attempting a VCAP exam?
Not since May 6, 2024. Candidates can attempt and earn a VCAP Design or Deploy certification without holding a VCP first. For VCDX, Broadcom narrowed the prerequisite to the VCAP Design certification alone.
Which VMware certification should a vSphere administrator take first?
VCP-VVF Administrator via exam 2V0-16.25 fits most administrators managing a vSphere estate, since the objectives map to daily installation, configuration, management, and optimization work. Move to VCP-VCF Administrator (2V0-17.25) once your environment includes the broader Cloud Foundation components.
Director, Educational Services | Training Camp
Mark Sabo is the Director of Educational Services at Training Camp, where he oversees the training team, course design, and certification program development. He holds a B.S. in Information Sciences and Technology from Penn State University and more than 50 industry certifications. Mark joined Training Camp in 2005, became a Technical Trainer in 2007, and assumed his current leadership role in 2015. His specialty is practice exam development and exam preparation strategy, built from years of teaching students in the classroom and studying how certification exams are constructed. His writing focuses on the technical details that matter most to professionals preparing for high stakes exams.