Citrix Specialist Virtualization Endeavor Experience

I’ve been recently involved in a lot of projects covering Citrix products, and because of partnership requirement my company decided to pursue the Virtualization Specialist program.

It has been a very busy period for me which kept me a bit away from blogging, so on my part I had to finish two things:

1. Citrix Virtualization Practicum – FAQ.
2. Designing Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 Solutions Exam – Guide.

• Citrix Virtualization Practicum:
  • The practicum is my kind of exam because its all hand on, they give you a statement of work that includes the scope required and you have 24 hours to complete it once you launch the lab environment.
  • The practicum has specific dates provided by Citrix, so you can’t just register at anytime.
  • The 24 hours are based on usage with a limit of 4 days, so you can for example launch the lab for 6 hours daily.
  • For the scoring part, you must pass with a 100% score yes a 100% score because Citrix considers that when delivering a project the scope must be fulfilled fully as the customer requires and the same case applies in the practicum.
  • For my part I was familiar with all the technologies require except for XenServer because we don’t have customers adopting it, so it was a lot of extensive lab-time.
  • Thankfully I sat for the practicum and finished it successfully.
  • The exam was fair, if you have done several projects and done your tests and reading the exam can be passed without any stress, just read the scope correctly and understand the requirement behind the design and of course do an evaluation on your points of weakness and hone on them.
• Designing Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 Solutions Exam:
  • This is an ordinary proctored exam, multiple and heavy on knowledge.
  • Nothing much to say about this exam, except that you should have at least participated in a couple of design documents.
  • You need to know everything about the products, literally.
  • Once you read the exam guide, my advise is that you don’t have to follow it word by word but you’d rather spend your time on going through the Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook, this is the gem and this is key for passing the exam.
  • The training provided by Citrix is good but it all falls back to the handbook, if you have good focus and determination and have a self-driving sense for studying you should follow the guide in terms of topics and match those topics to the sections of the handbook.
  • Because the exam is quite tough the passing score is 58%, on my first attempt I got 49% and again it was because of the lack of XenServer experience and knowledge.
  • On my second attempt I was more focused on the design aspect of XenServer mainly and passed with a 70% mark.

Hopefully the up above would be of aid to those whom are attempting to pass the up above exams.

(Abdullah)^2