At VMware Explore 2026, I took advantage of the free exam vouchers to pass the VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation Architect (2V0-13.25) exam.
A few of my colleagues took a swing at it completely cold. I wasn’t quite ready to zero-prep it, but also didn’t have time at the conference to do any exam prep. I fed the exam guide into Amazon Quick and asked it to create a maximum 60 minute study guide with the goal of achieving a minimum passing score of 300/500. I read through the output Tuesday night in my hotel room.
I followed my usual test taking strategy. I only answer a question if I know the answer immediately. I don’t do process of elimination or any guesswork on the first pass through the exam. If I’m not 100% confident, I mark the question for review and move on to the next one. This process prevents me from getting stuck on tough questions when I could be scoring points on easier questions. Then I go back for a second pass over the marked questions.
I answered 40 of 60 questions on the first pass. Since the questions have weighted value, there’s no guarantee that answering 60% of the questions correctly will result in a pass. But I had answered 67%, and was feeling fairly confident. I have passed a few of the VCAP Design exams on prior vSphere versions. All of that experience gave me easy scoring opportunities for questions on Conceptual / Logical / Physical, requirements / assumptions / constraints / risks, and AMPRS. It did not help with Modern Apps questions. If you’re like many VMware admins and haven’t jumped into Kubernetes, you probably want to spend some prep time on that topic. The Quick-generated study guide also pointed me to the VCF Design Blueprints,
Fortunately, I passed the exam. It’s been 5 years since my last VMware certification. If you’re an old school VMware admin like me and you’re stressing about updating to VCF – don’t worry. The fundamentals of VMware are still there and your wealth of experience will serve you well as you pick up VCF.