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How I became a DellEMC certified VxRAIL Systems and Implementation Engineer

Writer's picture: William BWilliam B

Updated: Nov 17, 2020


DellEMC VxRAIL is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that was co-engineered with VMware and was originally released in 2016. Since then VxRAIL has become DellEMC`s primary hyperconverged offering and has been adopted by hundred of thousands of customers all over the world. VMware`s vSAN provides the underlying distributed storage for the platform. My experience with VxRAIL has been with the the VxRAIL E560F nodes, which are based on the PowerEdge R640 hardware platform from DellEMC.

I am always interested in getting trained and certified on new platforms. The knowledge gained through your certification journey can help you maximize the value and understanding of the technology, and it might just help you discover some new features that you never knew were there.


DellEMC offers two certification tracks related to VxRAIL:


Systems Administrator and Implementation Engineer



The Systems Administrator exam focuses on VxRAIL Day 2 configurations and vSAN operations best practices, while the Implementation Engineer focuses on the rack and stack and initial configurations needed to get the platform up and running.


The Converged Infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud v2 exam is required prerequisite in order to satisfy the requirements for the other two exams. This is an entry level exam focused on hybrid cloud technologies (a mix of on premise and public cloud) and even though it is a DellEMC exam, the material is mostly technology-agnostic.


Areas that I focused on for both exams:

  • VxRAIL physical NIC configuration and options (failover order, vSAN, vMotion, etc)

  • vSAN operations, day 2 procedures: Understand which features are enabled and disabled by default pre and post install

  • vCenter / VxRAIL menu layouts and understanding what and where each configuration item is

  • vSAN Failures to Tolerate settings for standalone and stretched clusters

  • vSAN RAID data placement options

  • VxRAIL host / disk replacement procedures

  • Upgrade considerations for going from older versions of VxRAIL to VxRAIL 4.7.300 (both exams I took used this version, VxRAIL 7.X was not mentioned)

  • VxRAIL SRS configuration and troubleshooting

  • VxRAIL licensing and upgrade options

  • SmartFabric for VxRAIL configuration and troubleshooting


These information sources definitely helped me:



Each exam consist of about 65 questions, and is 1 hour and 30 minutes long (2 hours if you are a non native English speaker).








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Raghavendra Kk
Raghavendra Kk
Nov 23, 2020

Very Concise, Thanks

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