Let me paint you a picture. It’s 2019. You just passed your VCP-DCV and you’re feeling like an absolute rockstar. You’ve got a shiny new cert, a deeper understanding of vSphere than you ever thought possible, and most importantly, a legitimate reason to tell your boss you deserve a raise. Life is good.
Then Broadcom bought VMware in 2023, rewrote the licensing model, and the whole industry had a collective meltdown. Customers screamed. Partners fled. My Twitter (sorry, “X”) feed was basically a support group for confused sysadmins for about six straight months. I genuinely started keeping track of how many times per day someone DMed me asking if VMware was dead. The answer then was no. The answer now is still no, but it’s a more complicated no than it used to be.
So here we are in 2026. The dust has mostly settled, though it’s still dusty in places, and the question I get constantly from folks studying for their VMware certs is: “Brian, should I even bother?”
Great question. Let’s dig in.
First, a Reality Check on Where VMware Actually Stands
VMware, now officially operating as Broadcom’s VMware division, is still the dominant hypervisor platform in the enterprise world. I know, I know. You’ve heard the “VMware is dying” takes. People were saying that in 2015 too, and I was still teaching vSphere classes to packed rooms in 2024. Some things age like fine wine. That particular hot take ages more like warm milk.
Here’s the reality: enterprise environments don’t rip and replace overnight. I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember when people swore they’d never move off physical servers, and then again when they swore they’d never move to the cloud. Organizations with hundreds or thousands of virtual machines don’t just wake up one Tuesday and migrate to Proxmox because they read a compelling blog post at 11pm. The VMware footprint in mid-to-large enterprises is enormous, it’s deeply embedded in operational processes, and it’s going to be there for years. Which means the people who know how to run it are going to be in demand and paid well for a long time to come.
That said, the landscape has genuinely shifted, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I pretended otherwise. Broadcom’s acquisition didn’t just change the licensing model. It changed the conversation. Shops that might have been perfectly happy renewing their VMware agreements indefinitely are now, for the first time, seriously evaluating alternatives. That evaluation process takes time, and the migration process, when organizations actually commit to it, takes even longer. But the conversations are happening. And in some segments of the market, the decisions have already been made.
So when someone asks me whether VMware certs are still worth pursuing in 2026, the honest answer isn’t a clean yes or no. It’s “it depends on where you’re headed and who you’re trying to impress when you get there.” That’s not a cop-out. That’s just what’s true.
Making the Case, Both Directions
Let me give you the real argument on both sides, because you deserve a straight answer, not a sales pitch.
The case for getting certified is still pretty strong if you’re working in or targeting enterprise infrastructure. Go ahead and search “VMware administrator” or “vSphere engineer” on any major job board right now. The listings are there. They’re not shrinking as dramatically as some people predicted. Enterprises aren’t abandoning their VMware infrastructure en masse. If anything, the complexity introduced by Broadcom’s licensing overhaul means they need more skilled people, not fewer, to navigate the new subscription tiers, feature sets, and support structures. Knowing VMware deeply is still a career asset, and it’s likely to remain one for the better part of this decade at minimum.
The VCP-DCV specifically still carries real weight with hiring managers. I’ve talked to enough of them over the years to say this with confidence: they use it as a signal. Not just “this person passed a test,” but “this person knows virtualization at a serious level and was willing to put in the work to prove it.” The cert isn’t easy. There’s a required training component, Broadcom mandates it, and the exam itself covers enough ground that you can’t just cram for a week and slide through. That rigor is exactly what makes it meaningful. You can find the current exam objectives and requirements on Broadcom’s VMware certification page if you want to see exactly what you’re signing up for before you commit.
There’s also a benefit that doesn’t show up on your resume but shows up every day you’re doing your job. After twenty years of training IT professionals, I can tell you: the people who go deep on VMware through certification study come out the other side genuinely sharper. Understanding vSAN architecture, NSX-T networking, vSphere clustering, DRS, and HA isn’t just trivia for a test. It’s the kind of foundational knowledge that makes you better at infrastructure work across the board. I’ve never once met someone who said they regret understanding how hypervisors actually function. Not once. That knowledge transfers. When you eventually work on Nutanix, or Azure Stack, or whatever the next wave brings, you’re not starting from zero. You’re mapping new concepts onto a solid mental model you’ve already built.
Now, the other side. And I mean this genuinely, not as a token “to be fair” disclaimer.
The cost situation has changed substantially and it’s worth facing head-on. Broadcom’s changes to the VMware ecosystem hit training costs right along with everything else. The required courses for certification aren’t cheap, and they’re not optional. You can’t just self-study your way to the exam anymore. If your employer is covering the bill, this is a non-issue. If you’re self-funding, a VCP journey in 2026 can run you anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 between training and exam fees, depending on the path you take. That’s real money, and it deserves real consideration before you commit.
The competitive alternatives have also grown up. Proxmox has gone from “that thing hobbyists run on decommissioned hardware” to “that thing some pretty serious production shops are actually deploying.” I raised an eyebrow at it a few years ago. I don’t raise an eyebrow anymore. Nutanix has been quietly and methodically building enterprise market share for years. And cloud platforms, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, continue to absorb workloads that used to live permanently on VMware clusters. If your target employers are already well down the road of migrating toward any of these alternatives, your cert study time might genuinely be better invested elsewhere.
There’s also the matter of the certification roadmap itself. The old VMware cert path was clear as glass. Everybody in the industry knew exactly what they were working toward and what it meant. Broadcom’s reorganization has reshuffled things, updated exam objectives, and changed some of the track structures. If you’re starting fresh in 2026, you need to make absolutely sure you’re studying for the current version of the exam and not some prior iteration that’s been quietly deprecated. This is not a hypothetical concern. I have seen people waste months of study time on outdated objectives, and it is painful to watch. Verify before you dive in.
So What Should You Actually Do?
Here’s my honest, twenty-years-in-the-trenches advice, broken down by where you’re sitting right now.
If you’re already working in an enterprise environment that runs VMware, get the cert. Full stop. Your employer almost certainly needs people with deep VMware expertise, they’re probably willing to fund your training, and this is about as close to free career advancement as our industry offers. Say yes, get it done, and stop overthinking it.
If you’re actively job hunting and targeting enterprise sysadmin or infrastructure engineer roles at mid-to-large companies, the VCP is still a meaningful differentiator. It shows up well on resumes, it survives resume screening, and it gives you something substantive to talk about in interviews. If you can get it funded through a job search stipend or write it off appropriately, the math works in your favor.
If you’re self-funding and genuinely uncertain about which direction your career is heading, consider pairing a VMware cert with a cloud certification. AWS Solutions Architect Associate or Azure Administrator are both solid choices. Hybrid environments are the dominant reality in enterprise IT right now, not some transitional phase we’re passing through. A candidate who can speak fluently to both vSphere and cloud infrastructure is genuinely, practically valuable in a way that a pure specialist in either direction often isn’t. Companies are not all-cloud and they’re not all on-prem. They’re somewhere in the messy middle, and they need people who can operate in both worlds without needing a translator.
If you’re targeting organizations that are explicitly and actively migrating away from VMware, and you can confirm this is where you want to land, skip it. Study what they’re moving to. Follow the workload, not the legacy platform. There’s no nobility in mastering a tool your target employer is actively phasing out.
The Bottom Line
VMware certs aren’t the no-brainer they were in 2018. Anyone who tells you the certification landscape hasn’t shifted isn’t paying attention. But they’re also far from worthless, and the people predicting VMware’s imminent demise have been wrong before, repeatedly, and they’re likely still wrong about the timeline even if they’re eventually right about the direction.
The fundamentals you absorb while preparing for the VCP-DCV, networking, storage, high availability, resource management, cluster design, these concepts don’t expire when you close the study guide. They become part of how you think about infrastructure problems. I’ve been teaching virtualization since before most of my current students had driver’s licenses, and I’ve watched the same core knowledge serve people through platform shift after platform shift. The specific product knowledge has a shelf life. The underlying mental model doesn’t.
Know your target market. Know who’s paying and what they’re running. If VMware is in that environment, understand it deeply, get certified, and let the credential work for you. If your path is pointing somewhere else, follow it without guilt.
Either way, don’t just memorize the exam objectives. Actually understand what you’re configuring and why. Your future self will thank you. So will your future boss.
Brian Rhoades is a Senior VMware Instructor and IT veteran with more than 15 years of hands-on experience in virtualization, systems engineering, and cloud infrastructure. He has trained thousands of IT professionals to confidently work with VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and has authored multiple books and study guides for outlets across the industry. Brian has a habit of being somewhere new every few weeks, which if you've ever tried to pin down a good VMware instructor, explains a lot.