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.
Making the Case, Both Directions
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.
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. You can find the current exam objectives and requirements on Broadcom’s VMware certification page.
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. That knowledge transfers. When you eventually work on Nutanix, or Azure Stack, or whatever the next wave brings, you’re not starting from zero.
The cost situation has changed substantially. Broadcom’s changes hit training costs right along with everything else. The required courses aren’t cheap, and they’re not optional. 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. That’s real money and it deserves real consideration.
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.” Nutanix has been quietly building enterprise market share. And cloud platforms continue to absorb workloads that used to live permanently on VMware clusters.
So What Should You Actually Do?
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.
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. A candidate who can speak fluently to both vSphere and cloud infrastructure is genuinely valuable in a way that a pure specialist in either direction often isn’t.
If you’re targeting organizations that are explicitly and actively migrating away from VMware, skip it. Study what they’re moving to. Follow the workload, not the legacy platform.
VMware certs aren’t the no-brainer they were in 2018. But they’re also far from worthless. The fundamentals you absorb while preparing, networking, storage, high availability, resource management, these concepts don’t expire when you close the study guide. I’ve never once met someone who said they regret understanding how hypervisors work. Study smart, know your target market, and actually understand what you’re configuring and why. Your future self will thank you.
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.