That’s right – it is the first of two exams required for the exciting new Cisco CCNA Cloud Certification! Please note that I am writing this review on 11/5/2015, so please consider that if you are reading this post considerably after that date. Cisco has a tendency to change exam details and content periodically. Your mileage may vary 🙂

You are given 90 minutes for this exam and you can expect about 60 questions. You will have plenty of time to finish if you know your stuff. There are no sims or simlets of any kind to slow you down.

The required passing score is a but on the high side, so please, really know your stuff! You can expect a required passing score of about 890! That is higher than I can remember seeing in a long time.

Your score report, pass or fail, will show your performance in the following five areas:

• Cloud Characteristics and Models
• Cloud Deployment
• Basic Knowledge of Cloud Compute
• Basic Knowledge of Cloud Networking
• Basic Knowledge of Cloud Storage

This exam is pretty fair. The only issue comes with some of the questions in the last three areas of compute, cloud networking, and cloud storage. You see,  they state it is a “basic” knowledge that you need. The problem becomes when some of the questions that slip in here are pretty advanced and detailed. The great news is, you can best guess these and have enough questions that are well within scope in order to afford these guesses. If you are a student of my CBT Nuggets course on this subject, you will find I cover all questions in my Nuggets and accompanying Flash Cards. If you are studying on your own, I highly recommend you make your own flash cards as you go through the materials.

Here are some tips:

• Use the blueprint as you study – all questions do indeed tie back directly to specific bullets and sub-bullets of the blueprint
• Know the many, many parts that make up the Cisco InterCloud Fabric very well
• Know the Admin tab of the UCS Manager well – focus on RBAC capabilities there, for example
• Really study up on the details of the Cisco 1000V, things like the VSM, VEM, and vPath technologies are really important
• Know your storage options really well, this includes NAS (CIFS, NFS) and SAN (SCSI, iSCSI, FC, and FCoE (including FIP))

Exam Accuracy: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Exam Difficulty: 4 out of 5 stars (due to high cut score)

Time Pressure: Low

Have fun studying these super important, and super interesting topics!