VMware Certified Professional 6 – Cloud Management and Automation Beta: Candidate Guide
VMware Certified Professional 6 – Cloud Management and Automation was intended to validate professional capability in VMware cloud-management technologies, particularly the skills associated with installing, configuring, administering, and operating automated cloud environments. It served administrators, architects, and consultants working with VMware’s cloud-management stack. The most important decision for a reader today is not how to schedule this exam, but whether the historical VCP6-CMA target is still attainable: VMware identified the associated 2V0-631 exam and certification for retirement on August 30, 2019, and the official retired-exams guidance says retired credentials are no longer attainable by new candidates.
Is VCP6-CMA Beta still available?
No. Treat VMware Certified Professional 6 – Cloud Management and Automation, including the associated 2V0-631 VCP6-CMA Exam, as a historical target rather than a schedulable certification. VMware’s retirement notice stated that both the exam and certification would retire on August 30, 2019. The current retired-exams guidance says inactive or retired exams are no longer attainable for new candidates.
This status changes the preparation decision completely. Do not spend money on a booking, assume that a third-party listing represents a live appointment, or use a current VCP-CMA registration page as proof that VCP6-CMA has returned. Verify any proposed replacement with Broadcom’s current VMware certification information before committing to training or an exam fee.
The word “Beta” in the catalogue title should not be read as evidence that a beta sitting is currently open. The official material supplied for this guide identifies the historical exam as 2V0-631 and the certification as VCP6-CMA; it does not provide a current beta schedule, registration window, delivery method, or beta-specific blueprint.
What to do if a listing still advertises it
Ask for the exact official exam number, current registration destination, and an active certification-page reference. If the seller cannot reconcile the listing with Broadcom’s retired-exams information, use the page only as historical study context. A current alternative should be selected from the active VMware certification track, not inferred from an old exam name.
What did the certification validate?
The Cloud Management and Automation track was associated with installing, configuring, and optimizing public, private, and hybrid clouds using VMware vRealize Suite. The broader practical objective was to manage cloud services and automated provisioning rather than merely recognize product terminology.
The current Broadcom track description is useful for interpreting the historical credential’s place in VMware’s portfolio, but it is not a replacement for a VCP6-CMA blueprint. It supports a skills picture built around deployment, configuration, administration, operation, and optimization across cloud environments.
For a historical learner, that means the most valuable study is systems-oriented. Learn how platform components cooperate, how a request becomes a provisioned resource, how policies affect placement and governance, and how an administrator diagnoses a failed workflow. Memorizing isolated interface labels is a weaker substitute for understanding those relationships.
The official Broadcom certification page describes VMware Certification as a way to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and expertise to employers, colleagues, and customers. That purpose favors demonstrable technical understanding, even when the particular credential is no longer available to new candidates.
Which professionals was it aimed at?
The supplied VCP-CMA preparation material associates the current Cloud Management and Automation certification with cloud administrators, cloud architects, and consultants. Those role labels provide a sensible audience model for historical VCP6-CMA preparation, but they should not be treated as a VCP6-CMA prerequisite or a guarantee of the old exam’s exact audience.
What is not verified for this exam
No official source supplied here provides VCP6-CMA domain percentages, a question count, a time limit, a passing score, languages, delivery method, prerequisites, or a beta timetable. Do not import those details from the current 2V0-31.23 exam or from another VCP generation. A current VCP-CMA guide describes a different exam and product generation.
How should the measured skills be turned into a study plan?
Organize preparation around the lifecycle of an automated cloud service: establish the platform, configure its integrations and policies, publish a usable request, operate the resulting environment, and optimize or troubleshoot it. This sequence gives each technology a job and exposes gaps more reliably than reading product names in catalogue order.
Begin with architecture and terminology. Identify the role of the cloud-management suite, the virtualization and infrastructure services it depends on, the consumer-facing request experience, and the administrative controls that govern provisioning. Draw a simple dependency map and annotate what each component supplies and what it consumes.
Next study installation and configuration as a chain of decisions. For each component, record prerequisites, identity or access dependencies, endpoint relationships, certificates, storage or compute connections, and the likely consequence of a bad setting. The purpose is not to reproduce an obsolete deployment procedure from memory; it is to understand why a configuration is required and how to validate it.
Then follow a complete provisioning path. Start with a user request, identify the catalog or service definition involved, trace approval and policy evaluation, and end with the created resource and its post-provisioning actions. Repeat the exercise with a deliberately invalid dependency and document where an administrator would look for evidence.
Finish with operations and optimization. Review capacity, failed requests, permissions, lifecycle actions, logging, and the effect of policy changes. Explain each action aloud as if advising a customer. If you cannot state the symptom, likely boundary, evidence to collect, and corrective action, the topic needs another study pass.
A practical topic matrix
Create five columns: capability, component, administrator decision, observable result, and unresolved question. Populate it with the official track themes of installing, configuring, and optimizing cloud environments, then add the product concepts found in your authorized historical documentation. This prevents passive highlighting and makes revision target a specific uncertainty.
For example, a row might ask how a provisioning policy influences resource placement. The observable result would be the selected target or a policy-related failure, while the unresolved question might concern precedence between policies. The example is a study prompt, not a claim about an unlisted VCP6-CMA exam item.
How much weight should each domain receive?
No verified VCP6-CMA blueprint percentages were supplied, so assign study time by evidence and weakness rather than inventing weights. The official Cloud Management and Automation track describes installing, configuring, and optimizing public, private, and hybrid clouds using VMware vRealize Suite, but it does not provide percentage allocations for the historical exam.
What is a realistic preparation roadmap?
Use a staged roadmap that moves from scope control to retrieval practice and then to decision-based review. Because this exam is retired, the roadmap is best used to understand the historical technology or prepare for a separately verified successor—not to justify booking 2V0-631.
Stage one is a status and scope check. Confirm the retirement notice, write down the exact historical identifier 2V0-631, and decide whether your objective is archival knowledge, role preparation, or a current credential. If the objective is certification, stop the VCP6-CMA plan and investigate an active path through the official Broadcom VMware certification page.
Stage two is a baseline assessment without dumps or leaked material. From memory, explain the purpose of the cloud-management platform, the provisioning lifecycle, policy and governance decisions, and the administrator’s troubleshooting workflow. Mark each explanation as confident, partial, or unsupported. This produces a useful starting list without pretending that an unofficial practice score predicts a retired exam result.
Stage three is guided reading and diagramming. Use authorized VMware documentation for the relevant historical product version, build component maps, and convert each major procedure into prerequisites, action, validation, and rollback notes. Keep version labels visible. A procedure from a later Aria Automation release may clarify concepts, but it should not be silently presented as VCP6-CMA evidence.
Stage four is hands-on reconstruction where a lawful lab or approved learning environment is available. Practice creating a small end-to-end service, changing one policy, observing the result, and tracing a failed request. If the old software cannot be obtained or safely installed, use architecture diagrams, documented workflows, and troubleshooting exercises instead of downloading questionable images or relying on screenshots.
Stage five is retrieval and correction. Close the notes and answer scenario prompts in your own words. For every miss, identify whether the cause was terminology, sequence, dependency, policy logic, or troubleshooting evidence. Re-study the cause, not merely the answer. Then update the topic matrix and remove obsolete assumptions.
Stage six is the career decision. If the goal is a credential, compare the current active Cloud Management and Automation route with your role and product environment. If the goal is historical expertise, preserve a versioned study record and clearly label it VCP6-era knowledge on any internal learning plan.
A compact weekly rhythm
A workable routine is one concept session, one diagram or configuration exercise, one troubleshooting scenario, and one closed-book review cycle repeated across the available weeks. The exact calendar should vary with your background and lab access. Consistency matters more than assigning an unsupported number of days to an exam that is no longer open.
How to use official learning paths
VMware’s learning-path material says paths are organized around product, role, and skill level, and that instructor-led and on-demand offerings can include labs. Use that structure to choose resources for your current role, but confirm that a course maps to an active certification or current product before purchasing it for credential purposes.
Which study resources are safe to trust?
Start with official certification status, official track documentation, and version-appropriate VMware product documentation. Use older practitioner material only as an experience-based supplement and label it accordingly. A resource is useful when it explains a configuration decision or operational outcome; it is not reliable merely because it contains many recalled questions.
The supplied historical VMware blog describes one practitioner’s VCP7-CMA preparation and mentions using study resources for VCP6-CMA as well as material about vRA7 changes. That account is not an official VCP6-CMA blueprint, score report, or guarantee. It can illustrate the value of version awareness, but it should not replace authoritative documentation.
Avoid dumps, leaked questions, and memorization schemes. They can contain obsolete or altered content, do not establish that the exam is active, and do not demonstrate operational understanding. They also encourage confusing a remembered answer with the condition under which that answer is correct.
For a current certification decision, use the Broadcom VMware certification page and the current preparation guide rather than an archived VCP6-CMA advertisement. The current guide’s product and exam identifiers belong to a newer route, so use them to investigate present options—not to rewrite the historical exam’s specifications.
How to evaluate a practice question
A useful practice question supplies a technical decision, a constraint, and an observable outcome. After answering, explain why each distractor fails, which dependency controls the result, and what evidence would confirm your choice. If a question asks for an exact old interface detail without a traceable official source, treat it as a low-confidence prompt.
What mistakes waste the most preparation time?
The largest error is preparing as though the historical exam can still be scheduled. Confirm status first. Other common failures are mixing vSphere, vRealize, and Aria generations; studying screenshots without understanding workflows; treating product familiarity as mastery; and trusting unofficial question banks as if they were the official blueprint.
Version mixing is especially damaging in cloud-management subjects. Maintain a vocabulary table that records the product name, release context, role, and equivalent or changed terminology only when authoritative documentation supports the relationship. When a later product uses a different label, do not assume identical menus, APIs, prerequisites, or behavior.
Another mistake is learning installation as a checklist detached from operations. A candidate may remember that a service must be connected to an endpoint but fail to explain how credentials, certificates, permissions, policy, and network reachability affect the connection. Study every setup step with a validation test and a failure symptom.
Do not overvalue a lab that only follows a happy path. Add denied requests, unavailable capacity, invalid credentials, a broken endpoint, and a lifecycle action that cannot complete. The aim is to practice diagnosis and controlled recovery, not to collect screenshots.
Finally, do not treat a historical credential as interchangeable with a current one. Employers may value the knowledge, but certification status and product currency are separate questions. State clearly which one you are claiming.
A final self-check before changing direction
You are ready to move from historical study to a current certification investigation when you can describe the old track’s purpose, explain the provisioning lifecycle, distinguish configuration from operation, identify version boundaries, and verify an active successor from Broadcom. If you cannot verify the successor, do not infer one from a similarly named exam.
What should a candidate do next?
Take three actions in order: verify status on the official retired-exams information, record whether your goal is knowledge or a live credential, and select study material whose product version matches that goal. For a current credential, begin again with the active Broadcom certification page and its preparation guide; for historical learning, keep every conclusion labelled as VCP6-era context.
If a training provider offers “VCP6-CMA Beta,” request written clarification of the official exam number and registration route before paying. The supplied official evidence does not establish a current beta window, delivery mode, fee, question count, duration, or passing score for this historical exam.
If your employer needs proof of capability rather than this exact badge, assemble a versioned skills record: architecture diagram, provisioning workflow, policy decisions, troubleshooting notes, and the current certification path you have verified. This gives managers and customers more precise information than an ambiguous retired-exam listing.
The practical conclusion is straightforward: VCP6-CMA is useful as historical Cloud Management and Automation study context, but new candidates should not plan around 2V0-631. Confirm the live alternative first, then spend preparation time on the product generation and role that the current official source actually supports.
Official sources
The retirement status and historical identifier come from VMware’s retirement notice: https://blogs.vmware.com/vmware-japan/2019/04/vcp-vcap-retire201904_en.html. The rule that inactive or retired exams are no longer attainable for new candidates comes from Broadcom’s retired-exams page: https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/vmware-retired-exams-certifications-and-badges.
The Cloud Management and Automation track description is documented in Broadcom’s certification tracks diagram: https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/vmware-certification-tracks-diagram. Current certification-program information should be checked at https://www.broadcom.com/support/education/vmware/certification.
For current, not historical, VCP-CMA preparation information, consult https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/vmw-VCP-CMA-certification-preparation-guide. VMware’s learning-path discussion is available at https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2023/08/31/vmware-learning-paths-mapping-your-career-as-an-it-professional/. These sources should be read with their version and status distinctions intact.
Conclusion
The decisive fact is status: VMware announced retirement of VCP6-CMA and exam 2V0-631 on August 30, 2019, and Broadcom states that retired exams are not attainable by new candidates. Use the historical scope to strengthen Cloud Management and Automation knowledge, but verify an active certification route before scheduling, purchasing training, or presenting VCP6-CMA as a current credential.
