Citrix Certified Professional – Networking (CCP-N) exam experience

Last friday I passed the 1Y0-351 (Citrix NetScaler 10.5 Essentails and Networking) exam with a pretty good score. The exam was necessary, not only because I will do much more NetScaler projects in the future, but also because Citrix has made it mandatory to have a CCP-N in your company to to sell Citrix NetScaler.

Preparation

My employer booked me a 5-day course (CNS-220 Citrix NetScaler Essentials and Traffic Management). Very nice, although I already had experience with NetScaler deployments. This training was designed for NetScaler 12.0, not for 10.5.

A training might be recommended to prepare for an exam, but usually it is not sufficient to pass it. But I want to pass the exam in the first try, so I took a closer look into the Citrix NetScaler 10.5 Essentials and Networking Preparation Guide.

In addition to the student and lab material, I deployed three NetScaler VPX (10.5,11.1 and 12.0) in my lab. I really recommend this! Especially to learn the CLI and how to read the log files.

The exam

The exam 1Y0-351 is focused on NetScaler 10.5, and will be not available after January 19, 2018. The sucessor of this exam is 1Y0-340, which is based on NetScaler 12.0. It is available since October 20, 2017. You might have noticed that my course was designed for 12.0, but I took the 10.5 exam. Well, I could not identify a question that would have had to be answered differently for NetScaler 12.0. But I really recommend to take the exam matching your course.

You have to answer 72 questions in 120 minutes. I got 30 minutes extra, because I’m a non-native english speaker. I had to answer two survey before the exam. One of them was a self-assessment about my NetScaler skills.

The questions were pretty fair, no trick questions, or questions were multiple answers seemed to be correct. The exam met the exam objectives from the prep guide. And because I already wrote it: You really should work with the CLI, and you really should know the important logs.

In sum: A challenging, but pretty fair exam. No marketing, no factual knowledge from spec sheets etc. When you are quite familiar with NetScalers, there is a good chance to pass the exam in the first attempt.