The Wombelix Post

Proud to be SCE in SLES for SAP 15 number 166, after passing the two necessary Exams today. It's the first time SUSE requires two Exams to get certified and they were really tough ones. Tackling the SCA+ in SLES for SAP 12 and SCA+ in SLES High Availability last year as well as previous SAP NetWeaver and HANA experience definitely helped, but still, these both are the hardest SUSE Exams I took so far. I also decided to take both Exams in a row, means 3 hours with 140 Questions, very intensive, I would probably do it again, but not recommend to others doing it like that ;)

But as much I like SUSE, I have the impression that the quality of the Training Material but also Exams drops. For example, the courses to prepare for the Exam are based on different SLES 15 versions, which leads to situations where in Course A you learn about a specific version of a tool just to basically learn the opposite, caused by a new release, in Course B. Also during the Exam lot of questions where just not clear in what is asked for, more than once it was just guessing.

Such things can happen, but I would love to see a little increase in content Quality in future.

Other than that, the Exam isn't only single or multiple choice anymore, there are input fields where you have to fill in a command including all parameter to solve a problem. There are also screenshots from command output or web / gui interfaces and you have to place a marker on the right place depending on the question, for example on the line that provides you a specific information in a CLI output.

I like that there are some more variations but asking commands including arguments isn't that beneficial in my personal opinion. I'm in the industry my whole life and looking up exact syntax and parameter in the docs and man pages is something I still do all the time. If you want to test commands, I suggest provide a practical Exam and to let the Student build something in a real environment under real conditions, including the availability of the standard documentation ;)

Anyway, I passed, with a Score of 84% in part 1 and 86% in part 2, solid numbers given the difficulty of the Exam, the passing score is 70%.

Overall I still can recommend the SUSE Courses and Exam, they might not perfect but can help you to improve your Skills a lot! And that's at the end good for yourself, your career, the company you working for and most important: Your Customers.

Summary: "SUSE Certified Engineer in SLES for SAP Applications" is designed for System Architects, Deployment Engineers and System Administrators. Building on the "SCA+ in SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability", this certification demonstrates knowledge of how to plan, deploy, test and manage SLES for SAP Applications to provide High Availability for key SAP workloads, following SUSE Best Practice. The two key SAP workloads included in the certification are "SAP HANA with System Replication in a Scale Up Performance Optimized configuration" and "SAP Enqueue and Enqueue Replication Server"

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