The F5 certification path is a series of exams administered by Pearsonvue where you start of by passing 2 exams to become an F5 Certified big-ip Administrator and then depending on your specialist area you can add to that by becoming an F5 Certified Technology Specialist.
The certification costs are $135 per exam which would be $270 to become a certified administrator and then up to $675 if you passed all the technology specialist exams.
According to the F5 website there are four certification levels. Administrator, Specialist, Expert and Professional.
The expert and professional exams still say they are under development so for the rest of this post I will be covering only the administrator and specialist exams. If I find more information about the 400 level and 500 level certifications I will post them here.
F5 Certification Path
The graphic above was taken from https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/f5-friday-are-you-certifiable
F5 Certified Administrator
The first step in the process is to pass the Exam 101 Application Delivery Fundamentals this is a prerequisite to Exam 201. No certificate is issued when passing this exam.
The next step is to pass Exam 201 TMOS Administration (F5-CA) F5 Certified BIG-IP Administrator.
After passing this you will be awarded the certificate of F5 Certified Administrator.
F5 Certified Technology Specialist
Once you have passed Exam 101 and 201 you can then move onto becoming a technology specialist in your chosen area.
There are four main specialisms which include Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Global Traffic Manager (GTM), Application Security Manager (ASM) and Access Policy Manager (APM).
LTM Technology Specialist
To become a Local Traffic Manager Technology Specialist you need to pass two exams Exam 301a and 301b.
Exam 301a – Architect, Setup & Deploy – no certificate is issued but is a prerequisite to 301b
Exam 301b – Maintain & Troubleshoot
GTM Technology Specialist
To become a Global Traffic Manager Technology Specialist you only need to pass one exam – Exam 302.
ASM Technology Specialist
To become a Application Security Manager Technology Specialist you only need to pass one exam – Exam 303.
APM Technology Specialist
To become a Access Policy Manager Technology Specialist you only need to pass one exam – exam 304.
The Expert and Professional Exams will be covered in a later post when I have more information.
Register on the F5 Credentials System
The first step to becoming F5 certified is to register your detail on the F5 Credentials System
https://www.certmetrics.com/f5certified/login.aspx
Once you have registered your details there you then need to book your exam with pearsonvue
F5 Virtual Appliance
I would also highly recommend you get a copy of the F5 Virtual Appliance for practice – it’s free!
Conclusion:
This is the basis of the F5 Certification Path as I see it right now, I will be starting my journey to becoming an F5 certified administrator next week so you can follow along and see my progress.
If you are looking for an F5 certification study guide I will be posting more information on study resources in later posts.
Right now I need to make sure I understand everything on the Exam 101 Blueprint
So if you are looking got get your f5 load balancer certification you need to just download an appliance and start labbing. The F5 exams are known to be not the easiest but the main reason for that is (in my opinion) they are very fair and very real world hands on, so everything you will be tested on will be based on the operation of the load balancers, so if you have some good hands on knowledge you should be fine.
Roger
F5 Virtual Appliance – How to install the VE LTM on ESXi
Hi ROGER, i FAILED 301A YESTERDAY, IT WAS SAD BUT THE QUESTION IS REALLY TRICKY
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA CAN SHARE WITH US.
tHANKS A LOT
Angus,
Sorry to hear that – most of the material for 301A is included in the F5 study guides and is basic network theory.
What is your level of understanding of networking? As for some this exam is common knowledge and for others they will see a lot of networking questions they have never heard of before
Your website says “The certification costs are $135 per exam which would be $170 to become a certified administrator”
Do you mean to say $270($135 for 101+ $ 135 for 201) instead of $170?
yes – corrected it now