People have lots of negative opinions on the certification industry but it is particularly bad with VMware.

• The cert can only be obtained with mandatory classroom training
• The argument of course is that classroom training ensures people have real skills and did not just brain dump. Noone who attends these courses support that reality
• You can sink up to a thousand dollars a day in a four day course for the privilege. I'd love to know what kickback VMware get for certifying these training vendors.
• What you get out of this is the ability to sell the products with better kickbacks. Yes, the people who primarily benefit from these supposedly technical exams are people who work in sales. Of course noone in sales will sit these themselves, so it's a case of shunting the exams to someone else
• I can get a Microsoft action pack and run an entire small IT company on it for a few hundred bucks. Get bent over by VMware to sell their product and you can expect to pay thousands of dollars a year for Internal use licensing.

I benefited from this, I've had my VCP since VCP4 and really didn't want to renew. And I still feel angry about their whole position.