Aruba Network Expert practical exam HPE4-A52 Campus access switching
Hi everyone,
After months of labbing and studying, i am finally going to take this 6 hour exam this monday(10/08/2026).
I took the official course for this exam and i have to say it was pretty dissapointing... The theory part was just an AI reading the official study guide, which, as you may have imagined, is as entertaining as stomping your head on the wall for 4 hours straight.
The lab course was fairly good and not that difficult, however, the "trouble tickets" or "mock exam" exercises were extremely hard, basically you have to troubleshoot multiple issues and you are not able to use any show run commands, you need to be figuring out everything via debugs and show commands....Its not like they were impossible to figure out but oh boy did they take time.... And i dont think they set 6 hours time for this exam for nothing....
I would like to ask some of you what's been your experience with aruba networking practical exams... Will i be able to use show run commands? what kind of devices am i supposed to work with? CXsimulator ? Is the program expecting a specific string for example lag 256 for a specific answer? Will i be able to access CPPM? or Central?
I suppose i will find out this monday and letting you guys know....
This is the network topology i've been working with, it does not include the ZTP AND OTP and all the wifi part since that is not virtualizable and i have no access to central. There is quite a few things i've not been able to lab like VSF, real QOS traffic, or some vxlan features.
If any of you is learning and want some advice i will be happy to share some tips for setting up the environment.... there is also this really lab guide by some aruba guy...https://airheads.hpe.com/discussion/using-the-aos-cx-switch-simulator-lab-guides pretty solid.
If any of you has taken any hpe practical exam (or this one lol) please do share your experiences....
Wish me luck!