I passed the Solutions Architect Professional exam today with a 79%.  Here's the breakdown:

Topic Level Scoring:
1.0  High Availability and Business Continuity: 90%
2.0  Costing: 100%
3.0  Deployment Management: 100%
4.0  Network Design: 85%
5.0  Data Storage: 81%
6.0  Security: 71%
7.0  Scalability & Elasticity: 63%
8.0  Cloud Migration & Hybrid Architecture: 57%

The test was only 77 questions, and I still had 170 minutes. I'm not sure why I did so poorly on Scalability & Elasticity, but the hybrid architecture questions were really tough and reflected my lack of experience operating in a truly hybrid situation. My work environment is technically hybrid, as we run the web, db and ldap services in the cloud, but we connect the school network to the cloud over our internet access. I have an experiment planned to create a VPN gateway to the private subnets and connect to our ldap server over that. We can't afford a Direct Connect, so that part will have to remain theoretical.

My score was very similar to my Whizlabs results, but the exam was harder, as there were no duplicated questions or associate level questions, which did account for about 5 questions in my last practice. The exam questions were no joke, not a throwaway in the bunch. I took about two hours on the exam, where I usually mowed through in about a hour. There were a couple I had to transcribe to the scratch paper, identifying the salient concepts or potential solutions as I went. Reading them on the screen was just too much like Capote's criticism of Kerouac:"That's not writing, that's typing."

My testing experience was better than the last, there was no lag between questions. There was still construction noise, and the table was shaking a bit from some mechanical vibration, but it wasn't a game changer.  When I saw the pass notification screen, I sat there, smiling like an idiot for about 30 seconds. I am so happy to see that all the time spent studying and practicing paid off.

My next step will be to purse the Advanced Networking specialty exam and the Sysops Engineer professional certification, both via my Linux Academy subscription. I'll see if I can squeeze one or the other in before the end of the year.