VCP course at QA

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I did ITIL v3 at QA in Hinckley and I thought they were excellent.

 

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Booked. Managed to get them down to £1645 from £3500 Probably take the course early 2011.

 

Just to offer a little insight/advice if it helps.

Doing the course, reading all of the guides from VMware and then doing the exam should ideally teach you how to do almost anything within VMware itself. Get a good lab set up and do everything that is in the guides for some practical knowledge.

This should stand you in good stead for getting a 2nd level position maybe where they have already put in VMware and you need to manage the up keep etc.

However as Simon as pointed out previously, be aware of what it will not teach you; the underlying technologies that it is build and runs on. For example if you are given a blade center, 6 blades, an FC San and an iSCSI San, two Cisco switches and asked to install VMware you will struggle. This is where the experience factor comes in so even once you achieve a VCP, I would still look to aim for 2nd level positions to build up the experience with VMware to the point you can do all of this.

Don't expect say the networking team to help you out as without you telling them exactly what you need they will not know how you want the switches to be configured (STP, BPDU Guard, Trunk ports, VLANS, Port Security).

Get it wrong in production and you dont just see one server disappear, it could literally be hundreds.

I'm sure you already know this and I'm not in anyway discouraging you, I say go for it and good luck, but note there will still be some "working your way up" to be done.

 

Totally agree it's not going to make me an expert overnight but will give me a good start. Cheers for the advice mate much appreciated

 

Just finished the four days training on VMware vSphere 4, was really interesting and a big eye opener to how much the system can be tweaked. Linux embedded too, VMkernel, VMotion, DRS, VCB, Storage and list goes on and on cleverly all done on an ESX host etc.

So far I have been playing with ESX at work for slightly over three months now in a production environment, two host and server vm's. I have also installed ESXi 4.0 on my home lab HP ML115 quad core server running one host, two DC's and two client vm's and growing.

The trainer knew her stuff inside out and was very helpful and presented the course very well. I just need to now go and put my learning into practice and hopefully one day sit the VCP exam in the near future.

It would also help if you know the basics on Linux i.e searching log files using PuTTY command line tool /var/log/etc

I'd say go for it slypie and get a good book from Amazon after reading the reviews and setup a home lab to reinforce your theory. Best wishes

 

Nice one mate glad it went well. I'm either thinking of doing the course in Novemeber or possibly early next year as I really want a clue what they are talking about when I go on the course. I have used ESX but not in any real depth. I've bought some books so after I get my Exchange Exam and ITIL out the way I'll be reading those books and a SAN book I bought to prepare for the course and hope to take the exam soon afterwards. It's really given me focus on what I need to do to get my career back on track. Might even try to squeeze in CCENT along the way

 

I see vmware has just released a new mid level certification the VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP)

 

That's good to hear, just out of curiousity which SAN book did you purchase?

 

lol you mean out of about the 2 published? Bought the dummies book mate.

 

Ok, just read about the dummies book on Amazon uk and most people were saying the SAN book was either too basic or outdated. The other expensive book for about £53 had better reviews but would have to wait till it drops further in price.

Cheerio and best wishes

 

yeah i agree i have struggled to find a really good book on SAN