VMware advice

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Hi,

I'm keen to begin studying VMWare and wondered if anyone could advise the best approach, is everyone still in favor of building a home lab or are there better (cheaper) alternatives.

Any advice for a VMWare noob welcome.

 

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Very much in favour of home labs but you do realise that before you can sit the VCP exams you need to sit an approved training course?

I have a couple of articles on my site detailing installing vSphere 5.x - www.everything-virtual.com
I also have some blueprints and document bundles that can be downloaded from there.

I would also have a look at the hol.vmware.com site for some additional training material.

 

Wow, thanks for the prompt replies ! I'll certainly check these links out.

I've read that I'll need to sit an official course and I'm sure it will add some value but I don't believe I'll be able to learn enough in just 5 days training to pass. I generally need to put in a significant number hours beforehand to ensure I get the most value from the training and I'm test ready by the end of a course.

I'll aim for the VCP6-DCV, just hope I've understood the training requirements correctly.
Ultimately I'd prefer to certify rather than just knowing the material, makes me feel special

Obviously due to significant RAM requirements (32Gb - 128Gb) a Home lab will need to have more oomph than just a standard home pc,
a quick estimate suggests a build will set me back over £600.00 add this to the rather hefty course and exam costs (~£2,000.00) and it mounts up to fairly substantial sum. Before I commit to this I wanted to see if there are viable alternatives such as virtual training or even if its possible to build a hosted lab and do these alternatives represent value ?

If your sitting there reading this and thinking you're going about this all wrong please do chime in !

 

So yes there is some initial investment in a home lab, whether it's a laptop or PC is up to you (I have both).

As a side note I would suggest looking on ebay for components to make up a lab, as an example my Shuttle based boxes cost me about £500 or so when I built them up (this included the quad port nic which you don't really need at such an early stage). The HP MicroServers are great little boxes that can be got for about £100 with money back offers available, the only limitation is that they are BIOS locked to 16GB.

Whilst having 32GB is better you can initially get away with 16GB in a machine, yes an SSD will greatly help with the speed of things but if you're limited on budget then stick to what you can afford but allow yourself some wriggle room (ie don't limit yourself with something you can't upgrade).

Now as far as training is concerned then yes that can be expensive however I have used 360 GSP for my VCP training over the years and I know that @ChrisStark is on a course with them at the moment, they do training over 4 consecutive weekends and it covers more than the syllabus (which btw you're correct isn't enough to pass the exam with, you would want to get the excellent Mastering vSphere 6 book by Nick Marshall), however to ensure you have covered everything you need for the exam then you will be following the Exam Blueprint (found on the VMware site as a page now rather than a PDF in previous versions), also worth mentioning is that 360 GSP are a VMware Academy and Academies generally offer the training below the VATC prices because it's offered over a longer period.

Finally to ensure you have enough knowledge I would suggest a monthly subscription to PluralSight and go over the courses by David Davis and Greg Shields.