VCP
Roadmap to became VCP – VMware Certified Professional.
I had became a VCP 4 on VMware vSphere 4 recently. Actually I went for the class and the exam to near South Africa. You can read the whole story here. It’s been a great experience, especially for someone whose English is not a native language. (I’m French).
At first my preferences goes to video learning. I prefer to learn through Video since it’s the most effective these days. Besides that the pros shows you “On live” all the little how-to’s and tools they using, so that’s why they are pro.. -:)
Enough said, my preferred video learning course is VMware vSphere 4 from TrainSignal. David Davis, the instructor has managed to pack more than 50 hours of Video on 8 DVDs so you can learn on your own pace. There are even ipod videos and mp3 files included so you can learn while you travel.
The courses are well organized and since I follow those videos I feel more and more confident with administration of a Virtual infrastructure and gaining more and more knowledge every day. I often repeat some videos because I don’t manage to keep all the info at once. So I just review a part of an interesting video once again to refresh.
Now there is a possibility to Direct Access OnLine the courses in high quality.
Then there are some other good resources. I done a blog-post recently with some VCP links in it too, but I think that I’m going to regroup all here.
There has been a new certification announced recently. The new certification will place itself in between the VCP and VCDX certifications. Since the VCDX certification is so difficult to obtain that there is only few people on the whole planet having VCDX, the way to go and get more than VCP, you can go the VCAP way. VCAP stands for VMware Certified Advanced Professional.
There are actually 2 VCAP certifications. VCAP – DCA (Datacenter Administrator) and VCAP – DCD (Datacenter Design), you don’t have to pass both if you want to be VCAP. See my article on that.
This exam will be officially on in August 2010, but already you can get informed and also you can get the Exam Blueprint. Some links:
- Exam Blueprint for VCAP4-DCA -new !! v. 1.3
- VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting [V4]
- VMware vSphere: Manage for Performance [V4]
- VMware Certified Advanced Professional
- Main documentation link - vSphere 4.1
Test yourself:
- Simon Long Blog VCP 4 practice exam and VCP 4 configuration maximums exam test
- Try Your Knowledge – with a blank exam here.
- New official MOCK exam at VMware
- Get All the PDFs in one zip File from VMware Website ( all books in the main documentation set)
- Vmware Certification – here you should start
- VMwaretraining blog – some great VCP 4 study tips.
- My Learn on VMware.com – mock exam
- VCP BluePrint – Must have to get you started PDF guide (Must Have!!)
- VMware vSphere 4 Documentation – some great and useful docs
- VMware vSphere 4 Online Documentation – Like Microsoft Technet Style reading.. but rather for vSphere 4 … -:).
- Installing ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices
- Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices
VCP and VCDX forums:
Other Very Usefull Resources:
- Port Numbers used in vSphere 4 (PDF diagram)
- Your Cursus to VCP or VCDX
- VCP on vSphere Cue Cards
- Forbes Guthrie and his great vSphere 4.0 Reference Card (Must Have!!)
- Forbes Guthrie and his vReference 4 Notes
- VM CPU, Memory and Network adapters from Virtualized Planet
- VCP Tips -Storage Part1 from Virtualized Planet
Recommended tools:
I recommend VMware tools for desktop virtualization. Now with VMware Workstation 7 you can run VMware ESX 4 inside of VMware Workstation (as a VM) without the need of tweaking the VMX configuration file. The new Virtual Network Editor make things even more easy.
If you’re MAC user, don’t worry. The new VMware Fusion is optimized for Snow Leopard.
