Hey Phil, I recently did the VCP certification/course through VMWare however I was working with the technology over the past 5 years. Based off your desire to gain experience with it, my recommendation is to load up VMware Workstation on your computer and deploy ESXi instances as the guests. This is a cost feasible and although performance won't be production grade, you have the ability to play with clusters, DRS/HA config, OpenSAN (for your block based storage), etc. There is a myriad of training docs available but if you do want the certification itself, you'll have to go through the official course(s). Cheers, Matt Chung On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Phil Gardner <phil.gardnerjr@gmail.com>wrote:
Not sure if this list is the best place, but it is probably the only list that I'm on that won't give me a bunch of grief about the chosen technology.
I looked at VMware's site, and there are a ton of options. I'm wondering if anyone has some basic suggestions or experiences.
I'm a Linux admin by trade (RH based), with "ok" networking ability. I'm sufficiently versed in deploying scripted ESXi (including 5.x) installations for a specific environment, including vswitches/SAN config (but only with NFS datastores backed by a NetApp, unfortunately, no blockbased stores).
I'd like to get experience deploying VCenter clusters, down to DRS/HA config, other block based storage, and anything else a large environment needs.
Thoughts or experiences?
-- _____________________ Phil Gardner PGP Key ID 0xFECC890C OTR Fingerprint 6707E9B8 BD6062D3 5010FE8B 36D614E3 D2F80538
-- -Matt Chung