I’ve been asked several times recently to recommend training resources for VMware, so I thought I might write my responses up in a blog post to help out folks in the community who are looking for the best resources to gain VMware knowledge, prepare for their VCP and other certifications, and continue on their journey to becoming a virtualization rockstar.

I’ve picked up a bunch of certifications over the past 10 years.  For me, certification is not the means to an end, but the end of some long, intensive studying and lab work, then doing some deep dive studying and doing.  By the time I get to the test, passing should be a forgone conclusion.  I’ll save details of my lab for a future post and focus on the books and other learning resources that I use.  When getting into a new or updated technology, I start out my studying with a good overall survey of the technology I want to learn.  I like a good book that hits all of the major components, provides background information to help explain why the technology, component, or module really matters and how it fits into the big picture.  Then I get into technology specific books – deep dives, command line references, and architecture books.

Books

Mastering VMware vSphere 5, by Scott Lowe

My go-to book for VMware vSphere has been Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere 4.  Scott’s updated book, Mastering VMware vSphere 5 started shipping yesterday.  Scott covers everything from the basics of what a hypervisor is to VMware vSphere best practices.  This is a great book to accompany lab work as it includes licensing, planning and installation, setting up virtual networking, storage basics, security, resource allocation, HA, DRS, and even some automation with the CLI and PowerCLI (PowerShell).  The book is well written, taking you methodically through vSphere, while providing plenty of helpful hints along the way.  Do yourself a favor and click the picture to the left to order it from Amazon now (paperback or Kindle format).  This book is a great way to get started with studying for your VCP certification.

VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive

Once I have the basics down, I get into the deep dive work. The first deep-dive book for VMware vSphere 5 is VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive, by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman.  This is Duncan and Frank’s second book that focuses on the clustering and high availability technologies available in VMware vSphere.  Readers of Duncan and Frank’s first book, VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (Volume 1), got an incredibly deep look at how to configure VMware HA and DRS.  The new vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive includes Storage DRS as well.  I’ve talked to several readers of both these books and Duncan and Frank’s blogs who have remarked that 1.) I’ve been doing it wrong all along, 2.) I totally understand how HA and DRS work after reading this, and 3.) My environment really is resilient and reliable thanks to this book.

Pearson and VMware teamed up earlier this year to create VMware Press.  There are several books coming from VMware Press, as well as other authors/publishers that are now available for pre-order from Amazon.com.  These include:

There are not many vSphere 5 specific books out yet, but many of the vSphere 4 resources are still very useful.  My library includes these:

Video Training

If you are not a big reader or you are looking for additional topics, check out TrainSignal’s VMware Training Videos.  TrainSignal offers a whole slew of courses (many taught by VMware vExperts), including:

• vSphere 5 Training
• VMware View Administration Training
• vSphere Troubleshooting
• vSphere Performance Monitoring
• vSphere Security Design
• vSphere PowerCLI.

I have a couple of TrainSignal DVD’s and found them to be good quality with deep technical content.

Blogs and BrownBags

Once you are comfortable with the material, you can start to study for your VCP.  Several bloggers have published collections of materials to help you prepare for the VCP, VCAP, and even the VCDX.  I recommend Simon Long’s collection here: http://www.simonlong.co.uk/blog/vcp-vsphere-upgrade-study-notes/ and Cody Bunch’s VCP4 Resource Page and BrownBag sessions.

Instructor Led & Certification

Finally, once you are all read up, head to a VMware Education instructor led class.  You need to take a VMware Authorized Training course to qualify to sit for the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification exam.  VMware also offers a nice catalog of eLearning courses.  If you want to get a discount on eLearning, Instructor-Led training, and certification exams from VMware, check out the VMUG Advantage program.

I am finishing up an installation of an EMC Clariion CX4 SAN. One of the final steps of the installation is to configure PowerPath/VE on the ESXi hosts. PowerPath/VE is EMC’s multipathing extension module for VMware (and Hyper-V), designed to replace the Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) for increased I/O performance and failover management.  To simplify and automate the installation of PowerPath/VE, I decided to use VMware Update Manager (VUM) to push the extension to the ESXi 4.x hosts in the environment.

The process of setting up an additional VUM patch repository to host PowerPath/VE (and other 3rd party extensions such as the Cisco Nexus 1000v) is pretty straight forward.  3rd party extensions are supported in VUM beginning with vSphere 4.0 Update 1.  Chad Sakac has posted a great video guide on YouTube that covers the setup:

I opted to use the tomcat installation on the environment’s vCenter server to host the PowerPath/VE repository.  To accomplish this, I simply created a new directory in the tomcat root directory.  The default path for the root directory on a vSphere vCenter Server is “C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps” (or C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps on a 64-bit installation).

I created a directory named ‘depot’ and within that directory created a PowerPathVE folder.  I extracted the contents of the VUM folder from the PowerPath .zip file that I downloaded from http://powerlink.emc.com.  A screenshot of the directory is below:

PowerPath/VE Depot Directory Tree

After creating the directory for the patch repository, I simply added an Extension Repository to VMware Update Manager as Chad shows in his video.  I would like to call out one caveat – Because vCenter may not listen on standard HTTP/HTTPS ports, I used https://vcenter.domain.local:8443/depot/PowerPathVE/index.xml as the path to the source.

VUM Patch Source

Once PowerPath was added to an Extension Baseline in VUM, I simply had to scan my hosts for updates and remediate.  Installation of PowerPath/VE requires the host to be in Maintenance Mode and concludes with a reboot.  Pretty simple.

Then all you have to do is fight through an overly-complex licensing setup (seriously, a 112 page PDF on how to install licenses???), a bit of configuration, and you are multi-pathing with the best of them.  If you are interested in learning more about PowerPath/VE, start with this whitepaper: EMC PowerPath/VE for VMware vSphere Best Practices Planning.  For a bit of real-world insight into the performance increase you might see with PowerPath/VE, check out this blog post from Eric Sloof: Massive I/O power increase using EMC PowerPath/VE.

Update – 3/27/09: VMware published a Knowledge Base article on this procedure a few weeks after I wrote this post.  You can find it in  article 1018740.

Update – 4/15/11: You may have to set the NTFS permissions on the ‘depot’ folder to allow ‘anonymous’ read access when running on a 2008 or 2008 R2 server before you can validate and download from the new repository.

Microsoft published a document named “Getting to Know Hyper-V: A Walkthrough from Initial Setup to Common Scenarios” last week.  According to Microsoft, “this guide provides detailed step-by-step walkthroughs for testing Hyper-V on a pre-production environment. You can use this guide to become familiar with Hyper-V and the process of creating and managing virtual machines. Also included in this guide are useful scenarios that you can test to better understand how Hyper-V can address the business goals of your organization.”  The document serves as a sort of evaluators guide for Hyper-V, stepping the reader through everything from enabling VT in BIOS through virtual networking.  It also includes some sections on using snapshots, base virtual machine templates, and managing Hyper-V based virtual machines remotely with Hyper-V Manager.  If you want more in-depth documentation on Hyper-V you can go through http://technet.microsoft.com.

As a side note, Microsoft has published the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications to help standardize technical documentation.  I have long been a fan of Microsoft’s technical documentation for its easy to read style, although it sometimes lacks the depth that I desire.

While we’re on the topic of virtualization documentation, I have also been quite pleased with VMware’s technical documentation over the years, and have found it to be continually increasing in quality, providing very specific technical guidance and references to additional resources.  I have also been pleased to see that VMware has improved delivery options for documentation.  VMware offers several formats for documentation delivery, including web-based and PDF’s.  Start with the Documentation Roadmap for a quick introduction to the available documentation, and where to find what you need.

You can find web-based vSphere documentation here: http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40/.   The web-based documentation is great for running searches on.  All vSphere documentation can be accessed through this page: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vs_pages/vsp_pubs_esx40_vc40.html.  If you want to do a full grab of all of VMware’s documentation for an in-house repository (e.g. SharePoint), check out xtravirt’s VMware Documentation Downloader script.

If you are looking for quick and easy evaluator guide-type documentation from VMware, check out these resources: ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Setup Guide and the Virtualization Kit (registration required) at http://www.vmware.com/resources/wp/virtualization101_register.html.

There is a ton of less formal VMware documentation in several places:

• Technical resources and case studies here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/
• Proven practices around Strategy, Applications, Security, Management, and Availability at VIOPS.
• Official VMware Blogs at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/planet/vmware/.
• Community blogs aggregated by VMware at Planet v12n: http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/planet/v12n/
• VMworld Recorded Sessions & Labs (VMworld 2009 Sessions available as of today, September 14th) at http://vmworld.com.
• The VMware Community Forums: http://communities.vmware.com/
• And, 3rd party books like Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere 4.

Do you have other sources of virtualization documentation or easy methods of searching documentation to find exactly what you need when you need it?  If so, leave a comment!