How does one becoming VMWare Certified

GamingCrazy

This may be a dumb question but after looking in regards to VMWare I have a school that is one of the top 10 in the country located close to me with a full paid tuition scholarship, but my ideology of VMWare is quite limited,

Do you have to be knowledgable already or can one start from the beginning in regards to this certification? It's a 4 semester course from my understanding, but with technology vastly developing this technology interests me despite lacking knowledge of it,

Thanks for the help!

Sorry for my special ed title

msteinhilber

You have to take an official VMware course as well as pass the exam to become a VCP. More schools lately are beginning to offer the VMware curriculum through the VMware IT Academy which meets the requirements for the class portion of the journey to certification, but I doubt your school would have it spread out over 4 semesters. I'd check to be sure your school is listed as a participant of the VMware IT Academy by checking the website here:

Academy Program

Like I said though, I doubt they would spread it out over 4 semesters - there simply isn't enough content covered in the course typically offered (Install, Configure, Manage) to spread that out over 4 semesters. If somehow it was 4 semesters long, then my next concern would be you probably won't have the classes finished before the VCP-410 exam can no longer be taken as vSphere 5 is slated to be introduced I believe at the second half of the year.

Regarding prior knowledge, I think it depends a lot on how the class is structured in terms of how much time the material is covered in. I'm currently taking a course through a VMware IT Academy participant and it's over the course of 18 weeks where the official VMware courseware is usually several days. Going through it in several days, you would most definitely want to get some exposure and study in ahead of time or you'll probably have a hard time taking anything away from the class. When it's more spread out and not as much content is covered as fast, you're not going to be at as much of a disadvantage. That said, unless a person already had some significant professional experience with VMware - I doubt that the class alone would be enough of a prep to pass the exam. I haven't sat the exam yet, but everything I've read about it cites it's not exactly an easy exam to pass. You'll likely be supplementing your studies with 3rd party books and hitting the white papers at VMware's website pretty hard.

GamingCrazy

My question in particular is if you need to study before-hand, or have prior knowledge,

How does one acquire and become custom to it?

I want to jump in this technology but I'm at a gap I can't seem to located what is needed,

Thanks!

spiderjericho

You could read a little about virtualization, just to understand some of the teminology, products, etc.

The only other thing is your level of familiarity with Unix.

I took a VCP 3.5 class a few years ago and most of the students got hung up because most of us didn't have the Unix background to navigate through the ESX cli. The GUI/Vcenter is an easy interface though.

If you have vwmware workstation, you could install ESXi and get your feet wet. There are guides probably floating around on the forum or internet.

YouTube - How to install ESX 4.0 inside of VMware Workstation 6.5.2

GamingCrazy

One more quick question, is the technology associated with one prime outcome: As far as being a professional or are there other stages in regards to companies like "Cisco"?,

Thanks