Reddit reviews Mastering VMware vSphere 5

vSphere Essentials will do what you need. Depending on how fast you're going to grow your virtual datacenter, you may want to look at the other options and consider the cost differences. I've never had to upgrade from Essentials, so no clue what that process is like.

Yes, the hypervisor is the same across the various versions.

Mastering VMware vSphere 5 by Scott Lowe.

Attend VMworld.

As a final note I'd get more RAM in your servers if I were you. Servers are memory hungry. I personally find that I always have plenty of CPU resources available but fall short on RAM. However, it really depends on the workload you're throwing at your cluster, so ymmv.

Have fun!

For the overall picture (vSphere only), you can't go wrong with Scott Lowe's Mastering vSphere 5.

Epping and Denneman wrote a technical deepdive book on clustering which really gets into the nitty gritty.

And for storage, Mostafa Khalil wrote the bible.

Also, if you want to really dive into the virtualization arena, definitely check out the VMware community site. Follow people on twitter, join the live podcasts (community podcast and vBrownBags), etc... Listening to recorded podcasts is also a great way to learn.

Go get Scott Lowe's book. Read it at least twice. If you have the money, like mech said the VCA is a good start. At the very least Im pretty sure you can take their online "class" to learn the VCA material for free. Keep your eye out as well for free vouchers to take the VCA with as they do pop up from time to time!

Edit: http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-VMware-vSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/0470890800

VCP materiel will actually do part of the job.

Pick up "Mastering VMware vSphere 5"

It's an excellent resource that covers ESX and vCenter Server.

Its enough to get you to Install, Configure, Maintain, and Manage a vSphere infrastructure.

The online documentation on VMware's site is another place to start if you don't want to spend...

I think it was Mastering vSphere 5 - I am not sure - it was on Amazon. Honestly, I read the book and passed the test. my 5 years of experience pretty much helped me.

Disclaimer, I am not certified, you can't be without a registered class AND test. I have only passed the test and cannot afford the $3K class yet

Edit: Found it! http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-VMware-vSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/0470890800/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376012706&sr=8-1&keywords=mastering+vsphere+5

You need this book and this study guide. Good luck!

Wait what? The physical hard drives go into the server (as long as they can be mounted/plugged in physically in the server), you install esxi and then you place your VHDs (virtual hard drives for your virtual machines) in the datastore you have presented (which for starting would be your local drives).

Stick with the local storage for now until you get a handle on virtualization and then you can worry about network datastores later once you get more comfortable about virtualization. Jumping into the deep end with this without understand the basics isnt going to help you learn this.

http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/faq/virtual-datastore.html

I recommend picking up one of the books from Scott Lowe if you want to learn about Esxi
http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-VMware-vSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/0470890800

Number 1 pitfall - not actually reading the manual...

There's such a wealth of good accessible information both online and in print that you should try to absorb some of it before you start this process.

Apart from the actual product docs themselves (which are actually pretty good) VMware have some good resources here [https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=vmware-vsphere51-ent&lp=default#tab_preinstall] and here [https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=vmware-vsphere51-ent&lp=default#tab_install]

There's also 3rd party books/resources worth checking out including this great one
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastering-VMware-VSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/0470890800/ref%3Dsr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319188175&sr=8-1] This [http://www.amazon.com/VMware-vSphere-Design-Forbes-Guthrie/dp/1118407911] is an advanced book looking at vSphere design but it's quite readable and it does make you realise that it's often worth thinking about how you design/build your VMware environment and what you can do early on to make your environment highly available and meet your performance objectives.

You mentioned lack of budget for training - make them spring for just a few bucks for a pluralsight subscription for a couple of months and watch their online video based training materials for VMware [http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses/Find?highlight=true&searchTerm=VMware]

Stanly has a wait list, but the price can't be beat.

I also think Pluralsight is very very good and worth trying to convince your company to sign up for. If not, it's probably worth it to sign yourself up for $30 a month or whatever it is now.


Lastly, for VMware, these are the two books people seem to swear by for the VCP:
http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-VMware-vSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/0470890800/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y (This is the vsphere 5 version, I believe there is a 5.5 version as well if you're interested)

and

http://www.amazon.com/Official-Certification-Guide-VMware-Press/dp/0789749319/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394466897&sr=1-1&keywords=vmware+certification

The reason for the extra memory is well I figured I might as well just max out the motherboard from the start considering how cheap memory is in the first place and not worry about wanting to upgrade that down the line. I am planning on starting out with ESXI 5.0 anyway and picking up this book http://amzn.com/0470890800 as my go to reference manual outside of the google library.

I had no plan of using the onboard RAID hardware at all - I've already been warned by a friend (who builds clusters and borderline supercomputers for universities for a living) that the onboard RAID stuff will suck and that I should either buy a separate controller (just like you did) or use a software based configuration. Which brings me to my next question, what would you recommend for to purchase as a separate controller card?

I read through, cover to cover, http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-VMware-vSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/0470890800 & http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0789749319/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I also got a chance to go to VMWare Install, Configure and Manage 5.1 (I think that is the course name), but that didn't seem to have as much useful information as the books did.