This post will include information on the VCP VI3 certification offered by VMware.

To become a VCP VI3 you need to do three things:

1. You have to take the VMware authorized course.  No if, ands, or buts! The classes are instructor led and will allow you to get your hands dirty with VMware. There’s three courses you can take.

• VMware Infrastructure 3: Install and Configure V3.5
• VMware Infrastructure 3: Deploy, Secure and Analyze V3.5
• VMware Infrastructure 3: Fast Track V3.5

2. Get hands on experience with VMware. What’s the point of trying to get a VCP without using it!?

3.Sign up and pass the exam: http://www.pearsonvue.com/vmware

Now that doesn’t sound too hard, does it? Well, I wouldn’t say taking IT exams is easy. (Unless, you’re dumping, which I completely do not agree with.) Usually the hard part of getting a VCP is money. $2500-$3000 a course seems a little steep for a lot of people.(Although, Fast Track = $5495 but includes the exam) I see where VMware is coming from, especially due to the current state of IT certification. (i.e. people cheating/dumping exams.) Also, with the course you receive a VMware messenger bag, I mean, that’s totally worth $3000, right?

After you have passed your exam, you will receive a complimentary license of VMware workstation, a $175 “savings”. Interesting that the course itself costs about the same.

So, why get your VCP? Why does anyone get IT certifications? We all have different reasons, career advancement, your employer requires you to, or you just like to learn. Whatever your reason may be, getting certified in a technology is always beneficial.

Below are some resources you can use to learn more about VMware certifications:

VMware Education Services

TechExams.net Virtualization Forum

The Value of the VCP (VMware Certified Professional)

Just a quick update to let everyone know that the Veeam videos for the VMworld contest are in and have been posted to the forums for voting. I can’t endorse any of them here but of course I’m sure we all have favorites. Do you? Well then vote!

We’ve heard that some people are having issues registering on our forums. We do apologize for that but in an effort to keep out spam we have to dis-allow certain email domains (gmail, hotmail) and we also have a CAPTCHA that has been made a bit more user friendly (black and white instead of color). I didn’t realize until just the other day that some color CAPTCHA’s are very difficult for people who are color blind.

Anyway, vote for your favorite and be sure to leave a comment. There’s a bonus prize of a Flip going to the person with the best comment.

While there’s been a lot of talk this past week on Free ESXi (more on that later) I wanted to take some time and explain the new Veeam Essentials bundle and our reasons behind it. We view our Veeam Essentials bundle as a great entry bundle for the small business just getting into virtualization using VMware vSphere. As you may know, VMware has introduced a very attractively priced vSphere bundle called VMware vSphere Essentials, this gives you vCenter and up to 6 sockets (3 hosts) for just shy of US $1,000. If you think about it, that’s a lot of power for not a lot of clams. Think how many physical servers you can virtualize on 3 ESX(i) hosts…way more than 3. For more information, check out VMware vSphere Pricing.

So, for just shy of 1K you get fully licensed vSphere. This is great but it still leaves you without an efficient backup and recovery tool, single pane of glass monitoring or detailed reporting…enter Veeam Essentials bundle…offering Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter for around US $2,000 (Americas pricing). The Veeam Essentials bundle is fully functional licensed versions of those 3 products for 6 sockets (3 hosts).

Of course Veeam is placing some limits on this bundle…

• Must be purchased with VMware vSphere Essentials (or proof of VMware vSphere Essentials must be given)
• Each bundle will only support 6 sockets. This means that even if you purchase multiple bundles, each Veeam product will only work on 6 sockets, you’ll need to install other instances with the other license(s) to manage the other VMware vSphere Essentials vCenters.
• Each bundle is 6 sockets, no less (sorry folks, you can’t get it cheaper for only 4 sockets)

What does all this mean? For just under US $3,000 (hardware not included) you get 6 sockets of VMware vSphere, 6 sockets of Veeam Backup & Replication, 6 sockets of Veeam Monitor and 6 sockets of Veeam Reporter. That’s 3 servers with up to 8 cores (2×4) and 256GB RAM each running VMware ESX(i). Couple that with a free iSCSI solution such as Starwind and now you’re talking 2 TB of shared data for free (hardware and Windows licensing not included).

I did not include Support and Subscription (SnS) above because for VMware vSphere Essentials it’s optional (it’s not optional on VMware vSphere Essentials Plus). Veeam’s Essentials bundle includes 1 year of support and upgrades in the list price.

Now, let’s discuss a few things about the Free Version of ESXi. We’ve gotten a number of questions on this since we released the “news” and the Essentials bundle on the same day. Below is a simple table explaining what is and isn’t supported:

Table of compatibility:

+ = supported/usable
-  = not supported

Now please note that Veeam will not be supporting ESXi Free 4.0 at all. If you’re a current customer using Veeam Backup & Replication for ESXi Free 3.x, please contact your Veeam ProPartner or sales person for vSphere options.

While I don’t endorse or condone any of the following, I thought I would be doing an injustice if I did not include links to the community’s reaction to our announcement regarding dropping ESXi Free support. The list below is just some of the reaction, be sure to read the comments in each as well.

Rick Vanover at Virtualization Review

Rich Brambley at VMETC

Eric Scholten at VMGURU.NL

Gabes Virtual World

Search Server Virtualization’s Alex Barrett

Rich Brambley at VMETC again after Alex Barrett’s post

Search Server Virtualization’s Eric Siebert

Edward L Haletky’s The “soon to be launched” Virtualization Practice

The comments to my post on the original announcement

Update: June 12, 2009 - New Links

Bridget Bothelo over at Virtualization Pro

Discussion over at ars technica (I noticed this in my referral stats)

Update: June 15, 2009 - New Links

Search Server Virtualization’s weekly Podcast: VMware cuts free ESXi hypervisor support, fuels battle vs. Hyper-V

Update: June 26, 2009 - New Link

Mike Stokes over at eGroup

Update: July 3, 2009 - New Link

Tom Howarth over at PlanetVM

Mike Laverick from RTFM

Figured I would blog this…These are not my words, I just copied from Veeam’s official release. Let me know in the comments what you think…

As a longtime Premier Technology Alliance Partner and supporter of VMware’s product strategy, Veeam Software takes great pride in creating innovative software products that enhance the customer value of VMware ESX, ESXi, and ESXi Free.  One such example is support for the free edition of VMware ESXi in Veeam Backup and Replication.

Recently, VMware requested that Veeam Software discontinue support for ESXi Free in Veeam Backup and Replication in order to comply with VMware’s updated licensing policy.  In light of VMware’s request, and our close technical partnership, Veeam Backup and Replication will no longer support ESXi Free. We will still continue to offer support for ESXi Free to existing Veeam customers who purchased Backup & Replication prior to version 3.1.

For small or branch office environments, Veeam advises its new customers to buy VMware vSphere Essentials and the Veeam Essentials bundle (announced today).  This combination costs exactly the same amount of money as purchasing 6 sockets of Veeam Backup at regular list price for use with free ESXi, but it is actually better, because with Veeam Essentials at its special discounted price, customers also get Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter.

For some reason this Dilbert really makes me laugh. Matt Carpenter, resident Veeam Systems Engineer has a Dilbert desk calendar and he showed it to me so I thought I would share it here.

I took a little time today to create a sample video for Veeam’s “Win a trip to VMworld San Francisco” video contest. I really hope that our actual entries are much more exciting that this.

Veeam has just announced that we are giving away a free trip (airfare, hotel, pass) to VMword 2009 in San Francisco. I’m really looking forward to the videos that people submit. For contest details, check here.

You may have noticed that Veeam announced a new program today. Essentially Veeam will allow anyone to upgrade their current VMware backup product to Veeam backup for 50% off the list price.

In these difficult economic times it’s good to see that we’re offering a break to people who want to move up to the #1 Backup for VMware!