New vSphere 5 training courses

July 12th saw the announcement of vSphere 5, and the Education Services team at VMware have been busy for some time developing the new vSphere curriculum. In this blog post, I'm going to share with you as much as VMware will allow me to about the new official training options for vSphere, coming later in 2011. The exact names of some of these courses are subject to change, and I'm not able to divulge the target release date of all the courses.

For those of you that have vSphere 4 skills and knowledge to VCP4-level, VMware will be launching a vSphere 5: What's New course. This course will focus purely on new features in vSphere 5, enhancements to features inherited from vSphere 4, and the upgrade process. This course will benefit those wishing to update their VCP certification from VCP4 to VCP5, in fact it will become compulsory for VCP4 holders to attend this or another vSphere 5 course after February 29th 2012.

If you don't have VCP4-level skills and knowledge, there is still a foundation-level vSphere 5: Install Configure Manage (ICM) course, it will remain as a 5-day course, be closely aligned with the up-and-coming VCP5 certification, and content-wise little changes from the vSphere 4 version of the course. There is some re-ordering of content, some new content, and some content has been "moved up" to the higher-level courses. Some of the new vSphere 5 features will be included such as the vCenter Server Appliance, the ESXi firewall, the vSphere Web Client, and the rest of the content is all being updated for vSphere 5 as you would expect.

Following on from ICM will be two new courses, ICM2 and ICM3 - they are designed to offer an intermediate and advanced-level of vSphere training, and are aligned with the VCAP5-DCA certification. ICM2 will cover advanced configuration of vSphere networking and storage, and performance management. ICM3 will cover troubleshooting and command-line administration using the vSphere Management Assistant.

VMware will also be releasing updated versions of the Automation with PowerCLI, Manage and Design for Security, and Design Workshop courses.

As mentioned in other posts on this blog, there will also be new courses available on vCloud Director 1.5 (Deploy and Manage, and Architecting the VMware Cloud), and on Site Recovery Manager 5 (Install Configure and Manage).

Global Knowledge will be offering a full schedule for all new VMware courses in the UK and beyond as soon as each course becomes available, we will update our site as soon as we can: http://www.globalknowledge.co.uk/vmware