You’ll be glad to hear that I’m in the process of collating information for a new vSphere 5 Reference Card. I’ll release sections for everyone to peruse as soon as they’re ready as I’ll be eager for feedback before I roll them into the first full release. I like the Mantra of “release early, release often”. Be sure to follow me on Twitter (@forbesguthrie) to be the first to hear of any new sections.
As part of that effort, I’ve been trawling through the new vSphere 5 documentation. I’ve collated my condensed notes into a free download. I think for anyone who is familiar with vSphere 4, then it should bring you up to speed fairly quickly. The VMware documentation is about 1700 pages, but fortunately these notes are packed down into about 50 pages.
For example:
Dynamic port binding is deprecated in ESXi 5.0.
It is considered a Best Practice to use the Select the Percentage of Cluster Resources Reserved admission control policy.
The iSCSI initiator is enabled by Default in vSphere 5.
They’re all excerpts take directly from the official VMware PDFs. This makes it great to study from, as the VCP questions are often taken straight from their documentation. I occasionally added a few words to help clarify the context of the sentence, but the vast majority of the content is word-for-word. Being direct quotes makes it easy for you to search within the PDF if you are unsure on an area or need greater clarification surround a statement.
Living in this topsy-turvy North America land as I do these days, I’ve created it in Letter size. Let me know if you have any issues print it out in A4 and I’ll take a look at fixing it or republishing an A4 formatted version.
I hope they’re useful to you as well: vSphere 5 Documentation Notes.
Excellent resource! I used these notes to review for the VCP5 exam and just passed it today. I credit this document for a lot of my prep. Thank you so much for putting it together. It takes a lot of the hassle out of reviewing all the VMware documentation by having it condensed like you’ve done it.
Great news Michael, congratulations! I’m glad it helped.
wow you read 1700 pages :O
Forbes, thanks again for this awesome work. i didn’t finished yet but i noticed something wrong (obviously not your fault). On page 20, MAC addresses do not actually have to begin with the OUI 00:50:56 in ESXi 5.0 http://vm.lc/2e
Thanks a lot!
here are my 2 cents:
there was an error in VMware TCP and UDP Port list (KB 1012382):
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1012382
Update history says :
09/28/2011 – Edited for port 903 which was showing as port 902 earlier. Switched the source as vSphere Client and target as ESXi 5.
So “Ports Required for Communication Between Components” on Page 4 of these notes (Line 6 from the top) has to be corrected as well.