Top Virtualization Certs for IT Pros

In today’s on-again, off-again IT job market, virtualization has been a completely go-go technology and employment niche ever since it started to take off.

Even in the wake of the downturn of 2008, and the slow upturn ever since, IT job opportunities related to virtualization have remained an unadulterated “hot spot” in the employment marketplace. As we looked at recent top IT jobs, top IT pay, and top IT certification surveys for the last 5 years, in fact, we saw at least one virtualization entry in every single one of them. That makes it pretty much unanimous that virtualization is a good set of skills and knowledge for any IT professional who works with systems, networks or IT infrastructure or architecture to pursue and possess.

But the virtualization space in IT is a little bit different from other topic areas when it comes to certification. Where many subjects—for example, storage, networking, and IT security—have vendor-neutral certification programs as well as vendor-specific ones for IT professionals to pursue, virtualization currently boasts only one vendor-neutral credential—namely the Virtualization Essentials Professional (VEP) credential. It’s from the Cloud Computing Council, the same organization that teamed up with CompTIA to create the Cloud Essentials certification. It doesn’t yet register on too many radars, so we won’t discuss it further in this article, except to mention that it’s a great place for those with no knowledge of or experience with virtualization to start learning about this increasingly important and widely-used IT technology.

Virtualization is a technology space where the platform rules. This explains why the top 5 certifications all come from vendors who offer their own specific virtualization platforms and tools. These leading companies include VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. Though there are other virtualization players in this niche, they do not really compete with these big and well-established companies (we’ll mention others briefly, and provide links, in the conclusion to this article). Now, let’s step through the Top 5, which we present in order of their perceived market dominance and market share.

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

Mary Kyle is a full-time freelance writer, editor, and project manager based in Austin, TX. A former IBMer, Mary has over 10 years of project management experience in IT, software development and IT-related legal issues.

Check out Ed's Tom's IT Pro  Making It in IT - Certification & Training blog here. See here for all of Ed's Tom's IT Pro articles.