Virtualization Certs to Advance a Budding IT career: VMware or Nimbula?

A recent college grad with three years of work experience ponders whether to pursue a promising but unknown training and certification program from Nimbula, or the well-known and much-in-demand VMware credentials.

His long term goal is to wangle an H1-B visa to permit him to move from South Africa to the US to work in high-tech. Interesting question, but not at all a tough decision.

Hi Ed,

I was wondering, what will be the better option to go for, in the virtual environment sense. Is it better to be VMWare certified? Or go straight for the Nimbula certification? And which would be better to work with? In terms of longevity of product lifespan (in other words, gets replaced by something else or new). I know VMWare, but I am currently attending a webinar, concerning Nimbula, to see if it provides better features and it surprised me… but I would like your opinion regarding this.

Which virtualization product should I actually aim for? Which can provide a decent income and will be used for years.

Thanks in advance for your input,

Adnan

Dear Adnan:

Considering that I’d never heard of Nimbula before you wrote to me, and that my investigations show only a single course, and a not-very-well elaborated certification program on the company’s Education page, I’d say VMware stands head and shoulders above Nimbula in the current marketplace.

VMware not only has a strong market position (and thus, many more job opportunities for that kind of expertise), it also has a large, well-established and widely-recognized certification program. In fact, the VMware Certified Professional (VCP5) is on its third or fourth iteration, and the company also offers more advanced VCAP and VCDX credentials as well.

A quick trip to Indeed.com shows no job listings in the Austin Metro area for Nimbula, but 13 jobs for people with VCP5 certification, and 336 jobs for people with more general VMware expertise. I suspect if you look around in other major metro areas (Austin is number 14 in the USA) you’ll find the same kind of situation elsewhere, too.

My advice:

VMware first, and possibly (if you decide you need it) Nimbula a very distant second. In fact both Citrix XenDesktop or XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V related credentials would also come ahead of Nimbula, in my opinion.

Thanks for writing. I hope you find my feedback helpful.

Best wishes,

Ed

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.

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