As he said, there are benefits. If you want to go self taught, pretty much all of the cbt's out there are pretty decent. You can also install ESX into workstation and put it all on a single computer, so you essentially (if your hardware is decent enough) can create an ESX farm, including storage and use the demo ESX software to do everything you need to do in a production environment. Install workstation, into that install 2 esx servers, one nfs server, and put virtual center on your workstation, and you're ready to prep for anything. That's the cheap way out, classes are expensive, and don't try to be cheap there...If you're going to do the class, do the vmware class, that way you can get certified(to be certified, you are required to have the class from vmware).

W.