There's a lot of training on VMware Infrastructure out there; both VMware and third parties offer both instructor-led and self-paced training.

The key benefits of self-paced training are that it's easy to consume in small chunks, wherever you happen to be at any given moment; and that its price up-front is smaller. The key benefits of instructor-led training are that you get to play with hardware you can't get fired for breaking; you get to network with others who are doing similar jobs at other companies; and you get to pose questions to a human expert in real time.

Different people learn best in different environments, so there's no one kind of training that works best for everybody.

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.