VMware vSphere Central

~ Colin Westwater

This has been cross posted from my own blog vGemba.net. Go check it out.

Introduction

VMware have a website resource available called vSphere Central that collates some excellent documentation and resources on various aspects of vSphere. In this post I will run through what is available.

Overview of vSphere Central

vSphere Central is a collection of documentation, walkthroughs, mind maps, ebooks, videos, etc. which cover various aspects of vSphere. At a high level the following main categories are covered:

  • vSphere 7
  • vSphere Upgrade
  • vCenter Server
  • ESXi Host and Virtual Machine
  • Security & Compliance
  • Resource Management and Availability
  • Developer and Automation Interface
  • Hardware Acceleration

Under each of these main categories are further sub topics. I have created a mind map of these:

vSphere Central Mind Map

Click image to view larger size.

Under each section there is lots more detail and sub sections. For instance we can look at vSphere Upgrade and that is broken down into eight ‘playlists’ as seen in the mind map above. A screenshot of the actual page is shown here:

vSphere Upgrade

You can see in the playlists there are Release notes, ebooks, blog post, walkthroughs, and documentation. What is a nice feature of every page is the ability to export the content to PDF. You can export the whole category:

vSphere Upgrade Export

You can also export individual playlists too by clicking the highlighted button:

vSphere Upgrade Export

How does the export handle video content? The PDF has clickable links to the video hosted on YouTube. The PDFs generated are well formatted (thank you!) and have clear screenshots in them.

The actual content is of high quality and well curated. It is nice to have varied content collated in the one place to keep you interested. It’s very easy to be bored by PowerPoint.

Navigating the UI is straightforward with clear navigation between the categories and playlists. At the bottom left hand of each page there is a handy Share This Page link to various platforms and to copy the URL:

vSphere Central Share

One thing to note is some of the content is outdated. For instance in the section PowerCLI installation Walkthrough the content is for PowerCLI 6.5, and currently PowerCLI is at version 12. I have not gone through all of vSphere Central (yet!) but please verify everything you read is currently relevant.

Wrap Up

vSphere Central is a great resource that I think flies under the radar a bit. I feel like I keep up to date on VMware content, but looking back it was actually released in August 2017 and I only recently heard about it.

I hope this post helps advertise this valuable resource. Please go and have a look today and bookmark the site to keep tabs on it.