Studying for the VCP has helped remind me that I can’t get down in the weeds of every technology. One of my advantages is that I have a very broad range of knowledge across technology. I sometimes lament the time when I could be an expert in a single area but, I believe long term as IT continues to get pushed to the Cloud and external providers, enterprises will gain more value from extremely well rounded technical leaders.
I’m enjoying “geeking out” on VMware but I just don’t have the bandwidth to do deep learning needed to be an expert in a technology that’s just one part of my portfolio of knowledge. I believe the certification itself has value but if you want to move up the management ranks within a traditional enterprise then it may not be worth your valuable time to achieve a certification centered around a deep understanding of a single vendor’s technology. It is however, a great way to understand the basics of virtualization.
Virtualized Geek 
Even if Malcolm Gladwell was misquoted, the quote had atleast a kernel of thruth 😉
you have to have 10000 hours in a subject to be an expert
And as I mentioned on Twitter today, maybe people are finally starting to realize that virtualization of servers/machines should not be the goal, but application efficiency.
It seems to be that the last few years Google is the one that needs to show these things for people to finally understand scale.
Containers (like Solaris zones, Linux lxc/cgroups) are the efficiency kings, always have been:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/google-borg-twitter-mesos/all/
http://incubator.apache.org/mesos/
Why am I mentioning it here ? because maybe the complexity could be reduced by not using virtualization. 🙂
Amen