This is pretty significant... starting March 1, 2011 an ending June 30, 2011, pass any virtualization exam and you will receive a complimentary TechNet Subscription.
First 1,000 subscribers only. Registration is required.
It seen that the trend is Datacenter is deploying their hypervisor from more than one vendor so I am thinking what kind of knowledge Microsoft's virtualization certification is required.
For VCP there it is the exam blueprint to outline the necessary skill/knowledge.
I kind of cringe when I see Microsoft put out statements that they're going to leapfrog the competition. In some ways, they may do things differently but I doubt that Hyper-V 3.0 will be VMware's death knell. That said, I do fully expect Hyper-V 3.0 to be a "good enough" solution for many, many organizations that may not need everything offered by VMware. In that respect, I do see Hyper-V 3.o challenging VMware.
I wish I could take the credit for the books you mentioned, but I've not written vSphere books... there is another Scott Lowe out there that also writes about virtualization. I've written Exchange 2007, SBS 2008 and Home Networking books, but no vSphere books.
The two of us get confused for the other all the time!