TheSaffaGeek

My ramblings about all things technical

Category Archives: VCAP


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VCAP5-DCA Objective 1.3

Not many differences in this one. For me it was all about refreshing my understanding of the PSA,MPP’s,PSP’s and SATP’s and in what circumstances would I use what command.

Knowledge

  • Explain the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) layout

Skills and Abilities

  • Install and Configure PSA plug-ins

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-storage-guide.pdf pg164

  • Understand different multipathing policy functionalities

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011340 A really great VMware kb on it all

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/03/19/pluggable-storage-architecture-exploring-the-next-version-of-esxvcenter/ -Really great for getting your head around what to use when, just remember the esxcli commands have changed for vSphere 5

http://www.trainsignal.com/VMware-vSphere-Troubleshooting-Training.aspx vSphere Storage Troubleshooting – Terms, Concepts, & Logs

  • Perform command line configuration of multipathing options

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc_50%2FGUID-DD2FFAA7-796E-414C-84CE-1FCC14474D5B.html

  • Change a multipath policy

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc_50/GUID-C1358DCD-E4F2-49A5-842D-EDADA1784E9A.html

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1017760 <-i really like this one as gives a good overview of the “change” of commands from 4 to 5

  • Configure Software iSCSI port binding

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvD7MDlfh9U this gives a good overview of the steps necessary

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-multipathing-configuration-software-iSCSI-port-binding.pdf A VMware technical white paper showing every single step necessary. I read this one twice as this covers it perfectly and seeing as it is a new feature of vSphere 5 to have the new UI interface to support multipathing configuration for the software iSCSI adapter using port binding i think it’s a technique to know for the exam.

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A fairly straight forward objective once i got my head around all the components again.

Gregg


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VCAP5-DCA Objective 1.2

Objective 1.2 is almost exactly the same as the VCAP4 blueprint’s and a large portion of the things in here are covered better in the troubleshooting sections in my opinion but for the few things that are different that I made sure I covered, I have listed below. As with Objective 1.1,the below links are ones I’ve been using in my preparations for the beta exam, for some of the sections I’ve not put any links in as Sean Cookston’s,Ed Grigson’s and Kendrick Coleman’s Blueprint Breaksdowns for the VCAP4 covered them perfectly.

Knowledge

  • Identify storage provisioning methods
  • Identify available storage monitoring tools, metrics and alarms

Skills and Abilities

  • Apply space utilization data to manage storage resources
  • Provision and manage storage resources according to Virtual Machine requirements
  • Understand interactions between virtual storage provisioning and physical storage provisioning

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.0.pdf pg 11,30

  • Apply VMware storage best practices

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.0.pdf pg 30

  • Configure Datastore Alarms

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-12145

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/how-to-make-vcenter-datastore-alarms-useful/

  • Analyze Datastore Alarms and errors to determine space availability
  • Configure Datastore Clusters

Storage DRS lesson from VMware vSphere 5 Training course from Trainsignal

A nice and quick section thankfully, some of the links I used are still related to vSphere 4 but are nice refresher reads Smile

Gregg


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VCAP5-DCA Objective 1.1

Seeing as the VCAP5-DCA blueprint is 60-70% the same as the VCAP4, a large portion of the objectives are the same but objective 1.1 has a fair amount of differences due to VMFS 5 coming out, the standardisation of the esxcli command and a number of new features like Profile Based Storage. I think you can never know too much about storage and this one is one I’ve spent a bit more time on due to the new features and methods. Also i need to break old habits of using esxcfg. The below links are ones I’ve been using in my preparations for the beta exam, for some of the sections I’ve not put any links in as Sean Cookston’s,Ed Grigson’s and Kendrick Coleman’s Blueprint Breaksdowns for the VCAP4 covered them perfectly. This is more about covering the new things i need to learn after having done the VCAP4-DCA exam (twice to be exact)

Objective 1.1 – Implement and Manage Complex Storage Solutions

Knowledge

· Identify RAID levels

· Identify supported HBA types

· Identify virtual disk format types

Skills and Abilities

  • Determine use cases for and configure VMware DirectPath I/O
  • Determine requirements for and configure NPIV
  • Determine appropriate RAID level for various Virtual Machine workloads
  • Apply VMware storage best practices

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.0.pdf pg 30

  • Understand use cases for Raw Device Mapping
  • Configure vCenter Server storage filters

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-storage-guide.pdf pg126

  • Understand and apply VMFS resignaturing

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-storage-guide.pdf pg122-123

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1011387 Now using the esxcli command for ESXi 5

  • Understand and apply LUN masking using PSA-related commands

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1009449 <- look carefully at this one as I think there is a nice hint in it by the name of something

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1017760

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.vcli.examples.doc_50/cli_advanced_storage.8.2.html

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-storage-guide.pdf pg 166-168

http://www.punchingclouds.com/?p=965

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.vcli.ref.doc_50/esxcli_storage.html

  • Analyze I/O workloads to determine storage performance requirements

Understanding vSphere Storage Management from Trainsignals VMware vSphere Performance Monitoring Training

  • Identify and tag SSD devices

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-storage-guide.pdf Pg 143 and 144 and 147

  • Administer hardware acceleration for VAAI

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-4-esxi-installable-vcenter/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.vsphere.esxi_server_config.doc_41/esx_server_config/managing_storage/c_hardware_acceleration.html

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976

http://www.shogan.co.uk/?p=995 From my Xtravirt Colleague Sean Duffy

  • Configure and administer profile-based storage

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-50-storage-guide.pdf pg195

Policy Driven Storage lesson from VMware vSphere 5 Training course from Trainsignal

  • Prepare storage for maintenance (mounting/un-mounting)

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004605 -Covers via vsphere client, command line and automated via PowerCLI

http://blog.mwpreston.net/vcp-5/vcp-5-objective-3-3-create-and-configure-vmfs-and-nfs-datastores/

  • Upgrade VMware storage infrastructure

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2003813

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMFS-5_Upgrade_Considerations.pdf

http://blog.mwpreston.net/vcp-5/vcp-5-objective-3-3-create-and-configure-vmfs-and-nfs-datastores/

Now to go and practice all the above things in your lab and make sure you know how to do all of them.

Gregg


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VCAP4-DCA Exam Experience

 

I decided to wait until I got my results before I wrote up this blog posting as I felt writing it up straight afterwards would mean I might miss something out and to see if VMware would give me credit for doing things in another way even though I made a mistake. Firstly, unfortunately I failed the exam by 23 points. This was mainly down to my making a major mistake very early in the exam and VMware not giving me the ability to fix it even though I knew how and the ability to know how to fix it is one of the exam objectives. I agree that if I make a mistake it’s only right that now I should use up my exam time fixing my mistake but not giving me the ability to fix it when in a real world situation you would have this ability isn’t very fair in my opinion.

Study Resources:

But enough of that as it’s done and seeing as I made that mistake so early on and still got so close is pretty pleasing in my opinion. For my studying of the exam, I decided I wanted to cover everything and so set myself a month and a half to study for the exam. I covered everything in my VCAP-DCA study notes list and went through both Sean Crookston and Ed Grigson’s study guides. I did all four of the VCAP courses trainsignal videos (these were honestly the best for it and taught me things so in depth that even questions in the exam that was very unusual I knew them because of these videos). I also researched anything I didn’t understand and as linked to in both Sean and Ed’s study guides I read up on loads of blogs, watched loads of YouTube videos from people like Eric Sloof (you can find these by just searching for Eric on YouTube as he has loads of them up) and watched a whole load of VMworld videos. Using all of these resources prepared me amazingly; the only thing I didn’t do enough of which was mainly to blame for me making my major mistake was not enough lab hours. I’ve got so used to question and answer exams that even though I obviously knew the exam would be 100% lab based I never realised the real importance of my practicing all the tasks twenty times until I knew it without even thinking as trust me the pdf’s give you nothing apart from the real basics and if you don’t know those you won’t pass the exam anyhow.

The Exam:

The exam was hard and is probably the hardest IT exam I have ever done (previously this title was held by my MCSE 2003 upgrade exams) but I think it is only right it is as tough as it is as it really does separate the men from the boys and really shows if you know your stuff or not. As mentioned by every one, time is extremely tight and you won’t finish all the questions unless you skip certain ones. One bit of advice I was given which was really helpful was, if you don’t know how to do the question mark it down on your notes and carry on as rather do the ones you can do rather than waste time on ones you are unsure of as I knew how to do some of the last questions just before time ran out whereas if I had sat and tried to work my through ones I didn’t know I probably wouldn’t have even had the time to see and do the ones I could.

Summary:

If you do all the study resources I’ve listed in my study resources page and put in loads of hours deploying and playing around with every single thing on the blueprint in your lab then you’ll pass it. I’ve already started rebuilding my lab to get in a serious number more hours of practice for my re-sitting of the exam and making sure that the stuff I was unsure of in the exam I now know 150%. Good luck for anyone writing

Gregg


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Trainsignal VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Training videos review

 

As I’ve mentioned in my VCAP4-DCA&DCD Resources Page one of the main resources I’m using is David M Davis’ VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package set of videos. The first of the videos of this set I’ve gone through in my study preparations for the VCAP-DCA exam is his VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Training set of videos.

I was very fortunate to gain access to these videos and I’ve honestly learnt so so much from them as David’s videos not only cover objective 6 of the VCAP-DCA blueprint but due to the nature of troubleshooting your VMware infrastructure meaning you will need to all parts of it David has given great lessons and tips covering everything from storage basics, to VLANs to utilising third party tools to try troubleshoot problems. A perfect example of this overlap is David’s Lesson 20 where he goes into great detail all about VMware storage terms,concepts and logs where he gives a brilliant refresher/lesson all about the PSA architecture to name but one part of it which perfectly links in the VCAP-DCA Objective 1.3 – Configure and Manage Complex Multipathing and PSA Plug-ins.

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The lessons have been really great and for most of them David gives some in-depth demo’s of the steps necessary to troubleshoot the problems and what each feature of that troubleshooting entails. This is especially helpful if maybe you don’t have access to your own lab environment where you can try some of the things you need to do to fully understand how it works.

David also gives some great links and resources at the end of each lesson for you to do further reading and links to where he found all the resources he mentions and covers. These have proved extremely helpful as if I’m unsure of something or as is my nature that I want to read it all just to make sure I don’t miss something then i can use his links to quickly gain this knowledge without having to scour the web.

So if you’re studying for the VCAP4-DCA you have to get this course and if possible try get yourself the whole set but as mentioned by numerous VMware trainers, the troubleshooting course is supposedly the most beneficial to the VCAP-DCA exam and David covers it all amazingly. Also even if you aren’t looking to write the VCAP exam the tips and tricks David mentions are unbelievably beneficial to you when you will need to troubleshooting possible problems in your VMware environment.

If you don’t know who David is here a bit of a background:

David Davis -  (VCP4, VCAP-DCA, vExpert, CCIE #9369)

David has been in the IT industry for over 18+ years. He has served as a server/network admin, IT manager, and independent contractor. Today, David is a full-time instructor for TrainSignal.com where he has created over 10 different IT training courses.

Gregg

*Disclaimer: Trainsignal never paid me to write up this review nor did David. I wanted to write up this review due to the high quality of David’s training video’s  and how much it has helped me in my studies and in my daily work administering multiple VMware environments”


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VCAP5-DCA & DCD Resources Page

A very quick posting to alert people that I have now started building up a VCAP5-DCA and DCD Resources page for the impending release of the VCAP5 certifications. At the moment it is fairly short due to the exams not even having reached beta but I’ve got to start somewhere and for those of us out there who will be hoping to be invited to the beta exams these resources will probably be our best preparation Smile 

As said on the page ,if you know of any other resources out there please do leave a comment or drop me a tweet on twitter on @greggrobertson5 as this is really all about helping everyone find the best resources for the exams.

Gregg


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All Things Virtual 24

 

Just a very quick All Things Virtual as I haven’t been able to read as many blogs as I had wanted due to work commitments and the studying for my VCAP-DCA taking up a large portion of my time.

 

First is the delay to the vExpert results. The results were said to be released on the 6th of May yet were delayed by two weeks and then last week the guys from the vSoup podcasts spoke to John Troyer at the Boston Gestalt IT Tech Field Day and he explained that due to a number of the VMware employees who were selected to give their opinions on the candidates still not having replied it has been delayed for another two weeks (John said two weeks last week Friday but I have a feeling it will need another week above that). It is a shame this has been delayed so much and is a let down for the people who give so much of their spare time to the VMware community, for VMware to then take an extra month and a half to give the results of the vExpert nominations. John did however promise they would be out before VMworld Smile

Talking of VMworld the Session catalogues for VMworld US and VMworld Europe have been posted. There’s a number of very exciting sessions happening and it’s great to personally see so many people I know form the London VMUG and via twitter whose sessions have made it after the public voting. If you’ve never heard of VMworld or have never been before I blogged about each of the days happenings when i went to my first one last year if you’re interested in getting any idea of what an average day at the conference is like All Things VMworld Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.

The next London VMware User Group has been announced for the 14th of July. Unfortunately I will be away on holiday over this time but as I’ve stated many times in a number of blog postings on this blog the VMUG’s are an awesome day out and the amount you learn from the sessions and from fellow attendees is well worth your time. I was able to attend the last one on the 12th of May and wrote up a blog posting about the day if you want to get an idea of what happens during the day. If you are likely to be around the London area on the 14th of July I would highly recommend registering on the VMUG site and attending.

I’ve been trying to fill my slightly ADHD mind with all things VMware in preparation for my sitting of the VCAP-DCA exam and as mentioned in my VCAP-DCA and DCD Resources Page I’m a massive admirer of David Davis’s Trainsignal videos as they allow me to spend as long or short on each topic as I want and allow me to watch them via my iPad or laptop whenever i have a chance. David has recently released his VMware vSphere Performance Monitoring Training. I’ve only briskly looked at the video’s in the set as I’m trying to complete his VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Training set of videos first before starting the new ones but the videos look as amazing as ever and as sad as it is I’m actually excited to watch them. If you haven’t used David’s videos before I would HIGHLY recommend them especially if you are looking to do your VCP4 or your VCAP-DCA

Gregg


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VCAP-DCA&DCD Resources Page Updated

 

Just a quick posting to alert people that I have just updated my VCAP-DCA & DCD Study Resources page with new resources and great tips.The page is a list of resources that I have been constantly updating as I  have come across new resources and I have made my way through the  required amount of studying to be prepared (which is now in full swing).So either click the “VCAP-DCA & DCD” link at the top of the page or click here if you can’t be bothered going to the top of the page and if you know of any other great resources please do comment so that I can add them and it can benefit the whole community.

Gregg


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VCAP-DCA & DCD Resources Page Updated

Just a very quick posting to alert people that I have now updated my VCAP-DCA and DCD resources page. The page is a list of resources that I have been constantly updating as I  have come across new resources and I have made my way through the  required amount of studying to be prepared (which is still on-going).So either click the “VCAP-DCA & DCD” link at the top of the page or click here if you can’t be bothered going to the top of the page and if you know of any other great resources please do comment so that I can add them and it can benefit the whole community.

Also a reminder that Kendrick Coleman is doing a VCAP-DCA Live Lab on Cody Bunch’s Brownbag tonight so go to his site and register as it’s sure to be a brilliant one

Gregg


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VMware vSphere: Manage for Performance Course Experience

Last week I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the VMware vSphere: Manage For Performance course. I did the lab related to this course at VMworld Europe last year and in my now increasing preparations for the VCAP-DCA exam I knew I needed to strengthen my troubleshooting skills and more importantly fine tuning my ESXTOP/RESXTOP skills. Quite a few people commented that they really liked my VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course Experience posting so I thought i would try do the same for this one for anyone interested or thinking about booking the course.

  1. Day one covered the first three and a half modules Course Introduction, Performance in a Virtualized Environment, Virtual Machine Monitor and part of CPU Performance. It introduced you to all the monitoring tools you can use with an introduction to the performance graphs in Virtual Centre and ESXTOP,how to utilise these tools to work out possible problems and what to look for that may be good indicators of problems. Probably the thing I enjoyed the most about this course was that there was loads of labs for you to learn how to do it all yourself rather than learning it off a PowerPoint sheet or your course guide. If you are a regular reader of this blog then you’ll know I’ve been trying to perfect my knowledge of ESXTOP/RESXTOP and wrote a blog about it too “Understanding and using ESXTOP/RESXTOP”. This learning of it was a great stepping stone for the skills they covered in the course and for a few parts the links and resources in my blog gave me an even deeper knowledge of ESXTOP. For the virtual machine monitor module it covered Software and hardware virtualisation techniques which i knew fairly well from my studying for my VCP exams and the labs for it were really great in covering how the usage of these varying techniques can really help with the performance of your virtual machines/environment. Next we got into a bit of the CPU Performance module which introduced the CPU scheduler, CPU Cache contention and the NUMA. As with the hardware/software virtualisation techniques i had a good bit of knowledge about the CPU scheduler and NUMA from my VCP studies but it was a great refresher on the NUMA particularly and allowed me to better understand how it works and how the misallocation of resources can impact your virtual machines due to NUMA. Frank Denneman has done two brilliant postings all about the sizing of VM’s and NUMA Nodes and ESX 4.1 NUMA Scheduling which covers pretty much everything you need to know about this feature and how to use it correctly in your environment.
  2. Day 2 we finished off CPU Performance by learning how to use ESXTOP and the performance metrics in vCentre to find and recognise possible cpu problems and how to fix them. Next we covered Memory Performance which was fairly straight forward in my opinion but did give great recommendations on how to utilise your memory effectively and how ballooning and memory swapping works and what the increase of these values means to the performance of your environment. Yet again Frank Denneman has covered these topics brilliantly in two blog postings Memory reclamation, when and how? and Disable ballooning? which I’ll personally be rereading through myself so as to better my understanding of how it can help/impact my virtual machines. Next we did the Network Performance module which covered all the varying network card options you can select,what each allows you to do,what additional features each one gives and how these features work. This was also a refresher for me due to my VCP studies but it did seem to alert a lot of the people on the course with me to the benefits of upgrading all your virtual machines to hardware version 7 and changing their network cards to VMXNET3. VMware have a great KB article on this Choosing a network adapter for your virtual machine. For the rest of the module it was yet again teaching you how to find and troubleshoot possible network problems using the performance charts and ESXTOP.
  3. Day 3 finished off the last three modules Storage Performance,Virtual Machine Performance and Application Performance. Storage performance was good and was very interesting to hear how many people don’t use thin provisioning due to their belief that it impacts performance in certain ways. I’m not going to get into it on here and I agree it does in certain instances but like I said to the people on the course with me I would recommend reading  the VMware white paper on it first and make your own decisions from there. There are also loads of top blog postings on the subject so I would also recommend reading a few of those (Duncan Epping’s and Eric Gray’s in particular). For the last two modules of Virtual Machine Performance and Application performance these were essentially just applying what you learn for cpu,memory and network to your virtual machines and what to consider for the virtualising of differing applications.

Funnily enough whilst on the course the latest release of the vSphere performance troubleshooting guide for 4.1 came out which is perfect post course reading material for me. Duncan Epping’s posting alerted me to the release so only right to point to his posting here.

Well that’s a high level review of what I learnt/was covered in the course. As with any course though what you get out of the course is very dependant on your knowledge of the product/s and even though I have a fairly good amount of knowledge on the product and features I did still learn a fair amount and it was a really great refresher on certain features in preparation for my VCAP: DCA exam sitting.

Gregg