TheSaffaGeek

My ramblings about all things technical

Tag Archives: VCAP-DCA


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All Things Virtual 19

Since my last All Things Virtual there has been a massive amount of news coming out of the virtualisation arena. One of the main sources of these were due to VMworld Europe happening from the 11th to the 14th of October. I was fortunate enough to attend and I was very pleased with the amount of views my All Things VMworld Europe Day1, Day 2 and Day 3 blog postings received.

The week prior to me attending VMworld I was able to attend a day arranged by VMware and Alan Renouf where some of the top VMware GURUs came to London and gave some exclusive presentations on VMware API’s, performance, PowerCLI and Onyx. The day was seriously in depth and really opened my eyes to the amount of data and things you can get and do with the VMware API’s and ESXTOP. Alan has posted the slide decks from each session ran on the day on his blog.The sessions are listed below with their links, these are something I am planning to get through in my preparations for the VCAP exams

Due to there being such a large amount of time between All Things Virtual 18 and All Things Virtual 19 (a month and a half) there are a few articles on my list that are a few weeks old but nevertheless still brilliant and so I kept them on here.

As I have said before I ,like a large number of other professionals in the virtualisation field am preparing and studying for the VCAP exams. For my own usage and because amazingly a few people sent me messages saying that my VCP4 Study Resources(Part 1, Part 2) proved very helpful with their preparations for their VCP4 exams and were asking if I planned to do the same for the VCAP exams. So I have created a dedicated page for all the resources I will be using in my preparations and will constantly try to update it with any new resources I find. The page has only been up for a month and a half and already over 1000 people have viewed it which is really great and hopefully it is helping people find out about great podcasts/blog postings/videos that will help them be prepared for the exams.

Duncan Epping of Yellow bricks fame posted a very small but very important posting all about Storage IO Control Best Practices. If you attended either of the VMworld conferences then I would recommend watching the session Duncan speaks of in his posting “Tech Preview: Storage DRS” and another session i watched all about SIOC “prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Virtual Environments using Storage I/O Control”. Speaking of SIOC Luc Dekens has posted a brilliant posting on how to automate SIOC.

While at VMworld Europe Mike Laverick of RTFM.com fame went around and got himself a bag full of Swag and is raffling it all off in aid of UNICEF. The competition is open to anyone worldwide so go get yourself a ticket and donate to a very worthy cause at the same time.

Eric Sloof posted all about the availability of the the Technical White paper for Application HA. My knowledge of Application HA has only started growing very recently after attending VMworld this year and actually seeing some of providers stands and exhibitions of the technologies and their capabilities. I haven’t as yet read the white paper but like so many of these great resources it is on my technical reading list. Eric has also posted a video of the installation of Symantec Application HA.

Simon Seagrave of TechHead fame posted about some great free NTP Time Sources and the NTP Pool project. I’ve already been using the same source for my NTP synchronisation for my home lab and it works a charm Smile

During VMworld Europe David Davis of Trainsignal’s VMware vSphere Video Training fame was able to do a video interview with VCDX001 Mr John Arrasjid. The video is a brilliant one for anyone looking to take on the VCDX certification as John is one of the main people involved in the VCDX and gives great insight into the certification and how it is all done.Jason Boche was also interviewed by David at VMworld US all about the VCDX certification here. These are two really great resources and have been added to my VCDX study list .

Speaking of Jason Boche he posted a brilliant posting all about  the conversion of CPU ready to %RDY in ESXTOP. I am currently learning and strengthening my knowledge on ESXTOP and how to utilise it for my daily job and Jason’s posting is a great resource for learning all about how the %RDY value is calculated. I would recommend reading through a posting I did a while back about Understanding and using ESXTOP/RESXTOP as this will give a great base knowledge before going through Jason’s posting.

Steve Jin of DoubleCloud.org Fame posted all about using vSphere APIs to Collect vCentre and ESX Logs.After having attended the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course last week I’ve gained an even keener interest in learning all about collecting logs for security reasons as well as troubleshooting reasons and Steve’s posting was right on time for my interest in learning more about it all. I would recommend everyone learns how to do this as it will be a life saver at some point for you.

Vladan Seget posted all about a whitepaper by VMware on the top ten most forgotten things when building your disaster recovery plan. The white paper is a really great resource and has some very good pointers and recommendations when you are building out your disaster recovery plan. If you have  a disaster recovery plan or are planning one then I would highly recommend reading the white paper.

The next is an unusual one but one that I experienced myself and therefore feel I should link to it here even though I have already added it to my Upgrading from ESX,VMware Update Manager and Virtual Centre 4.0 to Version 4.1 posting. VMware have put out a KB article on an error where after upgrading your Virtual Centre Server to version 4.1 the transaction log for the vCentre Server database grows excessively large. Thankfully someone posted the KB article on twitter and i noticed it and fixed the problem before it severely impacted my Virtual Centre server.

Bas Raayman posted some really nice installation tips for installing VMware vCloud Director. I am yet to install vCloud Director to my home lab and so the installation tips are now part of my build documentation to go through when i finally get round to installing it.

Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com fame posted one of the best articles of the year over a week ago now all about VMotion, the story and confessions. The post covers the initial idea and building of a VMotion(misspelling intended) prototype to a number of top bloggers confessions on how amazed they were when they first saw or heard about VMotion and how it has impacted their work life and for some their career paths.

Well that’s all the postings of the past few weeks that have gained my interest.

Gregg


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VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course Experience

Monday,Tuesday and Wednesday this week I was fortunate enough to attend the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security course. The course is one of the recommended courses for the VCAP: DCA exam so I was looking forward to learning quite a few things and get some of the questions I had built up while doing my preparations for the VCAP: DCA exam.

The course started a little slow on the Monday morning,as to no fault of the lecturer the first two modules were him giving best practices and recommendations and covering a lot of things I had learnt before either in my VCP courses/studies or via real world experience. The course material is very well structured and the extra explanations and examples in the study materials will be great reference documents for my VCAP preparations and for my design one day when I’m hopefully prepared to put my design up for the VCDX certification. The afternoons material was a lot more engaging and started to get into the kinds of things I was hoping the course was going to cover in teaching good design practice and fixing and preventing common problems in todays virtual environments. The day finished off with a few labs helping you visually fix common design errors and problems.

Tuesday we got into protecting the  the management environment and Protecting your ESX and ESXi hosts. These were some of the topics I was really interested in especially for learning good design practices for my current job and for my future VCDX design. The biggest take away from this section had to be learning all about how you can use vMA to retrieve and store all your individual ESX hosts log files and how to add and use SSL certificates to secure the login into the Virtual Centre server. I’ve even already started looking at implementing the vMA log retrieval and storage into my own environment I was so impressed with it. Tuesday finished off with some labs learning how to setup vMa to retrieve and store the logs and had a really great lab for someone like me that hasn’t done it before on how to request and add an SSL certificate to your Virtual Centre server.

Wednesday consisted of finishing off learning about how to protect my ESX/ESXi hosts and then covered all the ways to harden my virtual machines and learning about configuration and change management. We were lucky to have a VMware employee in the course with us who had actually written parts of the vSphere Hardening Guide and therefore could give us great tips and additional resources to help learn more about securing our VMware environments. The two things that were the most interesting from what he told us was all about a product by HyTrust which “offers IT managers and administrators of virtual infrastructure a centralized, single point of control and visibility for hypervisor configuration, compliance, and access management” It comes in a virtual appliance and there is a community edition for me to play with in my test environment Smile. Hopefully I can write up a posting on my experiences with the product for anyone interested. The next very informative tip he gave us was all about a document created by Horst Mundt a Technical Account Manager at VMware Germany on the VIOPS.VMware.com site detailing all the alarms and what they do in vCentre 4 and vCentre 4.1. The document is frighteningly thorough. The course finished covering the remaining topics and then we got to finish off our labs which were really good compared to a few courses I have been on as they really did teach you some in-depth skills and tips.

I would highly recommend the course to anyone wanting to strengthen their knowledge on securing their VMware Environment and it really is a great course if you are planning on doing your VCAP: DCA exam as there was loads and loads of pages and resources i marked down for me to study before I sit the exam.

Gregg


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All Things Virtual 18

 

There has been an unbelievable amount of news in the past week and a half since my last All Things Virtual. Also i came across one or two blogs in the past few days that were a bit older but have so much great information in them I’ve added them to this list also.

First is the announcement of the next London VMUG meeting. It is happening on Thursday the 28th of October with some really awesome sessions by Xsigo and Gabrie van Zanten of www.gabesvirtualworld.com/ fame. If you are near the London area I would encourage you to mail the address and book your spot and come join all the attendees for vBeers afterwards and hear how we can all talk about not just VMware stuff but all things geek 🙂

I’m very fortunate to have become a part of a very current and global company like EMC due to the company I worked for being bought by EMC. If you are like i was and always wanted to join a big international IT company at the forefront of the industry then Chad Sakacc’s posting about the more than 200 open positions at EMC,EMC partners and VCE will be of interest to you. There are some amazing roles open especially in my opinion the latest vSpecialist roles to be filled as the vSpecialists are definitely one of the “elite” teams of Virtualisation professionals which I hope one day soon I can become a part of.

Chris Dearden has done an in depth blog posting all about Kaviza VDI in a box V3. If you haven’t heard about Kaviza they won the best of VMworld 2010 Desktop Virtualisation award and has been rated very highly by a lot of top people in the virtualisation industry. Chris has done a great posting all about the features and also just posted about the latest release of it version 3.1.

If you didn’t read my last All Things Virtual then you wouldn’t know that the registration for the VCAP-DCA exams were due to be opened on September the 13th as mentioned by Scott Vessey on his blog. You can register here for the exam. A few of the guys I follow on twitter have already registered. I’m personally waiting quite a while until i feel confident enough in my knowledge and having got through and confidently ticket off all the things on the VCAP blueprint with links as created by by Kendrick Coleman. Eric Sloof posted all about test questions for the VCAP-DCA exam on his site, which will be a nice way of doing some practice before the exam even though a large part of the exam is doing labs. Cody Bunch has started registrations for the VCAP-DCA brown bags consisting of 18 sessions run on a bi-weekly basis starting next week Wednesday (30th of September). I have been through quite few of Cody’s VCP and VCDX brown bags (recorded due to the times they have been running) and they are going to be a brilliant resource in my preparations for the exam.

David M Davis of the Trainsignal vsphere training materials fame has done a very interesting video all about VMware ESXi 4.1 Lockdown and New Total Lockdown Mode. this video is great for someone like me who is having to build and strengthen their knowledge all about ESXi seeing as I’m an ESX only user so far and with the next release not having ESX included.Eric Siebert has posted a great posting all about Upgrading hosts from ESX to ESXi in seven steps. This is brilliant for the exact same reasons of learning ESXi die to ESX being discontinued.

Eric along with David M Davis and  Simon Seagrave have also covered his blog posting along with HP microserver and cool vSphere iPad apps on their latest vchat episode. If you haven’t watched any of theses vChat’s before I would highly recommend them as the guys cover all the latest and greatest things coming out and a personal bit of enjoyment is seeing how remarkably happy David is in every single vChat episode 🙂

The talk and blogging about VMware vCloud Director is still going strong since VMworld and there have been some top class blogs all about features,fixes,lab builds and hardening guides. William Lam has done a posting all about automating the installation of vCloud director and the oracle database. Duncan Epping has posted about the vCloud Director security hardening guide. From what a number of people have been saying on twitter this is a must read before using vCloud Director. I am yet to get round to it as I’m still trying to finish building my test lab of the product but as usual the guide looks like a brilliant resource.Duncan has also posted about creating a vCD lab on your Mac laptop. I’m not an Apple Mac person myself but I’m sure a substantial amount of people will find this posting very interesting.

Mark Vaughn has posted all about a challenge he has made for someone to try make a mini version of the VMware Express truck. If you haven’t heard about the VMware Express tuck then read about it here. Mark is challenging someone to create a smaller version and try put it into a Mini Club-S. I along with a large number of people judging from the talk of it on twitter would love to see this achieved so if you feel up to the challenge then check out his blog and please tell me when it being started and keep me up to date on it’s progress as this is a brilliant idea and highly interesting concept.

Frank Denneman has done another brilliant posting all about Resource pools and simultaneous vMotions. I’ve posted a few of franks previous postings on the topic and i would highly recommend reading through his latest posting on the topic as i know a large number of people and see a very large number on the VMware communities still believing setting values and limits for resource pools as well as using resource pools for organisation.

Duncan Epping has also done a posting all about the misconceptions of the amount of memory allocated to the service console and how it is actually calculated. a nice little bit of information possible for someone writing their vcp or VCAP soon as they love these arbitrary kinds of questions in the exams.

Due to vCentre 4.1 now requiring the base Os to be x64 a number of people are now needing to upgrade their vCentre to a 64bit server.Barry Coombs has blogged all about the VMware document detailing how to achieve it and some of the points of interest he feels you need to pay special attention to.Thankfully due to my vCentre needing a rebuild  a while back my vCentre is already 64bit. If you like a large number people seeing as how much traffic I get to the posting you may get an  “Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance. Active Directory Web Services will retry this operation periodically. In the mean time, this instance will be ignored.” error and will need to make a few registry changes to fix the error as defined in my blog posting.

Alan Renouf has posted all about the latest PowerCLI 4.1 Poster and Quick Reference Guide. This guide is very useful to me due to my trying to teach myself Powershell/PowerCLI and the learning of these commands for my usage due to the removal of the COS soon. Alan is obviously one of the top guys for PowerCLI and as I’ve mentioned loads of times before if you aren’t using his vCheck program then you need to start using it ASAP.

The next one is an amusing one for anyone working in the virtualisation field who is asked by someone what they actually do for a living and having to try explain it to someone who doesn’t work in IT. Gabrie van Zanten wrote the posting and it’s a great article especially the comments of what other people say 🙂

Next is all about the latest release of the vReference card by Forbes Guthrie. The reference card is an amazing amount of information you could even need to look up on one very easy sheet. I always have the pdf saved to my desktop so i can access it whenever i need to do a quick lookup of any information or values

Next is the availability of the schedule builder for VMworld Copenhagen for all the attendees. I’ve already started playing around with my schedule trying to get in the sessions and hands on labs I want to attend and do ,as well as leave some time for social networking as one of the big things about the conference for me is meeting all the people who I follow and chat to on twitter and whose blogs I have and still learn so much from.If you are a blogger or social media contributor and are attending or will be blogging about VMworld Copenhagen  then remember to add your information for the VMworld Europe 2010 Social Media Contributors.

  Duncan Epping of yellow-bricks fame has a contest to win yourself a free VMworld  Copenhagen ticket so if you aren’t attending and wish to attend but for whatever reason couldn’t afford it then go check out his posting on the contest here and hopefully I’ll meet you there at one of the events.

Talking of events at VMworld the Danish VMUG have taken on a crazy task and have opened up a VMUGParty for all VMworld Copenhagen attendees with free beer and cold drinks sponsored by EMC, Trend Micro, Magirus, IBM and Veeam. I have a feeling this pay get out of hand with the amount of people invited but I’m planning to make it myself and hopefully i can meet you.

Chris Dearden has come up with a very clever idea of instead of exchanging information and business cards at VMworld to exchange self created t-shirts and maybe by the end of the week you’ll have yourself a couple of very cool shirts with your fellow VMware bloggers websites on them.

Gregg


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All Things Virtual 16

As you would expect the virtualisation communities are abuzz with talk of VMworld US starting next week in San Francisco. I’m going to be watching with a very keen eye to all the news and tweets from fellow virtualisation experts(not that I am an expert) about the event as most of the information that will be coming out of the US event will most likely be repeated and re-covered at the one in Copenhagen(of which i am attending 🙂 ). Hopefully I can learn what the best sessions were and make time to try get to as many of them as possible if they are replicated at VMworld Europe.Ed Grigson of vexperienced.co.uk posted a very interesting article about how VMworld Europe is shorter,costs more and has a staggering amount less unique sessions. Thankfully as Ed mentions the sessions from VMworld San Francisco should be online by mid September so if you have registered to attend either of them you will be able to see all the sessions online at VMworld.com.Also the VMworld 2009 sessions and labs are now open for public viewing. I have heard that if sessions go well at VMworld US then they will be asked to present at VMworld Europe. Don’t hold me to this as it is just what i heard but it does make sense and will hopefully bring some of the top unique sessions.

Whilst most of the news is about VMworld there has been a large amount of news not directly related to VMworld.

  • As mentioned by Eric Sloof on his blog,the VCAP4-DCD Exam Blueprint Guide has become available for those who are keen to get the ball rolling on their studies for the certification. I’ve personally started building up my home lab for my preparations and learning for the VCAP-DCA exam. A friend of mine asked me if i knew what exams VMware recommend for the VCAP examinations and funnily enough i had received an email from VMware telling me exactly this. Here is what they recommend:VCAP-DCA Preparation Courses

    VCAP-DCD Preparation Course

  • Also a big congratulations to Eric Sloof(@esloof) on being awarded as the best freelance VCI of the quarter.  Eric’s blog is always a great source for any kind of VMware related course or news and is a blog i would recommend adding to your RSS feeds.
  • Talking of the courses to prepare you for the VCAP exams i asked the same question on twitter to see what people recommended and Jonathon Medd(@jonathanmedd ) pointed out his belief that there would be no need for the PowerCLI course due to himself,Alan Renouf, Arnim van Lieshout and Glenn Sizemore currently writing a PowerCLI book that should teach you everything you should need to know to be able to utilise PowerCLI in the environment. As Alan says in his blog posting the book will be be written by “4 vExperts and a MVP” so you know it is going to be a brilliant resource. Jonathon has told me to stay tuned for news of it’s release.
  • Talking of books the much anticipated HA and DRS Deepdive by Frank Denneman( @frankdenneman)  and Duncan Epping ( @DuncanYB ) is due to be released very soon. These guys are two of the top guys in the industry and for anyone that has tried to read through the whole of Duncan HA deepdive posting will know he is the perfect person to write about the topic. This book is on my list already to buy and I will be keeping a keen eye on it’s release.
  • As you would expect there have already been a few videos and a page dedicated to all the new about VMworld. Due to lack of time I haven’t had the time to look through them yet so here they are as they are on my “to do” list:
  • Greg Stuart (@gregwstuart) has posted all about a competition where you can win the “Ultimate vSphere Library”, with titles from Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe), Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) and David Davis of trainsignal fame ( @davidmdavis) to name but a few of the things you will win if you are the winner. So get following and good luck 🙂
  • Mike Laverick (@Mike_Laverick) at RTFM-ED.co.uk is also running a competition to win the trainsignal (@TrainSignal) VMware vSphere Pro Volume 2 video series.- find out the details at www.rtfm-ed.co.uk.
  • Eric Sloof has also posted a nice little posting with two slide decks by Iwan Rahabok who works as a Senior Systems Consultant at VMware all about the differences between vSphere 4.1 and 4.0. I always love finding these kinds of things especially when you have to try provide reasons why “upgrading to the latest version of x is a good idea because of these advantages…”
  • A big congratulations and thank you to Stefan Jagger for the passing of his VCP4 exam and for mentioning and linking to my VCP4 resources pages. always nice to get a bit of traffic from different blogs 🙂
  • Frank Denneman has posted all about the VCDX application form and how it should be filled out correctly so that your application is accepted and has the correct amount of information in it. I’ve added this one to my VCDX list for future reference when I am ready to put in my application
  • While on the VMware communities this morning seeing if i could help answer any questions I came across an unusual thread where someone asked for the 10 most common issues in VMware with the steps to fix these problems. True to form a few people replied and i thought their answers were actually quite interesting.  Especially  the one by Petri all about the ten best ways to increase performance for your VMware environment. Also the top ten KB articles at the time is a great page I’ve added to my favourites to frequent to try keep up to date on the latest problems and solutions happening with VMware products.
  • Last but not least is a posting by Maish Saidel-Keesing all about him creating a VERY useful Google spreadsheet of all the VMworld sessions and the information about them. This is going to come in handy for sure especially when I’m sure I’ll arrive at a session at VMworld Copenhagen and it’s full already and i have to find another sessions to attend.

Well that’s everything that has caught my attention for the past few weeks since the last All Things Virtual. As I’ve said numerous times I’m on twitter at @greggrobertson5 if you want to follow me/ask me questions/give feedback/abuse me 🙂

Also any comments are welcome

Gregg


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All things virtual 14

Unless you have been under a rock ,you will know the biggest news recently in the virtualisation arena, which has filled most of the top blog posters blogs is the release of vSphere 4.1. For all the news and latest features ,I posted a blog posting last week all about the best resources to get yourself up to speed here this should cover it all for you and most of the blogs are constantly being updated. There no real point to say anything more seeing as the people i linked to have done and currently still are doing such great jobs covering it all

Duncan Epping posted a very interesting article all about the the changes to the snapshot “delete all” mechanism. I still think they should change it to Commit All but it is a very good change that should allow better and faster committing of the data to the virtual machine.

Chad Sakac aka VirtualGeek has posted all about thin provisioning and if you should do it in vsphere and or the disk array and the reasoning to his recommendations as well as a brief lesson on the differing formats of virtual disks and what theses choices will mean for you and your storage utilisation.

David Davis of Trainsignal fame posted a very interesting video all about the new feature in vSphere 4.1 ,Windows Active Directory Authentication-the ability for ESX/ESXi servers to “join” a Windows Active Directory (AD) domain. The video is really good as you would expect from David’s in depth expertise in creating technical videos. also have a look through the site as David has posted up some really good videos and has put up the first vChat with Simon Seagrave from Techead.

Chris Dearden has blogged all about the second volume of the Trainsignal vSphere Pro series. I actually have a set of these with my name on it at our main offices but haven’t been able to collect them due to work constraints, plain laziness in part and the person who has them for me being a very busy person himself. If these videos are anything like the first volume then i can’t wait to get my hands on them and better my knowledge especially as i plan to have assimilated as Chris said in his blog posting all the information into my head amongst many other resources before I attempt the vcap exam/s.

Cody Bunch has started his infamous Brown Bags for the VCAP-DCA exams and the first one is today/tonight(depending on your time zones) I’ve made a few of Cody’s brown bags before and they are brilliant for asking your fellow administrators questions about things and covering the topics you are required to know to pass. Cody also does brown bags for the VCP4 exams so i would HIGHLY recommend getting yourself registered for them and watching some of the past ones if you are writing soon or looking to sit the VCAP-DCA exam at some point like myself.

Well that’s it, I’m sure I’ve missed a few nuggets this past week but most of the news is obviously about 4.1 and I’ll leave that in the more capable hands of the people I mentioned in my blog posting.

If you’re interested in working for EMC Consulting like myself and being a part of this ever strengthening arm of EMC, then drop me a message via the blog and I’ll more than happily pass your information onto our recruitment people.

Some roles going at the moment are:

Senior Solutions Architect/Exchange

Senior Solutions Architect/VDI

DW Architect

FYI: all of EMC Counting’s hiring is done through direct contact. We don’t use recruitment consultants, so don’t waste your or my time if you are one.

Gregg Robertson


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All things virtual 13

 

Yes I decided to get rid of the roman numerals and go with the old trusty numbers from now on as I think it looks better and it’s more user friendly for the five people who read these posts 🙂

It’s been two weeks since the last All things virtual posting due to work constraints and my studying for my MCITP: Enterprise Administrator exam. Unfortunately the exam was cancelled unbeknownst to me so I’ve had to reschedule for a few weeks time (i know loads of people are going to think I just failed and don’t want to say it but I’d honestly say it if I had). Anyhow since it’s been two weeks since the last version there has been loads of really top class postings and information to have come up in the virtualisation arena.

Firstly as I said in my posting yesterday the second vBeers is happening TOMORROW,July the 1st. I was fortunate enough to have made it to the first one and it was awesome to meet and chat to loads of the guys I follow and chat to via twitter,their blogs(My blogroll holds my favourites) the VMware Community forums or in the VMware community roundtables. If you’re near the London area tomorrow evening I’d highly recommend going along.

Next is a brilliant posting by Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks all about troubleshooting and recognising is a vm is swapping and if so how to work it out as it isn’t as simple as looking and seeing if the SWCUR value in esxtop is giving out values. As I stated in my blog posting a few weeks back I’m learning to use ESXTOP and better my skills in using this tool to manage my environments and be able to spot these kinds of things via this tool.

Eric Sloof blogged all about the release of the Maximum vSphere book. The book was written by Simon Seagrave of Techhead fame and Eric Siebert of vsphere-land.com fame. Simon wrote the chapters on ‘Performance in vSphere’ and ‘Building Your Own vSphere Lab’ and Eric wrote all the remaining chapters. John Troyer has also written the forward for the book. I haven’t personally read Eric’s VMware® VI3 Implementation and Administration book but these guys are top of the industry and their blogs are some of the best out there so you know the content is going to be amazing. Hopefully I can get my hands on a copy of this once it’s released.

As I blogged  almost a month ago now about the latest versions of vCentre and vSphere having been released, Update 2. Chad Sakac of Virtual Geek fame posted a brilliant write up all about the release also and has added some very helpful fixes to issues that may arise from updating to update 2. I’ve managed to update most of my home test environment to update 2 but unfortunately haven’t had the time to fully play with /break it yet. Talking of new versions William Lam of Virtually Ghetto fame has posted a very interesting posting all about the possible imminent release of vSphere 4.1. If rumours are true then this release will be the non COS release. Kind of crazy to put an update out then release a new version in my opinion especially for all of us that have to keep environments up to date whilst not breaking anything in the process. Jason Boche of Boche.net did a nice little posting all about how a simple Google search gives plenty of proof that the COS is going away.Duncan Epping also posted that DRS sub clusters are supposedly due tin the next version also.

A fair number of the guys and I’m friendly with and/or follow on twitter were fortunate enough to have been invited to take the VCAP-DCA beta exams over a week ago now . Jason Boche, William Lam and  Chris Dearden are a few that I noticed who blogged about it and from their comments and rants it sounds as if the exam is going to be a real test and that to pass this you are going to need to have used,played,configured and fully understand all the technologies and features that the vSphere family of products have to offer. Even though this means I’m probably going to end up spending innumerable hours playing around with my lab(which i kind of do out of nerdy fun already anyways) and also means that people can’t just learn answers to questions from cheat sites and post 500 out of 500 scores even though they misspell VMware and will hopefully also help me to increase my skills and knowledge which is what all exams/certifications should do for you.

One of the biggest banes of any VMware administrators life is the managing and controlling of snapshots especially if you allow them to be created by the users of the vm’s as i have to in our environment. I’ve posted before all about the great ways I use to ease the management and monitoring of VMware Snapshots. Last week Mike Bean posted a brilliant guest posting in the VMware communities blogs all about VMware snapshots and what they are meant for and what they are not meant for and how they are created and maintained. I’ve saved this one to my favourites as it’s got all the reasons you need to explain to a user in why they can’t have five snapshots on one vm and keep it for months on end.

Duncan Epping posted all about the new SIOC (Storage IO Control) feature due to released in most likely the next version of vSphere. I had seen this video before the posting as it was obviously all over twitter very quickly and I’m really excited and pleased that this feature is coming.

Last but not least a big congratulations to Simon Long in his announcement that he is joining VMware as a Senior Consultant. Wow if memory serves me right that takes him from being made redundant and looking for a role to being a VMware employee in 12 months!! Congrats Simon!

Gregg Robertson

 

 


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VMware Certified Advanced Professional Datacentre Administration –Blueprint Released

Just a very fast posting to notify that the blueprint for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional Datacentre Administration blueprint has been released. As I’ve said I’m really looking forward to this exam as hopefully it will enable me to differentiate myself from the multitude of vcp’s that qualified recently and hopefully also teach me and hone my skills for preparation for my VCDX someday in the future.

The Blueprint is here and it looks like a very good exam and loads of really interesting and testing things in it. I look forward to learning more about it in the coming weeks and months.

Gregg Robertson


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New VMware Exams Released

 

Just a very quick posting as so many of the top bloggers out there have covered it so well that VMware have released their new Exam set the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – VCAP.

Simon Long has posted a blog all about the VCAP side and what will be required for the administrator and design exams here

Duncan Epping has posted all about the VCDX 4 (VCDX4-DCD) side of things here and details the steps now to become a VCDX4-DCD. Quite disappointed they had to add the DCD part personally as all it’s doing is adding to the long winded acronyms some of us carry at the end of our mail signatures/business cards.

Eric Sloof also posted all about the VCDX4-DCD here and gives a brilliantly detailed break down of the VCAP here. I’ve already signed up to receive an email alert when registration opens (yes I’m seemingly that sad)

I plan to update this blog in the coming days/weeks as more information becomes available. Hopefully to the person who came across my blog a week back by searching “I’m a vcp4. Now what” has an answer 🙂

Gregg Robertson

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