Virtualisation | TheSaffaGeek

October 2, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCDX Spotlight: Jonathan Kohler

Name: Jon Kohler

Twitter Handle: @JonKohler

Current Employer : MSN Communications

VCDX #: 116

How did you get into using VMware?

I started using VMware ESX 3.x and Workstation in late 2008. The more I started to use VMware’s products, both personally and professionally, the more impressed I was with their functionality and direction. I worked at a VMware partner at the time vSphere 4.0 came out and deployed it internally for their production environment and externally for customers as part of PS engagements. I decided then that VMware virtualization is where I wanted to maintain my professional focus and haven’t let up since.

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

I decided to go after the VCDX after I changed jobs a few years ago. I moved from Vermont to Colorado after finding a VMware Infrastructure engineering job at a large national health system on Twitter. The person who got me in the door was Nate Raper, VCDX 85, though not a VCDX at the time. I had both of my VCAP4’s at the time, and hadn’t really given much thought to the VCDX. That changed when I saw what Nate brought me in to work on. The environment at this company was massive in both complexity and size. To give you an idea of the level of VMware engineering at this particular establishment, the enterprise both Nate and I worked in has produced 3 VCDX’s (Tom Ralph, Nate, and Myself). That scale, as well as Nate’s encouragement, is what got me hooked and on the right path.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

I started with the VCP4 in January 2009 and finished up with the VCDX5-DCV in August 2013, so holistically the better part of five years. In terms of hours, I probably spent over 600 hours over the last year working on everything associated with the VCDX deliverables. This was over the course of three application attempts and one defense attempt.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

Approach all of your work like it was going to be compared against the VCDX blueprint, this will get you in the right mind set to succeed on whatever design you choose. I know the blueprint can be kind of vague, but try to use it as a checklist when you think you are done with a project, and literally go down the list and point out where you have those items in your design. Also, get and read the VCDX boot camp book.

Have confidence in yourself and give yourself a LOT of time. No matter how good of an engineer or architect you are, trying to rush to put together a world class deliverable simply doesn’t work, which I learned the hard way when I didn’t allow myself enough time for proper decompression, peer review, etc and failed the application stage twice.

If you get invited to defend, no matter how confident you feel, get SEVERAL different peer reviews on your presentation, practice frequently, and KNOW YOUR DESIGN INSIDE AND OUT. This means know why you made choices (very specifically), what you didn’t choose to implement (alternative design choices), and why you did what you did.

Past that, keep your hands in the dirt, as you will need to be sharp for the troubleshooting and design sections. I got lucky on my troubleshooting piece, as it was a problem I had actually dealt with in the real world before, which made me much more confident when engaging the panellists.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

I would have given myself much more time the first go around, so that I didn’t have to stress over this for the past year. Smile

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it

Life has been much less stressful for sure. My employer MSN Communications and manager Colin were supportive throughout the entire journey, and have responded well. No change in positions or anything, but as fate would have it, Nate and I left our healthcare IT jobs last year when we got outsourced, and both went to MSN. He just left MSN to go to VMware’s Global CoE, so I am going to step up and fill some of that gap with our customers, which I don’t think I could have done without going through the VCDX process. Lastly, I do think this journey was worth it and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

September 24, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCDX Spotlight: Brian Suhr

Name: Brian Suhr

Twitter Handle: bsuhr

Blog URL: www.virtualizetips.com

Current : Ahead

VCDX #: 118

How did you get into using VMware?

I was working for a large enterprise at the time and they had already begun to deploy some workloads into VMware 2.5. I was looking for more ways to expand my skills and learn new things. So I kept asking my manager to let me start working with this new virtualization stuff. This got me hooked on VMware early and fast, soon came amazing things like vMotion that blew my mind.

This was really a pivotal point in my technology career that set me on a course that led me to the point I’m at today. Without getting that early opportunity I would have not likely been introduced to VMware for several years.

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

I remember back about three years ago, thinking that I was pretty bored at the time. I was looking for a new challenge and I would need to make a career move. So I took my time and looked for a company that would provide me with the support and environment that would allow me to earn the skills necessary for me to make a VCDX attempt. This was the early days of VCDX and I was impressed with the level of people that were already certified then.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

If you count the point from which I made the job change about 2.5 years. But for me it was about 18 months ago. That was when I began taking my VCAP5 exams and selected which one of my projects I would use for the submission. Anything before that point was preparation that I needed to hone my consulting and architecture skills.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

I would say that while its possible to pursue VCDX by yourself it’s much easier if you have a support system. This could be co-workers or other technology people. You can then use these people for technical reviews and practice answering their questions. Even if you are a consultant and work with customers daily and are good at presenting, the VCDX defense session is at another level and you will want to be ready for it.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

I am pretty proud of my VCDX journey, don’t think that there is anything that I would change about it. Well I would have loved to pass on my first attempt. I should have taken a few more vacation days before each defense attempt to feel more prepared.

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it

It’s only been a short time since I was notified of my success. But my company values the VCDX program very highly and offers unprecedented support to those who wish to pursue.

For me it was absolutely worth it. To make the VCDX attempt it required me to push my technical and soft skills to a much higher level. So whether I was successful or not that was worth it for me. Granted being awarded the certification brings with it a lot of recognition both from the community and customers. But it was really about challenging myself and that was accomplished.

September 17, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCDX Spotlight: Tim Antonowicz

Name: Tim Antonowicz

Twitter Handle: @timantz

Blog URL: whiteboardninja.wordpress.com

Current Employer: Mosaic Technology

VCDX #: 112

How did you get into using VMware? In early 2004, I was a SysAdmin at Bowdoin College in Maine. Running out of datacenter footprint, we consolidated our servers with ESX 2.01 retiring 50 physical servers and leaving us 80% virtualized. After Katrina in 2005, we worked with LMU in Los Angeles to co-host each other’s VMs for DR purposes. This project was one of the inspirations behind the development of VMware’s SRM solution.

What made you decide to do the VCDX? After moving into the Partner space, I began seeing and designing for several different customer environments. The VCDX program not only recognized those at the pinnacle of our profession but also advocated those skills and abilities needed to become the best at what we do. If I wanted to become a successful Architect, I should aspire to be a VCDX.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey? Overall, the process was almost 3 years in length. I spent over a year getting my VCAPs and had a few attempts as a design, but nothing serious until about a year ago. My first design attempt didn’t make the deadline for submission, and I had to wait for PEX13 for my first official submission and defense invitation. While unsuccessful at PEX, I learned from my mistakes there and applied my experiences to my successful defense at VMworld13.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation? Don’t attempt this unless you really want it. The VCDX process is not something you can go into half-committed. It will tax and test you all along the way, both technically and mentally. It is not for the faint hearted. With that in mind, if the VCDX is something that you want to do, and you are committed to becoming the very best you can be in your field, go for it. It is a journey that pays back 1000 fold what you put into it. By going through the VCDX, I am a better Architect than I was before. I’ve changed the way I approach each project, and my company, my customers, and I are better off as a result of my work and dedication. Aside from the actual certification, I am better at my job today for just going through the process. Holding the VCDX after it all is just the validation that I was on the right track all along.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently? Looking back, I wouldn’t have waited so long between getting my VCAPs and actually working on a design for submission. I should have started the process a year earlier than I did. Also, I only did one ‘Mock Defense’ for my first attempt. To all prospective VCDX applicants: “Mock, Mock, Mock!” Realtime, live interaction can do nothing but help you with your preparation for your defense.

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it? Since it has only been a few days since I received “my number”, nothing has changed for me professionally at this time. Personally… For the first time in over a year, I haven’t woken to thoughts of my design, potential flaws, and defense preparation scenarios running through my mind. It’s nice to hear the birds outside my window.

August 26, 2013
by Gregg Robertson 6 Comments

VMware vSphere 5.5 Latency-Sensitivity Feature

Today at VMworld US vSphere 5.5 was announced in the keynote and one of the new features released with vSphere 5.5 is the Latency-Sensitivity Feature. The latency-sensitivity feature is applied per VM, and thus a vSphere host can run a mix of normal VMs and VMs with this feature enabled. To enable the latency sensitivity for a given VM from the UI, access the Advanced settings from the VM Options tab in the VM’s Edit Settings pop-up window and select high for the Latency Sensitivity option as shown below:

What Latency-Sensitivity Feature Does

With the latency-sensitivity feature enabled, the CPU scheduler determines whether exclusive access to PCPUs can be given or not considering various factors including whether PCPUs are over-subscribed or not. Reserving 100% of VCPU time increases the chances of getting exclusive PCPU access for the VM. With exclusive PCPU access given, each VCPU entirely owns a specific PCPU and no other VCPUs are allowed to run on it. This achieves nearly zero ready time, improving response time and jitter under CPU contention. Although just reserving 100% of CPU time (without the latency-sensitivity enabled) can yield a similar effect in a relatively large time scale, the VM may still has to wait in a short time span, possibly adding jitter. Note that the LLC is still shared with other VMs residing on the same socket even with given exclusive PCPU access.

The latency-sensitivity feature requires the user to reserve the VM’s memory to ensure that the memory size requested by the VM is always available. Without memory reservation, vSphere may reclaim memory from the VM, when the host free memory gets scarce. Some memory reclamation techniques such as ballooning and hypervisor swapping may significantly downgrade VM performance, when the VM accesses the memory region that has been swapped out to the disk. Memory reservation prevents such performance degradation from happening.

Bypassing Virtualization Layers:

Once exclusive access to PCPUs is obtained, the feature allows the VCPUs to bypass the VMkernel’s CPU scheduling layer and directly halt in the VMM, since there are no other contexts that need to be scheduled. That way, the cost of running the CPU scheduler code and the cost of switching between the VMkernel and VMM are avoided, leading to much faster VCPU halt/wake-up operations. VCPUs still experience switches between the direct guest code execution and the VMM but this operation is relatively cheap with the hardware-assisted visualization technologies provided by recent CPU architectures.

Tuning Virtualization Layers:

When the VMXNET3 para-virtualized device is used for VNICs in the VM, VNIC Interrupt coalescing and LRO support for the VNICs are automatically disabled to reduce response time and its jitter. Although such tunings can help improve performance, they may have a negative side effect in certain scenarios. If hardware supports SR-IOV and the VM doesn’t need a certain virtualization features such as vMotion, NetIOC, and FaultTolerance, we recommend the use of a pass-through mechanism, Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV), for the latency sensitive feature.

August 21, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service Beta Impressions

Almost two months ago I was selected as one of the very fortunate few VMware vExperts to participate in the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service beta. If you’ve not heard of vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) or not entirely sure what it is, then I’d recommend watching these videos before reading on:

“An Introduction to VMware vCloud Hybrid Service”

“A Look Inside vCloud Hybrid Service”

We were all provided a portion (or slice?) of a virtual datacenter in a multi-tenant cloud. As a bonus I got to share mine with two VCDX’s Chris McCain and Matt Vandenbeld. It’s always super exciting for a nerd like me to be able to do some of the cutting edge stuff with some of the top names in the industry.

Impressions:

The custom portal for vCHS looks extremely sleek and very intuitive for anyone using it for the first time or who may not have even used the vCloud GUI extensively. The front page presents you with a good overview of all your resources bundled into a Resource Snapshot section. You can easily review how much of your total resource is utilized and if you have more than one virtual datacenter you’ll observe the same utilization report per instance.

The virtual datacenter that I shared among three other people was number 25-202. If you click on the virtual datacenter in the Virtual Datacenters section above then it will take you through to your virtual datacenter page where you can check on your Usage & Allocation, Virtual Machines, Gateways, Networks and the Users who have access to this Virtual Datacenter.

Usage & Allocation

Virtual Machines

Gateways

Networks

I created a number of virtual machines for a test I am planning to blog about around using vCenter Configuration Manager in vCHS. One of these virtual machines is an MS SQL server which you can see below. You can access your virtual machines from either the virtual machines tab at the top of the page or via the Virtual Datacenter tab shown previously. If you are a user with permissions to access the vCHS vCloud Director portal (VPC Administrator) you’re able to manage VMs that you have permissions to using vCloud Director by simply clicking Manage VM in vCloud Director (shown below).

Personally I prefer working in the vCloud Director portal as this is something I’m very familiar with but the vCHS portal is more than adequate to undertake administration, it’s not too dissimilar to the standard vCloud one with an organization administrator view.

The flagship feature of the vCHS hybrid cloud connectivity is the ability to migrate workloads using VMware’s vCloud Connector using the new Data Center Extension in vCC 2.5 between your private vCloud instance and vCHS. I’m still testing this functionality but what I’ve seen so far the stretch deploy feature is looking like an amazing use case for people looking to migrate high workload resources to vCHS Chris Colotti covered a real world case and how he utilised stretch deploy here and here.

My initial impression of this service is really good and I’m looking forward to getting even more stuck in with real world customers and requirements. I’ll hopefully have my VCM blog posting out very soon although with all the goodness coming out of VMworld US it’s going to be hard.

Gregg

August 12, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP-CID Objective 1.2 – Identify and Categorize Business Requirements

Knowledge

Identify discovery questions for a conceptual design (number of users, number of VMs, capacity, etc.)

These questions are ones you are going to ask during the design workshop for the design/project. For the workshop you need to make sure you have the applicable project participants/stakeholders who can join the workshops (depends if you want one big one where people come and go at certain points or multiple ones where you speak to each business unit/ team). For the stakeholder meetings/design workshops I personally like to try bring in the following people, this does vary depending on the project and what has been chosen but 9/10 times these are the people you want to speak to:

Virtualisation administrators (if applicable. If not already present then future administrators of the solution)
Server Hardware Administrators
Backup Administrators
Storage Administrators
Desktop/OS Administrators
Network Administrators
Application Administrators (these are very important as their applications may have very specific requirements)
Security Officer
Project Sponsors
End users/ Help desk personnel (this I find is helpful to find out what are the current support desk tickets/problems the company are facing and if these will impact the project in any way. Also these discussions are easy to have in the hallway/over a coffee but have alerted me to unknown risks that would have severely impacted the design and delivery)

The US vBrownbag for the VCAP5-DCD objective 1 had a great first slide on VMware’s 5 Step Design Process:

Identify the effect of product architecture, capabilities, and constraints on a conceptual design.

I may be looking at this the wrong way but I think this is actually around how specific products architecture, capabilities and constraints isn’t applicable in a conceptual design as for a conceptual design you are only creating a “napkin” design diagram of how the whole environment is going to be delivered.

Skills and Abilities

Relate business and technical requirements to a conceptual design.

From one of the VMware service delivery kits available to VMware partners they give a great breakdown of what requirements are and what business and technical requirements are:
- Requirement – Documented statement that depicts the requisite attributes, characteristics, or qualities of the system
- Business requirements – Describes what must be achieved for the system to provide value
  - System must provide self-service capability
  - System must provide x% availability
  - System must provide optimal scalability and elasticity
- Technical requirements – Describes the properties of a system which allow it to fulfill the business requirements
  - System requires a Web portal where users can log in securely and deploy virtual machines based on defined policies
  - System must have fully redundant components throughout entire stack (host, network, storage)
  - System leverages virtualization technology and associated features

As mentioned these requirements will be gleamed from the Design Workshops/Stakeholder meetings and then put into the conceptual design. This is where you would work out if the customer requires a private, hybrid, public or even community cloud deployment. For example if the customer requires certain data to remain in a country for regulatory reasons then in the conceptual design you know compute resources, networking and connectivity between that country and the primary site need to be available. The speeds, number of hosts, make of hosts and amount of memory and vCPU are not in the conceptual design as this is the “napkin” design just covering the concept of how it will all work out and may actually change once you get to the logical and physical designs.

Some example business requirements a customer may have which are ones I did for my VCAP5-DCD Design Practice are :

Number	Requirement
R001	Virtualise the existing 6000 UK servers as virtual machines, with no degradation in performance when compared to current physical workloads
R002	To provide an infrastructure that can provide 99.7% availability or better
R003	The overall anticipated cost of ownership should be reduced after deployment
R004	Users to experience as close to zero performance impact when migrating from the physical infrastructure to the virtual infrastructure
R005	Design must maintain simplicity where possible to allow existing operations teams to manage the new environments
R006	Granular access control rights must be implemented throughout the infrastructure to ensure the highest levels of security
R007	Design should be resilient and provide the highest levels of availability where possible whilst keeping costs to a minimum
R008	The design must incorporate DR and BC practices to ensure no loss of data is achieved
R009	Management components must secured with the highest level of security
R010	Design must take into account VMware best practices for all components in the design as well as vendor best practices where applicable

For Technical Requirements a great way of doing it is to break them down into sections like:
- Virtual Datacentre Requirements – eg: Allocation model Virtual Datacenters reserves 75% of CPU and memory
- Availability Requirements – eg: VMware vCloud Director (clustering, load balancing)
- Network Requirements – eg: Organizations have the ability to provision vApp networks
- Storage Requirements – eg: Different tiers of storage resources must be available to the customer (Tier 1 = Gold, Tier 2 = Silver, Tier 3 = Bronze)
- Catalogue Requirements – eg: Catalog items are stored on a dedicated virtual datacenter and dedicated storage
- SLA Requirements – eg: SLA Requirement #1 – Networking 100%
- Security Requirements – eg: Organizations are isolated from each other
- Management Requirements – eg: Only technical staff uses remote console access
- Metering Requirements – eg: Metering solution must monitor vApp power states for PAYG
- Compliance Requirements– eg: Solution must comply with PCI standards
- Tenant Requirements – eg: Customer requires the ability to fence off vApp deployments

To make sure you are doing the design in a VCDX-like manner which should push you to do it at a very high level, don’t forget to refine the customer-specific technical requirements and validate that they are specific, measurable, accurate, realistic, and testable (SMART).

Gather customer inventory data.

This is what is going to be on the new vCloud system whether it is existing workloads or new workloads. A good way of getting this if the customer allows it is to run a VMware Capacity Planner collection on the existing workloads that are going to be migrated in so you know sizes, I/O and current state analysis values. The Capacity Planner can only be run by VMware partners so if this isn’t possible for you then manual collection and recording is going to be required. Another method is via the VMware vCloud Planner which is another tool only available to VMware Partners so maybe getting a VMware partner in to do this for you prior to the project running would be a good idea

Also knowing what the customer already has can help you understand possible future constraints for example that all their current servers are IBM and so this is likely to be the server platform for this design.

There may also be a requirement to use existing legacy physical kit already present in the datacentre which needs to be recorded and fully understood so that the risks and constraints of using this infrastructure are fully understood. For example if you are using legacy network switches which can’t do stretched VLANs this will impact your design substantially if you have two sites and a requirement for the Management cluster to be failed over/migrated in the event of a disaster.

Determine customer business goals.

This is plainly what is the customer looking to gain from the deployment of this solution? At the end of the project what do they hope to achieve? These are sometimes not as clear as you may hope as people have different ideas of what they want the solution to achieve so as the architect you will need to take all these business requirements, set expectations if they are unrealistic due to varying reasons like cost or pre-selected hardware and then define them and get sign off from the customer that they agree to these before any additional work is done. This is very important as if these aren’t defined and agreed to by the customer then scope creep can happen which could cause the project to fail.

Identify requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions.

I’m not going to go into great depth here as I think the definitions of each will give you a good idea of what each is. During the design workshops/stakeholder meetings these are worked out, recorded and agreed to by the customer. Always remember that for any design you need to collect all of these and then look at it in a holistic manner and understand the impacts of each decision.
- Requirements – Documented statement that depicts the requisite attributes, characteristics, or qualities of the system. See above portions around Business and Technical requirements plus the examples.
- Constraints – Requirements that restrict the amount of freedom in developing the design
  - Hardware which already exists and must be used (for example,host or storage array)
  - Physical limitations (distance between sites, datacenter space)
  - Cost $$$
- Risks – Potential issues that may negatively impact the reliability of the design
  - Lack of redundancy for specific hardware component
  - Support staff has not had any training
- Assumptions – Suppositions made during the design process regarding the expected usage and implementation of a system
  - Provides a sounding board for design decisions which must be validated
  - Hardware required is installed before vCloud implementation
  - Network bandwidth is not a limiting factor for external end users
  - Appropriate training is provided to existing technical staff
- For assumptions and risks I like to get these highlighted to the customer right away as you normally don’t want any assumptions if possible and for the assumptions you record in your design you want these to be realistically clarified already so that the assumptions are only there to ensure that if what they promised would be there isn’t you can refer them to the assumptions they signed off.

Given customer requirements and product capabilities, determine the impact to a conceptual design.

This I think is covered above in places but is also something you can only really learn from actually doing a design and understanding how requirements shape a design and what impacts each of them have. On a conceptual design it isn’t as much of an impact as in a logical and physical design but limitations like keeping workloads in specific geographies and the capability of vCloud stretched clusters between the two locations for example are something that will impact the conceptual design. I would also read the Service definitions listed below in the recommended tools from the blueprint and the implementation examples from the vCAT.

Tools

Functional vs. Non-Functional Requirements
Conceptual, Logical, Physical: It is Simple
Private VMware vCloud Service Definition – This is in the vCAT
Public VMware vCloud Service Definition – This is in the vCAT
Hybrid VMware vCloud Use Case – This is in the vCAT
Product Documentation

If you feel I have missed something or am wrong on something then please do comment as I don’t proclaim to be the best and am always learning and welcome constructive criticism and feedback

Gregg

August 8, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP-CID Objective 1.1 – Create a Conceptual Design Based on Business Requirements

Due to an imminent customer engagement I am due to be working on I have been refining my vCloud skills and dusty away the cobwebs. One of these tasks was to book the VCP5-IaaS and sit it so that it forced me to learn the basics again and be sure I had a solid base knowledge with no gaps. My experience of the exam and the resources I used for it are mentioned in my VCP5-IaaS Exam Experience blog posting. I have now been using the VCAP-CID blueprint as a structure for perfecting my vCloud design skills and so I thought I would slowly post up each objective for my own benefit but also hopefully help other people looking to take the VCAP-CID. I will be consolidating all the objectives on my blog page here

Skills and Abilities

Distinguish between virtualization, automation and cloud computing.
- This could be defined in a number of ways (I’m more than happy to be corrected here) but the way I piece it all together is:
  - Virtualization is what VMware has been doing for years with vSphere and its complementing technologies. This is nothing new to anyone preparing for this exam and if it is then I hate to tell you this but this exam isn’t for you.
  - Automation ties perfectly into the NIST definition of on-demand self-service which is : Unilaterally provision computing, as needed, automatically without requiring human interaction
    - This can be done through multiple technologies and mechanisms like VMware’s vCenter Orchestrator, vCAC,vFabric Application Director and third party tools like Puppet, Razor and IBM’s Virtualization Automation solution. Without true automation you can’t have a Cloud.

Distinguish between private, public, hybrid and community cloud computing.
- These are defined perfectly in the vCAT 3.1 introduction document as:
  - Private cloud: A private vCloud (also known as an internal vCloud.) operates on private networks, where resources are accessible behind the firewall by a single company. In many cases, all the tenants share one legal entity. For example, a university might offer IaaS to its medical and business schools, or a company might do the same for various groups or business units. The private vCloud can be managed by the enterprise and hosted on premise or operated on a dedicated infrastructure provided by a vCloud service provider or systems integrator. In any case, a private vCloud must conform to the organizational security constraints.
  - Public cloud: A public vCloud offers IT resources as a service through external service providers and is shared across multiple organizations or the Internet. This can be viewed as a vCloud infrastructure that is operated by one organization for use by multiple, legally separated organizations. A public vCloud is provisioned for open access and might be owned, managed, and operated by one or more entities. A public vCloud provider might also support a private, community, or hybrid vCloud.
  - Hybrid cloud: A hybrid vCloud combines the benefits of the private and the public vCloud, with flexibility and choice of deployment methods. A hybrid vCloud consists of multiple, linked vCloud infrastructures. These distinct vCloud infrastructures can be private, community, or public, they but must meet a set of requirements defined by the providers and agreed to by the consumers. Connecting these vCloud instances requires data and application mobility as well as management. When load-balancing between vCloud instances (cloud bursting), use a consistent monitoring and management approach when migrating an application or data workload.
  - Community cloud: A Community vCloud is a specific public vCloud use case where the cloud is shared, and typically owned, by a group of organizations with a common set of requirements. In many cases, the organizations also include some level of legal separation. Community vCloud resources are shared, with some parts under central control and other parts with defined autonomy. A vCloud built for government, education, or healthcare might be an example of a community vCloud. A community vCloud can be offered by a traditional service provider, by a member of the community, or by a third-party vendor and hosted on one or more sites. It can be placed on-premise at one or more of the organizations’ sites, off-premise at a vCloud provider site, or both on- and off-premise.

Analyze a customer use case to determine how cloud computing can satisfy customer requirements.
- For this I would recommend you read the Service Definitions document from the vCAT as this covers all the definitions and how they map to customer requirements and fulfil these requirements. Also the VMware vCloud Implementation Examples document also from the vCAT shows you how varying implementations can benefit businesses in differing ways

Given a customer use case, determine the appropriate cloud computing model.
- This is one I feel you can only do once you have a firm understanding of the capabilities of all the different Cloud offerings and how each of them meet varying requirements and also have differing constraints/disadvantages.

May 13, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCDX Spotlight: Jonathan Kemp

Name: Jonathan Kemp

Twitter Handle: @ActuallyVirtual

Blog URL: http://www.actuallyvirtual.co.uk

VCDX #: 100

How did you get into using VMware?

It all started about April 2008 when the company was looking to setup a brand new branch office. This was for about 120 people and my first design brief was “Can we do anything interesting with virtual desktops?” At that point I had only been with the company 6 months and my virtualisation experience consisted of a MS Virtual PC machine I used to test SMS packages. I did a quick search on virtual desktops and came across VMware’s VDI 2.5 solution. I was able to setup a small test lab using a couple of desktops and an old server running a virtual iSCSI san appliance. Up to that point the company had run entirely traditional desktops and server environments with local storage.

Having proven that it was possible, the first design was a bit of a stab in the dark as far as requirements were concerned. I was able to get the company to send me on the VI 3.5 Fast Track course, which was really well done with a great trainer and great facilities to do the exercises on. This really helped with improving the desktop design and migrating our datacentre over to virtualisation.

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

It was after I took the VCP 3 that I read about the VCDX certification. I made the decision then that I wanted to work towards that goal although I knew it would take some time.

I attended the vSphere 4 Design Workshop course to get a better understanding of the method that should be used to design infrastructures. At that point with the newly released VCAP certificates being made available I really began working towards the VCDX goal I had set. I took the VCAP-DCD first as the design course was still fairly fresh in my mind and the DCA was the exam I was dreading the most (and still do). Once I had both of these under my belt it was really down to finding the ideal design to use for the VCDX itself, which took a little while.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

The whole journey took about 4 years, although in reality it was probably only the last two years that I was able to think of it as a possibility. I had read the blueprints for both the VCDX 3 and 4 and realised that I wasn’t going to be ready for 3 and needed a lot more practical experience for 4. I had got the pre-requisite certifications for VCDX 4 done by the end of 2011 and then it was down to choosing the right design to submit. This was the bit that took a bit of time as I wanted the submission to be as real a design as possible. Although a wholly fictitious design is possible, it is easier to defend decisions based on real requirements and constraints. Finally in August 2012 I had a design I felt was a good candidate with a few minor changes to cover the requirements in the blueprint. I spent about 3 weeks solidly working on completing the design documents to fit the requirements. I spent a lot of time reading the blogs of existing VCDX holders and the tips on the VMware site, trying to put all that advice into practice.

I submitted and defended the design at Barcelona in October 2012 and happily, along with seven others, received confirmation I had achieved VCDX about two weeks later.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

Firstly go for it. The whole process is worth it.

Lots of research. Read the experiences of others who have already been through the process, there is a wealth of advice out there. Also read the advice tips given on the VMware site, especially the tips on what not to do.

Read the blueprint. Read it again and then again. Make certain your design covers the objectives, adding to your original design if necessary.

Plan your time and then possibly double it to allow for unforeseen problems.

Peer review. Get as many people to read through your documents as possible and I would say get a mix of technical experts and non technical people. Can someone with little or no experience understand your design and see why they would implement your design? You may be asking them to make a big investment.

Run some mock defences. Again I would say try to include someone who is not technical on the panel. A non technical person may well ask you to explain something that a technical person will take for granted. Try and keep to the real time limits so you get a feeling for how quickly it passes. Remember you have to defend all aspects of the design so, for example, why did you do X? Could you have done Y differently?

Print your documents out and proof read them, both by yourself and someone else. Get yourself a red pen and be ruthless.

Finally, if you have the opportunity, attend a VCDX boot camp. I attended the one in Barcelona two days before my defence and I can say it made a huge difference on the day.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

Not much, knowing my own personality. I should have started the design submission documentation earlier and made time for a mock defence or two.

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it

The company, I think, is a little unsure of what it all means but my colleagues were certainly impressed. I am encouraging our other VCPs to begin the journey themselves and put the lessons I have learned into greater practice.

Was it worth it? Categorically yes. The process was, for me, more a personal goal rather than something I felt was professionally required. Had I not been successful at Barcelona then I would definitely have been back for another try.

May 8, 2013
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCDX Spotlight: James Charter

Name: James Charter

Twitter Handle: @DavesRant

Current Employer: Long View Systems

VCDX #: 106

How did you get into using VMware?

I first saw VMware Workstation 4 and was really impressed with what you could do with it. When we first adopted ESX 2.5 at my workplace I was totally hooked, and within a couple years was working as a consultant in the virtualization team at my current employer.

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

A friend I have a lot of respect for was pursuing it and I thought it was an interesting challenge. I applied to the VCDX3 program and completed the enterprise admin and enterprise design exams, and started refining an existing design I had completed for a client.

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

A couple of years. I was planning to apply for a VCDX3 defense, but with a young family I was finding it very challenging to make the deadline, and put it on hold. Some friends asked why I hadn’t picked it back up, so at VMworld 2012 I took a deep breath and said I would submit an application to defend at Partner Exchange.

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

Support is really important, and your family needs to be behind you, it’s a lot of work and time away from them. Employer and peer support is incredibly important and makes a huge difference. I was fortunate on all three counts.

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

I would have followed a more structured preparation plan and started earlier. I can’t stress that one enough, have a structured plan with contingency and follow it – life gets busy.

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it?

My company has been extremely supportive and believes in the value of investing in advanced certifications and training. It was definitely worth it, and has helped me advance my design and consulting skills. For our consulting practice it has changed the way we approach designs and solutioning

April 24, 2013
by Gregg Robertson 30 Comments

VCAP5-DCD Retake

This Monday I re-sat my VCAP5-DCD exam after having marginally failed it the first time in January this year. I wrote a fairly extensive blog posting about my opinions about the exam and the additional resources I planned to use. I would recommend people read that posting first if you haven’t as I still maintain 95% of the pieces I said and mentioned in there are true about the exam. This time I thankfully passed the exam and with not a bad score of 333 also.

Resources used:

For this attempt i did use a fair portion more resources and actually think I studied more this time than I did for my first attempt. I thought I would list the resources I used or re-used for this attempt and am planning on adding the resources mentioned here on my VCAP5-DCA & DCD Study Resources page if they aren’t mentioned on there already:

– I read the official VMware book Building a Virtual Datacenter to try help me get the holistic view and mentality you have to maintain during the build of a virtual datacenter and how every decision can have an impact on another portion of your environment and design. The book was really good and I would recommend it but I have to admit I did skip certain portions as I had covered them in books that had them covered much better and in more depth.

-I bought the kindle version of the new VMware vSphere Design book from Forbes Guthrie and Scott Lowe. I bought the kindle version as the paperback version wasn’t out in Europe for a while and my timeframes for studying were very tight. The book is utterly brilliant and covers both vSphere 5 and 5.1 and I would HIGHLY recommend it for the exam and anyone who works with VMware.

-As I stated I would, I read the VMware press book Managing and Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployments by Harley Stagner and Sean Crookston which helped me gain more knowledge around all the portions of a design and the link each component in the design has. The main piece from this book that i really liked was the operational portions as you can’t do a design without having the end goal and plan of it being able to run for a long time after you have left (if you are a consultant like I am).

-The main thing I really focused on was going through the whole vSphere Design workshop course notes, lab guides and answers to the lab guides and made sure I understood every single portion and why certain decisions were made by VMware in the completed designs of the labs. If you haven’t been on the course I would beg management to put you on it as it covers every portion you need to know for the exam and gives some great tips for the exam (no I cant tell you what these are)

Exam experience:

I was more nervous for this attempt than my first attempt as I really wanted to pass it this time as with having a five week old little one my studying schedule took a knock and I actually postponed the exam for two week later from it’s initial date due to not getting through portions I wanted before the attempt.

Once I got into the exam and started making my way through the questions with each question I felt I had got correct or very close to correct i became more and more confident. I also think i managed my time a bit better this time and wasn’t as overwhelmed by what they were asking of me. Before the exam starts they tell you how many visio style questions you are going to get so I wrote down the numbers (1-6 for me) and marked them out after each one so that I knew how my time management was going. I did have two drag and drop questions in my last three questions which used up my time and meant i only had around 8 minutes left by the time I completed the last question. The result came up and very quickly and I was in shock that it stated congratulations and actually started feeling dizzy after not having been able to eat much before the exam due to feeling sick from nerves and not having drank much as I knew I couldn’t afford toilet breaks.

Tips:

For this attempt i came across and learnt a few tips for the exam which helped me with the visio style questions and allowed me to be sure portions were connected correctly.

-There is a scissors icon beside the bin in the right hand bottom corner that allows you to cut a connector/connection you have made in error without moving loads of portions across the page by trying to move the connection to the bin. I did this drag and drop mistake a few times in my first attempt and it really hurt me as it moved portions off the screen and so meant I had to redo pieces.

-Make sure connections have stuck to boxes by carefully trying to move the box and seeing if the connector follows. This is related to the piece above and is a good tip to make sure you have connected the boxes correctly. Also make sure you connect the correct portions together as I noticed once or twice I didn’t click the correct piece and so the pieces I meant to have connected were actually not connected so be careful where you click.

-Do practice designs at home on paint or visio or even word to allow yourself to visualise how you would do different visio style designs scenarios so that when you are in the exam and maybe see one of them you know what your final designs should look like.

Conclusion/what’s next:

So now that I have both my VCAP5-DCA and DCD I can start designing my VCDX infrastructure and submit the design for defence for the VCDX5 accreditation. I still need to do some soul searching and decide when I want to submit as it’s a serious amount of work to complete all the required documents and my planned design is only about 60% where I want it to be before submitting it so I’m estimating around 40 hours of work to get it all ready which isn’t easy to find with a 5 week old, a full time job as a consultant and my sanity maintained. I will most likely slowly start building my design and documents and submit for PEX early next year although I may be drawn to do it sooner or later.

For those looking to do either of the exams I would recommend starting right away and also booking a date for it so that you are pushed to get through everything, the exams are very challenging but there are amazing resources out there which will help you gain the knowledge to pass the exam and with loads of lab time and practicing you can pass them. Good luck to all those who are preparing or looking to do the exams and hopefully my resources page and this blog help you.

Gregg

Impressions:

Usage & Allocation

Virtual Machines

Gateways

Networks

Knowledge

Identify discovery questions for a conceptual design (number of users, number of VMs, capacity, etc.)

Identify the effect of product architecture, capabilities, and constraints on a conceptual design.

Skills and Abilities

Relate business and technical requirements to a conceptual design.

Gather customer inventory data.

Determine customer business goals.

Identify requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions.

Given customer requirements and product capabilities, determine the impact to a conceptual design.

Tools

Skills and Abilities

Distinguish between virtualization, automation and cloud computing.

Distinguish between private, public, hybrid and community cloud computing.

Analyze a customer use case to determine how cloud computing can satisfy customer requirements.

Given a customer use case, determine the appropriate cloud computing model.

Name: James Charter

Twitter Handle: @DavesRant

Current Employer: Long View Systems

VCDX #: 106

How did you get into using VMware?

What made you decide to do the VCDX?

How long did it take you to complete the whole VCDX journey?

What advice would you give to people thinking of pursuing the VCDX accreditation?

If you could do the whole VCDX journey again what would you do differently?

Life after the VCDX? How did your company respond? Was it worth it?