TheSaffaGeek

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Tag Archives: VMware


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London VMUG

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend the London VMware User Group (VMUG). I’ve been unable to attend the past few due to work commitments but yesterdays theme of “Your Journey to the Cloud” couldn’t have come at a better time as we’re currently looking at VMware’s vCloud Director product and a number of the sessions and talk were centred around this product.

The day started at 10am due to the number of presentations they were able to get in and the labs that people were able to take. The labs were a first and ran two different paths. The two labs and layout were described on the VMUG page as:

The VMUG are providing VMware vCloud Director Labs for all UG members to get a look and feel for the product.  COLT has very kindly agreed to host the labs on their infrastructure in the Cloud.  COLT are a certified VMware vCloud Datacenter Services Provider and the first in EMEA to provide this service.  The COLT team along with VMware vCloud Architects have provided two types of labs to provide the best experience possible.

Lab A – Consuming Cloud resources from VMware vCloud Director
This lab is tailored to provide a user’s view of consuming compute resource from the cloud.  It provides an insight into the ability provide resources via a self-service portal deploying virtual machines via vApps within private virtual datacenters.

Lab B – Administrating VMware vCloud Director
This lab provides the administrators view of vCloud Director.  The lab contains a virtual center server, vCloud Director server and an ESX host to create compute resources within the cloud.  It provides the ability to define different compute services in the form of vApp’s which can then be published within the vCloud Catalogue.

I personally didn’t attend a lab due to my wanting to get a number of my questions around vCloud Director answered and due to my already having done all the vCloud related labs at VMworld Copenhagen and so having already done large portions of the steps within the labs. I did however hear raving reviews of the labs from fellow attendees and when I arrived there was a line of people waiting to register for the labs which shows the interest in the labs.

The day kicked off with the standard welcome from Alaric Davies and Martyn Storey detailing the layout of the day and announcing the UK National VMUG being planned for Warwick for November 3rd .We then got straight into the first presentation from COLT who were presenting and demoing all about their vCloud environment’s implementation and inner workings. Greg Branch, Director of Architecture for Colt and Dan Senior, Virtualisation Architect for Colt did the presentation and demo’s together and I was really impressed with their offering and how they have used the vCloud technologies and products to be the first in EMEA to be a VMware vCloud Datacenter Services Provider.

Next was Paul Martin (@vzpaul) from Quest Software talking about “Private Cloud – Build for Success by Planning for Failure”. Pauls presentation was all about thinking and planning for things before and during the build out of your Private Cloud. Paul did leave me with a number of thoughts and things I need to research prior to us rolling out our own private cloud and how many differing parts of your environment can impact the running of it. Credit to Paul for not doing a marketing pitch for Quest software but rather giving valid points to look out for.

We then had a very quick refreshment break and then Simon Rahilly of EMC (@NoneOneMany) did his presentation all about the cloud and how the varying technologies from EMC from the storage, to backups to disaster recovery and high availability can help you with your journey to the cloud. I personally enjoyed the presentation and it was nice to hear a bit about the release of EMC’s Project Lightning also.

Lunch was then served at the event which was a very nice change as it meant everyone stayed in the rooms and I got to meet loads of people I follow on twitter and got to talk about all the things we’re currently doing in our VMware environments and gain some very helpful tips and tricks.

We were then given the option of two different tracks, each with different speakers and topics. I personally chose track two as I’ve always enjoyed hearing from Stuart Radnidge ( @vinternals ) and was keen to listen to Massimon Re Ferre’s presentation on the same track also. Stuart’s presentation was all about Rethinking Infrastructure and the experiences he has had with deploying a private cloud within his organisation. For anyone that knows Stuart you knew this was going to be a straight talking honest presentation and he didn’t disappoint as he gain some great pointers on how the business will ask for certain things and will expect things from your cloud implementation even though you “aren’t a web start-up”.

Next was Massimo (@mreferre )  who is a VMware vCloud Architect talking about vCloud and giving an overview of all the products in the “vCloud Family” and how each of them work. His presentation was very helpful to me to better understand vCloud Director and most importantly allowed me to ask all the questions I have been needing to ask about vCloud Director. I’m pleased to say Massimo and Martyn answered all my questions Smile

Last in the track was Richard Zuber from VMware Global Support talking about support issues they have been receiving from customers using vCloud Director and the solutions they used to fix the problems. The presentation was a little dull as hearing about support calls and solutions isn’t the most exciting of things but it did show that making sure your networking is correctly administered and deployed for your vCloud implementation is very important in making sure you don’t experience problems and faults.

We were all then released to go to The Pavilion End pub for vBeers and I got to talk shop with fellow VMware Admins and met Julian Wood (@Julian_wood) of http://www.wooditwork.com fame, David Owen (@vMackem) of http://www.vmackem.co.uk fame, Simon Davies (@EV_Simon) of http://www.everything-virtual.com fame,Luke Munro (@mnrmunro) a fellow Saffa and Ed Grigson (@egrigson) of http://www.vExperienced.co.uk fame to name but a few.

It was an amazing day and I would highly recommend anyone thinking of attending to register for the next one on July  14th. Also a special thanks to Jane Rimmer (@Rimmergram) for her hard work on getting this all done and then not being able to attend due to being ill.

Gregg


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VMworld Sessions Public Voting Now Open

Just a very quick posting to alert anyone that hasn’t noticed that the public voting for VMworld 2011 sessions is now open. Unfortunately I personally couldn’t get a good enough idea down to submit a session myself like I had hoped I would but from the amount of talk of it on twitter already today it looks like loads of the top people in the industry have submitted quite a few and they have all been approved to go through to the public voting phase.

To be able to vote you will need to have a VMworld account, which you should have already since I’m sure you’ll have all been watching all the previous VMworld session videos to hone your skills and knowledge. There are a substantial amount of sessions to select from once you have logged into the session selection page so I would recommend using the search options and selecting the kinds of sessions you would like to see to try save you time

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Good luck to all those who have got their sessions approved and hopefully all the sessions I’ve voted for will get through.

Gregg


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All Things Virtual 22

 

Yet again I’ve been a bit slack on my posting of an All Things Virtual every fortnight (a personal aim I made for myself) due to a few things namely, any blog site/twitter/nonstandard website being blocked due to heightened security at EMC after the RSA break in, my studying and sitting of the EMC Information Storage Management exam and good old work keeping me busy. Also the increase in my studying for the VCAP-DCA has meant a large portion of my spare time has been allocated to it.

A few of the below articles are a few weeks old but are still very applicable and ones I have been reading with interest and are ones I believe fellow virtualisation professionals will find interest and informative, which is the idea of these All Things Virtual postings.

As I mentioned in my reasons for the delay of this All Things Virtual, I set myself the goal of obtaining my EMC Information Storage Associate accreditation by sitting the EMCISM exam. I won’t go into detail about this as I have already done a posting all about the exam and my preparations and study resources here for anyone thinking of attempting the exam themselves. I will say though that it was something different to learn as I’ve never done a storage course or exam before and it did help me solidify a lot of knowledge I have learnt via work experience.

Early last week the applications for vExpert 2011 were opened and unlike years before VMware have now asked that everyone submit their own applications so VMware can get a better idea of your contributions to the community in 2010. I’m not going to go into depth about the process and criteria as I’ve already done a posting all about it, where you should apply and nominate someone for the award here. Good luck if you are applying.

As I’ve posted a number of times on this blog I try to attend and participate in the London VMware User Group’s whenever they are happening. I haven’t been able to attend the last few due to work commitments unfortunately but the next London VMUG has been announced and so far it looks like I’ll be able to attend. This VMUG is a bit different from the rest as it is aimed at “Your Journey to the Cloud” with live labs and differing tracks for you to do during the day. Chris Dearden of JFVI fame was the first person I noticed to have blogged about it so if you’re interested in attending or learning more then have a read of his London VMUG–May 12th 2011 “Your Journey to the Cloud” blog posting and hopefully I’ll see you there.

As mentioned in my previous All Things Virtual Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks fame and Frank Denneman have released an HA DRS book. For those of us who are a bit geeky and would rather have a kindle version of it, the Kindle version has now been released and is available for download. Frank has detailed the release of the kindle version on his blog posting here

One of the latest announcements from VMware is the release of VMware Cloud Foundry. I was fortunate enough to attend a fair portion of the VMware Communities Roundtable call where it was announced and detailed but seeing as I have yet to play with it and that talkshoe kept crashing me out of the call, I would recommend watching Eric Sloof’s video on Getting Started with VMware Cloud Foundry just like I will be when I have an opportunity and listen to last weeks VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast.

Another of the fairly recent announcements was the release of VMware vCentre Operations, a tool you can deploy into your VMware environment via a vApp downloadable from the VMware site which is supposedly going to be “Your Future Performance Dashboard” I am yet to have a chance to play with the product but Eric Sloof has yet again done a great posting on the product in his posting vCenter Operations – Your Future Performance Dashboard and Christian Mohn of vNinja.net and most recently vNinja.com fame has done a brilliant posting all about Installing and configuring VMware vCenter Operations

Next is the leak of a number of the VMware vSphere 5 future technologies and features. I saw loads of the tweets about this as it was announced that someone had posted these but due to the location of them, I decided against trying to access the link. Beth Pariseau from SearchServerVirtualization.com was happy enough to access the site and has listed all the features mentioned by the leak and given a description of them on her blog posting here. There are some very exciting features mentioned and I hope a number of them are true as they could really help make my daily job a lot easier and the running of my virtual environments a lot smoother. vSphere 5 is as you should know by now only going to have ESXi as vSphere 4.1 was/is the last release containing ESX. To help with this transition and the learning of all the features of ESXi, VMware have released a free VMware eLearning course and ebook offer. The course is an online one which people can obviously attend in their own time and once you have completed the course and done the quick survey you can obtain the free ebook all about ESXi. I’m planning to try doing the course in the coming weeks and getting myself the free ebook clip_image001

Vladan Seget has posted all about the release of the next version of the vSphere4.1 Hardening guide. As I mentioned in my VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course Experience posting, a large portion of the course is based around this Security Hardening guide and so this new version with feedback from the community is a must read for anyone looking to do the VCAP exams. I’ve already downloaded my copy. Talking of security Eric Siebert has written a great article on five ways to maximize VMware hypervisor security . A number of them should be obvious to people but as Eric mentions I’m sure a large amount of people have made their environments less secure by making changes to allow them to access their servers more easily and then have forgotten to re-enable those security features. The article is a must read for anyone looking after a VMware environment.

Lastly are two postings asking for the participation of the VMware community. One is from Duncan Epping asking people to fill out a survey all about virtual machine storage and snapshots and the other is a posting by Scott Lowe asking for the communities input in answering a reader’s design question. The survey is really quick and will help VMware better understand people’s needs and the design question should hopefully give those of us with less experience in the designing of VMware environments a better understanding of the things to know and think about in our designs

Gregg


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vExpert 2011 applications now open

 

A very quick posting to alert people who may not have seen it announced on twitter by John Troyer that the 2011 vExpert nominations and applications are now open. The vExpert 2011 is based on the amount you gave back to the VMware community in 2010. So if you have done really well this year but didn’t do much last year then you will only be able to add that to next year’s application obviously.

The vExpert, for anyone that doesn’t know it is “a way for VMware to acknowledge and help those who ‘go the extra mile’ and give back to the VMware user community by sharing their expertise and time. vExperts are bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise.”  Unlike last year VMware now want everyone to put in an application for themselves so that VMware can get a good idea of your participation in the community and the things you have contributed to it in 2010. There is also the nomination forms like normal where you nominate people who you feel deserve to be a vExpert.

So go apply if you feel you deserve to be in contention to be a vExpert and good luck to everyone applying.

Gregg


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VMware vSphere client for iPad app released

The VMware vSphere client for iPad app has now been released. The first person I noticed to mention it on twitter and with an extremely in-depth blog posting covering it all was Jason Boche  (@jasonboche) in his Free VMware vSphere Client for iPad Available, even beating Scott Herrod VMware’s CTO to the punch(on the twitter announcement at least).

Jason has done such a great job covering it as has Eric Sloof in his VMware vSphere Client for iPad – Control your datacenter from the couch posting that I won’t even bother trying to cover all the features and rather just tell you to read through their blog posting like I have and will repeatedly today Smile

The app can be downloaded from the Apple App store although a number of people are stating it doesn’t show up but John Troyer (@jtroyer) has alerted people to the fact that the “ vSphere Client for iPad can take a few hours to show up in search, but here’s the direct link: http://bit.ly/igaqQP “. I’ve already downloaded mine and hope to be doing all my vCentre work via it today so I can used to how it all works.

Have fun playing

Gregg

*Update* You will need to download the vCMA to be able to use the iPad app to access your vCentre. It can be downloaded from here http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vcma and the guys from VMGuru.nl have done a great posting on how to set it all up here


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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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All Things Virtual 21

 

I have been slacking on my All Things Virtual postings for the past few months due partly to me just being a bit lazy if I’m honest and due to my focusing a lot of my spare time after work on my EMC and VMware studies(blogs forthcoming). Due to the rate of new blogs coming out and things changing so fast, a large portion of the blogs I had on my list of things to read and thereby be in line to be included in this posting have now become obsolete/old news so my list was culled and is now a current as is possible.

First thing is a little bit of a plug of my VCAP-DCA & DCD resources page and a big thanks to a few people who have helped it gain so much traffic/views. The page has been receiving an overwhelming amount of views(at least in my eyes) and this is mainly down to many of the top people in the virtualisation industry very kindly pointing to it in their blog postings about the exams. So a big thank you to

Speaking of the VCAP exams and preparations for it, I was fortunate enough to attend the  VMware vSphere: Manage for Performance Course and wrote up my experiences of the course for anyone thinking of attending the course. One of the topics of conversation was how the impact of virus scans in your virtual environment can impact the performance of your environment drastically especially if all your virus scans kick off at the same time. Richard Garsthagen has posted a brilliant little blog posting this week all about Security designed for virtualization and how Trend Micro’s new product DeepSecurity 7.5 is using the newly available EPSEC API to save you having these performance hits and has added the performance benchmarks to prove. it

Next is the announcement of the soon to be released and much anticipated PowerCLIBook by industry experts Luc Dekens,Alan Renouf,Arnim van Lieshout, Glenn Sizemore and Jonathan Medd. For anyone remotely using PowerCLI they will know these guys are some of the best if not the best in the industry when it comes to PowerCLI and so this book is being tipped as the perfect book to use to teach yourself everything you need to know about using PowerCLI in the VCAP-DCA exam and to obviously help you build up your knowledge before the release of vSphere 5(or whatever it may be named). I’ve already pre-ordered my copy and will be using this book cover to cover before my VCAP-DCA exam and to teach myself PowerCLI.

Eric Horschman has done a brilliant posting on the VMware Blog pages all about Hypervisor Memory Management Done Right which is  brilliantly written and a perfect reference article for memory management and how it all works and what the kinds of impacts mismanagement can cause in your virtual environment. I’m still slowly reading through it myself and trying to apply some of the best practices into my own environments.This posting is a MUST read for anyone looking after a VMware environment or looking to build one.

The VMworld Europe dates and venue have now been announced and you can sign up to be notified when registrations open for it and the US event. I was very fortunate to attend last year and hopefully I’ll be approved to attend again. My aim this year (a rod for my own back comes to mind at this point) is to try have a session approved for VMworld Europe this year and to present it at VMworld Europe. I’ve decided to do this as I feel it’s a good thing to aim for seeing as the people I look up to in the industry and who I would like to be one day are obviously people who are doing these kinds of sessions and it will hopefully push me to try be a better presenter and hopefully advance my knowledge and skills. Now to just think of something to do for my session…

As I said at the start of this posting I’m busy doing some EMC studies and to not get into specifics seeing as I’m a bit superstitious and I’d like to save it for my planned blog posting one of the reasons for doing it is to hopefully prepare myself for the recently released EMC Cloud Architect certification. Chuck Hollis from EMC posted this past week an update for the certification detailing that the courses are now in full production and has linked to a few testimonials of people who have already attended some of the courses. The courses look really good and even if you feel cloud is just a buzz word at the moment I’d still encourage you to have a look at the certifications and Chucks blog postings about them before writing them off.

Scott Drummonds posted a twitter message this week asking for help finding whitepapers on the subject of VMware environments networking best practices. True to form the community responded and Scott has blogged about all the resources he was pointed to. It’s a great resource for all the VMware networking “best practices” and will prove to be a time saver for anyone needing to source this information for VMware builds. I’ve added it to my “VMware Design Best Practices” bookmarks already.

Last but not least is a blog posting by the infamous Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com fame all about managing the availability of your environment through vCentre alarms. I blogged a while back 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. Both are a definite must read especially if you aren’t currently using custom alarms in your environment. My favourite one at the moment is an alarm to alert you when snapshots get over a certain size which has saved me loads of headaches. There’s a great VMware KB article all about how to set this alarm up and even includes a very helpful video if you’ve never done custom alarms before. 

Well that’s my list of things that have interested me in the last week, for those people writing the VCAP exams soon good luck

 

Gregg


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VMware View 4.5 client hangs on connecting

Just a very quick posting on a problem I experienced late last year and have been meaning to post a blog posting on it to hopefully save someone the time i spent trying to work it out.

Late last year I had been battling to connect to our test VMware View 4.5 environment and couldn’t work out the reasons why. Each time I tried to connect to the environment the client would just sit on the connecting phase of the login whereas for my colleagues they could connect perfectly fine.After over a week of speaking with the networking guys and trying loads ideas I decided to do what I should have done in the first place and Google search the problem. Google found me a posting on the VMware communities and the solution right at the bottom of the first page was on the money as I had recently installed Internet Explorer 9 beta and doing the compatibility “fix” did the trick and got it all working again. So if you’ve installed IE9 beta and now your VMware View client just hangs on connecting you know why and how to fix it now

I haven’t tested with VMware View 4.6 so I’m not sure if this will/still apply to it.

Gregg


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vBeers–3rd March 2011

 

Just a very quick reminder that next week Thursday evening is the next instalment of the London vBeers. My aim is to actually try make this one and hopefully meet up with some familiar faces and hopefully some new ones.

If you’ve never heard of vBeers before here is the “official” definition of vBeers:

vBeers is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT.  It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.

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The following is quoted from Simon Seagrave’s Website :

Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers!

vBeers[7]Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink?  If so, then vBeers is for you!  This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…

vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.

The London vBeers meet-up is held at the lovely ole English pub, ‘The Cittie of Yorke’.  Details and directions below:

vBeers - Cittie of York
When & Where

The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks.

Location: The ‘Cittie of Yorke’, London

Address: 22 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6BS

Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane

Date: First Thursday of every month

Time: 6:00pm

Ye Olde Map: (click to enlarge)

vBeers

Gregg Robertson


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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