VM /ETC

Archive for December, 2009

VMware has extended it’s previous deadline for upgrading to VCP4 certification until the end of January 2010. Previosuly, VMware admins already holding VCP3 certification had until December 31, 2009 to upgrade to VCP4 without being required to sit (and pay for) an additional course on vSphere 4. In conjunction with the new deadline, VMware has also extended the 2 For 1 VCP-410 test re-take offer. Candidates who enroll in the Second Shot program with Pearson Vue and take their first exam before January 15, 2010 can take the exam again at no charge if needed.

The following information was taken from the VMware Certification page:

In order to accommodate participants that despite best efforts were unable to schedule their exam prior to the deadline, VMware will continue accepting the VCP3 certification as a qualification to take the VCP4 exam without requiring attending the ‘What’s New" class through January 31st 2010. We fully expect that the additional four weeks will allow remaining participants ample time to find a testing center with available seating, and will NOT be extending the deadline any further, so please take advantage of this opportunity! Regards, The VMware Technical Certification Team

Become a VCP4. Free 2nd Shot Opportunity!

VMware is allowing participating candidates who fail a VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4 exam (exam code – VCP410) to have a free re-take. To participate you must enroll prior to taking your first attempt and no later than January 15th, 2010. You will receive a registration confirmation for a class. You will receive additional information on the date and at the time indicated in your registration. You should wait to register with Pearson VUE until you have received the additional information.

Click here to enroll in the 2nd Shot Program. Vouchers will only be sent to those who have completed the prerequisites for VCP4 (see below). Please direct any questions about this program to certification@vmware.com. You must take your first exam on or before January 22nd to allow for the 7 day wait between attempts.

Visit www.PearsonVUE.com/VMware/Upgrade for the full list of participation instructions. If you have previously enrolled in the 2nd Shot Program and already received your voucher, the expiration has been automatically extended.

Check out this previous VM /ETC post for a quick list of links to help you prepare for the VCP-410 exam.

How to increase the number of simultaneous VMotions of guests allowed between VMware ESX hosts has been covered many times already. In fact, check out the following blog posts on this topic for extra information and insight not provided here.

• Increase Simultaneous VMotions as well as Increase Performance
• Guest blog entry: VMotion performance » broche.net – VMware …
• VMware Communities: ESX Tips: Increase number of VMotions per host
• Increase number of VMotions per host

One possible scenario for changing this setting would be to temporarily increase VMotions allowed in order to evacuate ESX hosts within a short maintenance window. I prefer to leave the setting at the default, so for this scenario be sure to change it back after the maintenance is complete. if you read the links provided above, others suggest they have changed the settings permanently.

This rest of this post contains a cut and paste of the steps necessary to make the configuration change with a brief explanation about setting the appropriate value. I am pasting from a VMware Partner PDF communication assembled by Michael White, VMware engineer.

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Forget the feature matrix with all the check marks. Forget the price comparison and the price per virtual machine or cost per application. For the sake of consideration, assume an “apples to apples” scenario and focus on VMware and Microsoft virtualization solutions, vSphere Enterprise (or Plus) and Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V, as production implementation projects. Put yourself in the shoes of someone responsible for implementing both virtual infrastructures and following best practices. Forget bias. Forget allegiance. Build the best virtual infrastructure design based on the prerequisites and requirements of each solution. Build it with the best interest of the company who will administer and support it going forward.

There is a lot to consider in the first paragraph, and as any consultant would say, the final decision depends on what other objectives the solution will need to satisfy besides just serving as server infrastructure. Again, for the sake of consideration, I’m going to zoom in on the server infrastructure and leave the “other” out of the implementation.

Again, for the sake of consideration, can the difference between choosing to implement production virtual infrastructure with VMware or Microsoft be simplified to a aligning with either companies strategic vision? I’ll attempt to make that case in this post.

For the sake of being open and honest before I continue, I’ll state up front that I personally have yet to implement a production Hyper-V environment, but as a consulting engineer working for a large Microsoft partner, I’ve sat in certification training, experimented a little in the home lab, and have been looking very closely at the implementation services needed to deploy Hyper-V for customers recently.

This post holds my thoughts on some major implementation differences as I understand them today. Please point out where I have missed the mark or help me consider other factors that I may have missed.
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The GestaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD) is the gift that keeps on giving! From now until the end of the year (2009), VM /ETC readers can use the promotional code BRAMBLEY when buying a Drobo from Data Robotics and receive a discount.

For those that don’t already know about Drobo storage and the BeyondRaid technology, I posted about the Data Robotics TFD presentation a few weeks ago.

When you are ready to purchase just go to the Data Robotics store. The VM /ETC reader code is good until the end of the year (2009) and offers the following discounts:

Drobo $50 off <> Drobo S $75 off <> DroboPro $150 off <> DroboElite $350 off

Just enter BRAMBLEY in the Promotional Code field when placing your order.

For the record, I have not received any compensation for this post nor will I receive compensation from the use of this code. Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Shortly after VMworld  I posted about my experience using vCloud Express. One of the things that I expected to see but found missing from the solution was the ability to perform virtual machine (VM) uploads and downloads between my own vSphere infrastructure and the hosted VMware environment. To be able to move my workloads (running on VMware VMs) from my private data center to the cloud or visa versa was an expectation I had based on the federated and private cloud discussions I’ve listened to over the past year. I expected to be able to at least manually export or import an OVF, but unfortunately did not find that capability while testing.

Before continuing allow me the liberty to reference a common expression - Can’t see the forest for the trees:

“An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole”

VMware has created the opposite scenario described in this expression with their concept of the Cloud. That is, VMware has allowed us to visualize what the forest will be before we have the trees. Of course, they had to. Was anyone besides Amazon talking Cloud before that, and if they were, was anyone even considering allowing companies to create their own internal clouds? I’d have to say VMware put the concept in my head. All I can say for sure is that I know I wasn’t listening to Cloud discussions before VMworld 2008.

Getting back to my vCloud Express testing and expectations, I was finally looking at the trees instead of the forest. I have since found some interesting information about how these trees are growing (if you will). To complete my reference, some of the details about VM transfer between private and public clouds are revealed by a VMware project has been privately referred to as Project Redwood. Read the rest of this entry »

vCenter Client Shortcuts by Bouke Groenescheij is post worth book marking by VMware admins who want to speed up their administration and management of vSphere. Check out the entire post for many, many more shortcuts than those listed here, but I am high-lighting some of the key navigational shortcuts for my own reference later (and making sure I have a backup link to Groenescheij’s post!).

The following screen shots show the Ctrl+Shift keystroke combinations to move between the most common VI Client management views:

Other Ctrl+Shift Navigational shortcuts Read the rest of this entry »

Surely you’ve heard about Drobo by now? As the presenter in the last slot of the GetsaltIT Tech Field Day (TFD) schedule a few weeks ago,  Data Robotics was probably the most anticipated session by my fellow Delegates. I’ll admit, I had heard enough about the technology during the 2 day event that I was looking forward to the presentation as well. Data Robotics did not disappoint. Evidence can be seen in the enthusiasm expressed in the various posts and videos published since that session.

As always, I’ll leave the deep technical details of Drobo’s unique and patented Drobo BeyondRaid technology to my fellow storage bloggers and stay focused on how Data Robotics fits in virtual infrastructure. In this post I expand a little on why the Drobo storage device is a VMware HCL certified, simple to implement and expand iSCSI SAN targeted for SMB customers that is an exciting alternative. Finally I offer opinions based primarily on my virtualization server administrator perspective.
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