Everything-Virtual

Category: VMware

  • VMware Academy Training Experience – vSphere 6 ICM Course with 360GSP

    Over the years I have 360gspexperienced a lot of VMware training, whether that’s been with a VMware VATC (VMware Approved Training Centre), Directly with VMware or via the VMware Academy route.

    My previous VCP 4 and 5 training has been carried out via the Academy route and rarely differed from the usual VATC provided training, the only difference between the Academy and VATC’s in the past was that the Academy could offer weekend training dates and also lasted 8 days instead of the usual 5 days.

    In previous times training with an Academy still meant that you had to sign up for the class on the MyLearn VMware site, had to attend all the lessons and be signed off the class by the instructor, you also received a heavily discounted voucher for the VCP exam and a reasonable time to sit that exam. Again training with a VATC only provided the course attendance and no discounted VCP voucher. This time around I discovered that there has been a change to the way that the course attendance is marked and also an additional benefit that all students should use to aid in their study and understanding of the technology.

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  • V-locity 5 Install and Configuration

    So I was recently offered the chance to test drive V-locity 5 to see how it compared against the previous V-locity VM product that I tested nearly two years ago, one of the big differences between the two products is that this time I am using the V-locity Management Console (VMC) as my centralised management and deployment tool.

    This post covers the installation and configuration of the VMC and the deployment of agents via it.

    One of the first things I noticed after downloading the installation file from the Condusiv Technologies website was that the new package came in quite a lot smaller in size than the previous version, I mean like about 50% smaller, now considering this includes the VMC as well as the V-locity package you have to hand it to the developers with regards to size reduction.

    Supported Platforms for the VMC and V-locity agents, as you can see you’re not restricted to either physical or virtual for either the VMC or agents.

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  • VCP5-DCV (VCP550) Exam Blueprint Downloadable Documents Bundle

    As preparation for my VCP5-DCV (VCP-550) study Guide I downloaded all of the documents mentioned in the blueprint and decided to put them in to an easily downloadable bundle for everyone else to download.

    The zip file contains folders for each objective and contains some duplications but for the most part shared files for each objective can be found under the common files folder in that objective folder.

    The file can be downloaded here

  • Creating a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template – Updated for Deployment Fix

    I have created a new post here that details the most up to date information for CentOS 7.x Templates.

     

    I have documented how to create a CentOS 7 VMware Gold Template for all the non-Linux admins out there. centos7

    Following the instructions below will yield a template ready for future installs that ensures you can deploy at speed.

    All told this should take no longer than 15 minutes to complete.

    I have amended the post with details on how to fix the guest customisation issues that I was experiencing before.

    I can now successfully deploy new VM’s from the template.

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  • VMware Certification 2015 Road Map

    With the release of vSphere 6 yesterday VMware have now also released their road map for 2015 on their certification offerings.

    As expected there is the new VCP6 DCV exam but it’s also no surprise that the recently announced VCIX has made further in roads and replaced the VCAP exams across the board.

    We also see a renaming of both the Cloud Certification and Desktop Tracks, these are now known as the CMA (Cloud Management & Automation) and DTM (Desktop & Mobility) Tracks respectively.

     

    Cert_Roadmap_2015Q1_v5_final_WEB

    More information can be found at https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=62402&ui=www_cert#key

  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – One or more ports are experiencing network contention

    Having installed vRealize Operations Manager a couple of times recently in my home lab I came across an error that initially caused me to rip out the lab and build it again changing the way my networking was being done. Why? Well the following error was being presented to me when I logged in to the Operations Manager console.

    2015-01-24_21-13-16

    In a home lab environment this confused me because, well it’s a home lab environment and there wasn’t a lot going on (I had 5 VMs running across three hosts at the time).

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  • SanDisk Cruzer Fit – Write Protect on ESXi 5.x – Fix

    I recently came across an issue with my home lab that indicated I had an issue with my Cruzer Fit going to a Write Protect mode, doing a search online showed that a number of people were also exhibiting the same kinds of issues but this wasn’t being restricted to SanDisk Fit drives.

    I have been a fan of the Cruzer Fit for a while now, it’s sleek size meant that prying little fingers (I have a two year old who loves to investigate) can’t pull it out and lose it and it looks great on the front of my Shuttle SH63H3 cases so I was a bit alarmed to realise that I may have to replace these with another brand of drive that may not offer me the same flush fit as the Cruzer Fit.

    One thing I have to mention is that my usual method of installing ESXi in to my lab environment usually involves using VMware Workstation to create a VM, attaching a USB drive to the laptop and then attaching that to the VM, hey presto you have a readily available way of installing ESXi on to a system that doesn’t have a CD\DVD drive fitted. The reason I mention this will become clearer later on in the article.

    Now I should mention that the original lab build was done on VMware ESXi 5.1 and I blogged about how to upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 here, during that time I haven’t really had much need to make changes to my ESXi environment and didn’t take note as to if\when the SanDisk Cruzer Fit drives I was using in my environment went to read-only but I know it has to have been after the 5.5 upgrade.

    Now how did I know that the drives had gone to a write protect mode? well carry on after the break to find out.

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  • vRealize Operations Manager 6 – Initial vCenter Configuration

    In previous posts I have demonstrated the installation and initial configuration for the vRealize Operations Manager 6 installation. At the end of the last post we were left at the log on screen to continue the configuration.

    image

    Log in with the admin user and password and let’s continue after the break to configure vRealize Operations Manager.

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  • My NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [v6.0] Experiences

    nsxThis past week I was fortunate enough to have attended the VMware NSX 6.0 Install Configure, Manage (ICM) course run by VMware at the Global Knowledge offices in London. The instructor for the course was the great Paul McSharry, author and fellow vExpert so I knew we were in good hands from an instructor point of view.

    The course is designed as a 5 day course but in actual fact I believe that the course could have been run over 4 days instead – especially with decent working labs.. more on that one later.

    One of the things concerning me from talking to a colleague of mine who recently sat and passed the VMware NSX VCIX exam was that this was definitely more networking orientated than I was used to and I wondered if this was the right course for me, it’s definitely aimed at guys with decent networking backgrounds (and in fact it was recommended that I also look at the Cisco CCNA Data Centre as an exam to help broaden my experience with data centre networking).

    In hindsight I would have been better off to have sat through the VMware Network Virtualisation Fundamentals and the Pluralsight VMware NSX for vSphere – Introduction and Installation courses prior to attending but obviously hindsight is a wonderful thing Smile

    The course was pretty much broken down to a 50/50 split of instructor led and hands on lab sessions and this is where things started to fall down Sad smile.

    VMware have decided to take the newer VMware training away from the VATCs and host it themselves, so instead of utilising the training providers vSphere infrastructure you’re using VMware’s Labs, which in the case of the NSX course appear to be US based (anyone who has done the VCAP Admin exams will have experienced the laggy environments before). US based Labs aren’t such a bad thing if you’re not running 3 or 4 concurrent training courses around the world. In our case we were not only contending with our own local students but also students from other classes around the world (at least 3 NSX ICM courses were being run this week in Europe).

    With multiple courses being run concurrently speed and reliability of the lab environments left a lot to be desired, in fact we tended to find that the instructor led portion of our training was carried out in the morning to see if the other classes who finished before us meant we had a better responding lab environment (it didn’t).

    Next up was the age and reliability of the environment, I understand that the NSX: ICM [v6.0] course is being run on 6.0 of the NSX product and not on the newer 6.1 release (with 6.1 having been released back on the 11th of September and 6.1.2 having been released on the 4th of December) I would have liked to have seen the course updated to a newer release of the 6.0 track instead of running on 6.0.2, especially as there were issues highlighted back in July 2014 on the Beta courses that are still active now.

    Finally my lab experienced a failure that would have taken longer to fix (remove all the NSX components, create a new standard switch, migrate off the distributed switch, delete and recreate the whole kit and caboodle again) so I had to start using a fresh lab, oh and this was on day 3 of 5 so whilst my peers were doing labs 10+ I had to start again from lab 1 and that unfortunately meant I struggled for the rest of the course (I was doing lab 13 when I decided to call it a day at the end of the course on day 5).

    All in all of the 14 students on my course not one of them went a day without some kind of performance issue, luckily I was the only to experience a complete lab failure so I was the only one who didn’t actually manage to finish the labs.

    Final thoughts were that this really should still have been classified as a beta course (it wasn’t) because the course was quite possibly the worst performing course I have attended in a while (even worse than the vCloud Director 1.5 course I attended that was nearly cancelled 50% of the way through due to poor performance) and as such I hope that VMware improve their offering for future delegates because I know that we weren’t the only course to have experienced issues (and not just this time either).

    I will be posting more material covering my experiences with the VCP-NV as I plan on taking that quite soon

  • From Techie to Manager – A new career direction

    I have been fairly quiet with the blog over the last couple of months due to things going on in my life both professionally as well as personally.

    For the last two years I have been attached to a Project Team that was focusing on Dev workloads utilising various VMware technologies, as the technologies have matured and the likes of VCHS have come around the idea of running these workloads on-premise have changed to the idea of running them off-premise and using the on-premise infrastructure to run production based workloads instead. The move to a Production ready state has meant changes within the team and one of those changes was the need to create the role of Cloud Services Operations Manager.

    As a senior engineer within the Cloud Operations Team I like being technical, the technologies I work with are some of the most bleeding edge around (when VMware whistle when they see what my colleagues are doing with the products you know we are doing some amazing work) so I was a bit surprised when asked recently why I hadn’t put myself forward for the new manager position. I didn’t see myself as a manager but the more I thought about it and the more I talked to friends and family the more I realised that actually there was no real reason why I couldn’t be a manager and that it was basically the next logical step in my career path.

    So I made the decision to apply for the role, something completely different for me but offering new challenges than the ones I face as a techy. As a hands on techy I know that I will want to get involved with the day to day technology but as a manager I know that I have to take a step back and actually trust in the team around me that they can get the job done without me micro-managing them constantly, I also understand that as a manager the only way I am going to keep my head in the game is to carry on with my home lab and use that to keep me up to date on all the new technologies around the VMware Stack.

    I am thankful that my company has given me this opportunity and I hope to prove to everyone (me included) that actually you can move from being a techy to that of successful manager Smile