With my recent migration away from Windows to Ubuntu I decided to install VMware player to my machine, unfortunately this isn’t as straight forward as it is under Windows but it’s actually not too difficult if you follow these instructions.
First of all download VMware Player from the VMware site (registration is required but it’s free anyway).
The VCA4-DT exam has been out for a while now and whilst there still isn’t a required attendance on a course there also isn’t a great deal of training material out there for the exam.
The following material can be used to aid your study for the exam, it’s important to note that the VCA4-DT exam covers View 4.6 so in your preparation please make sure you’re evaluating View 4.6 and not View 5.0.
White Papers and Blue Print
Your first port of call should be the following VMware documentation.
VMware VCA4-DT Blue Print 1.3
VMware View 4.6 Administration Guide
VMware View 4.6 Installation Guide
Evaluation Software
Downloading the trial for View 4.6 directly from VMware currently only works if you’re already licensed for it so I have provided an alternative download location for the 4.6.0 software here.
View Composer 2.6.0-349155
View Connection Server x86-64 4.6.0-366101
View Client x86-x64 4.6.0-366101
View Client x86 4.6.0-366101.exe
View Client with local mode x86-64 4.6.0-366101
View Client for Mac – 4.6.0-366101
Additional Training Material
There are a number of additional guides out there that can be useful to help train you further in the use of VMware View 4.5 \ 4.6, the following book should be considered if you want to further your knowledge for the VCA4-DT
Administrating VMware View 4.5 – Authors Edition by Mike Laverick – I spoke with Mike at the last VMUG and asked for his permission to link the book from my site.
TrainSignal VMware View 4 Administration Training training by Brian Knudtson.
Finally
Have a look over on the VMware VCA4-DT website for links to the mock exam and community forums.
Good luck
The 2nd #LonVMUG is nearly upon us (Thursday 17th May 2012), the agenda has been decided and it looks to be a cracking one again.
The #LonVMUG is being held at The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 33 Queen Street, London, EC4R 1AP
I was recently asked to list the current VMware certification offerings over on the Certforums website and decided that it can’t hurt to have them listed over here as well.
VMware have a number of different exam \ certification paths open to individuals now, however initially they only offered a single certification and that was the VCP (VMware Certified Professional), over the years the certification offerings from VMware have grown to where we are currently.
The following certifications are currently or will be shortly available from VMware, some of these courses have strict class requirements whereas some of them don’t.
In my last post I mentioned that I had looked at alternatives to Windows as I wasn’t happy with the direction that Microsoft have taken with Windows 8, don’t get me wrong I really like Windows 7 and think that it’s a great OS but Windows 8 left a lot to be desired where laptop\desktop OS’s were concerned. The last blog post highlighted some issues I was having with the installation of Ubuntu 12.04 taking way too much time and leaving me with a black screen at boot up.
Move forward a couple of weeks and I have now been running Ubuntu 12.04 in a stable environment with the same hardware as before, this time however what’s changed is that NVidia had released a new driver which made my system way more stable and for the last two weeks I have been happily using Ubuntu as my main OS of choice, sure there are things I miss from my Windows days (SnagIt and Camtasia Studio as well as not being able to play Battlefield 3) but as a whole the experience hasn’t been as bad as it could have been. In addition to the now working NVidia driver my installation times have also drastically reduced down from the many hours I experienced for the first couple of days to about 15 minutes (thank you 50mb cable connection 
).
I have been a Windows guy from a very early age (actually I was a DOS guy before becoming a Windows guy) and it’s with surprise that I find myself in my current predicament. I recently had a go of the Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview and unfortunately found myself really disliking it, don’t get me wrong I think from a tablet point of view it will work wonders but when I sit and watch videos like this you just know that Microsoft have goofed and it’s not just me who has this view on the new Microsoft OS.
Now I understand that Microsoft haven’t released the final product yet and that things ‘could’ change but tbh I don’t think that Microsoft plan on changing it too much. With this in mind I started looking around at different Operating Systems to use at home, I have a number of different machines around the house doing all sorts and I won’t be changing all of them away from the Microsoft platform. I currently have a Mac Mini that works as my iTunes library for the families iPhones\iPads and a dedicated Management PC for my blogging and VMware lab which will all be staying as they are, that just leaves my gaming rig and my wife’s small Shuttle PC (which she uses for the household budget (YNAB) and gaming (WoW)).
Over the last couple of years OCZ Technologies have gone down the pan where quality control comes in, I have used OCZ products on and off over the years (RAM, CPU Coolers etc) but to date the worst experience I have had with OCZ Technologies has been with their SSD units.
I was recently sent a request to re-upload my IX4 Acronis image again, this image can be used to image replacement disks to put into an IX4 (as Iomega don’t officially support non Iomega purchased disks). As I no longer had the original TIB file I decided to load up my old 500gb drives (they sit on my shelf gathering dust) and once I was happy that the IX4 didn’t have any fixed IP addresses was going to take an image of the drive and provide it again.
This is where things started to go wrong, placing the disks into the IX4 they would stick at 95% and wouldn’t go beyond that, in-fact even loading a single drive prompted the same results. It was then that I had an idea, I already figured out that the bootstrap for the IX4 doesn’t actually only reside on the disk (it was the initial assumption when people tried putting blank disks into the IX4), instead the bootstrap is loaded into NVR and then looks at the makeup of the disk and continues to load the disk up if it matches what it expects to see. (more…)
I recently discovered (accidentily I should add via Twitter) that VMware have awarded me the vExpert title for 2012, this award is based on my previous years contribution to the world of everthing-virtual 🙂 and is awarded to people who have contributed to the VMware community either through forum posts, VMUG presenting or blogging. I look forward to receiving the email from VMware in the not too distant future 🙂
I started my blog back in 2010 with the intention of expanding my experience and exposure to the virtualisation market and can honestly say that getting the vExpert was definitely something I was aiming for (admittedly I didn’t think I would get it this year but the blogging and various forums I post to helped my site rankings earlier this year so I had hoped that it would help my chances).
Having recognition for my contributions to the community is part of the reward I get from blogging and posting on forums and the vExpert to me is the thing that tells me I am doing the right thing.
I try and put a lot of effort into blogging and whilst I may not be the most prolific of bloggers I hope that what I do contribute help those who need it.
To ensure that I am not a one hit wonder where the vExpert is concerned I know I need to keep up with what I have been doing so these are some of the things I have planned for the rest of the year.
I recently decided to upgrade my vSphere 4 lab to vSphere 5, one of the things I did at the time was consolidate my SQL environments to a single platform (I have in the past had SQL 2005, 2008 and various SQL Express environments up for one reason or another), I decided at this time that I was going to install a dedicated SQL server (VM of course) that would be my single source for any db. requirements.
I decided to install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 as this happens to be the latest supported product (Denali having only just come out I am not sure on the number of the products that support it), like most of my environment SQL 2008 R2 will be hosted on a Windows 2008 R2 server joined to my AD domain.
Installing SQL 2008 R2 isn’t taxing, for the most part it’s a next next next but there are a couple of caveats that you need to be aware of, especially if you’re going to be using it as the host for any VMware products.
Using my TechNet subscription I downloaded SQL 2008 R2 to run the installation.