Everything-Virtual

Category: Uncategorised

  • VMware VCP 4 – Additional Study Material

    For those of you wanting to study and pass the VCP 410 exam you need to know this isn’t something that’s easily done, I have heard it mentioned that VMware expect that 50% of people taking the exam for the first time fail it but I haven’t managed to verify that figure myself. I do know that VMware are very keen to ensure that those holding the VCP have done it the right way and I believe that they have it right by requiring people attend an accredited course, of course that in itself does give you the required knowledge to just pass the exam and that’s hopefully where this post can help.

    Wanting to pass the VCP 410 exam has been on my agenda for a while, having got over the main hurdle of the required course (I sat the VMware ICM course at the 360GSP VMware Academy) I next had to ensure I had enough in the way of additional material.

    For my study prep I have been using the following books, both physical and kindle editions (I own some of these books twice, once in each format).

    Mastering VMware vSphere 4VCP Study GuideVCP 4 Review GuidevSphere 4 ImplementationMaximum vSphereHA & DRSVMware vSphere DesignVMware vSphere 4 AdminvSphere for Dummys

    Each book is dipped into when I need to read up on something, be it home lab environments in Maximum vSphere or some light hearted banter in the vSphere for Dummies book.

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  • vSphere Remote Management Applications for the iPad and iPhone

    As most of you are aware VMware released the vSphere Client for the iPad back in March, the client itself is fairly limited in what it offers but as a freebie offering isn’t too bad. I wanted to see however how it compared to other vSphere apps for the iPad\iPhone.

    With that in mind I downloaded or purchased three vSphere Remote Management Applications.

    1. VMware vSphere Client for iPad

    2. Nym Networks iDatacenter

    3. Project Eureka LLC’s iVMControl

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  • Free utilities for VMware administration

    Having just finished my VMware Install, Configure and Manage (ICM) course I wanted to offer my classmates some advice on free utilities to make their lives easier when it came to managing their vSphere environments.

    As the class are aware of my blog I have decided to also mention them here so that they can get the links to download them for themselves as well as offering links to other people who are interested.

    There are a number of decent free utilities out there that people aren’t aware of unless they actually go out and look for them, some of the utilities I use and recommend to others are the following, this list is by no means complete and will be updated over time.

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  • Blog Updates

    I had planned on posting part 3 of the NAS/SAN article by now, unfortunately life got in the way of my testing. As it stands at the moment the article is on hold for a couple of weeks because of that.

    I can however tell you that testing of NexentaStor has been problematic due to ‘issues’ with my hard drives. It appears that NexentaStor doesn’t like my drives, which is kinda strange because thorough testing using tools found in the PartEd USB key show the disks don’t actually have any issues, further more NexentaStor tells me I have issues with specific drives, but if I swap those drives out and put different drives in to the unit I am still advised that there are issues with them. As I mentioned however there aren’t any issues with the other drives and none of the other NAS/SAN software has reported any issues with these drives (I am currently doing some further testing with FreeNAS using the original IOmeter scripts as well as those used by Vladan courtesy of Didier).

    More updates over the next couple of weeks.

  • How to upgrade your Iomega IX4-200D Disks

    As some of you may have read previously I had a number of issues when I tried previously to upgrade my 2TB IX4 to make it into a 6TB IX4, whilst the disks were read and configured correctly, no matter what I tried I couldn’t configure any Data Protection on them.

    Over the weekend I had to remove a disk from one of my test systems due to an ongoing SMART issue with the drive, the drive itself is showing up OK with my BIOS but using a USB boot disk running SMART scanning software (Parted Magic) I discovered an issue with the Spin Up Time Attribute that was causing me issues with NexentaStor (it was dropping the drive which is what caused me to do some in depth diags).

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  • FreeNAS 8 isn’t ready or reliable

    Unfortunately whilst I really wanted to like FreeNAS 8 I can’t, because it’s so flaky. What you ask??

    I installed FreeNAS 8 yesterday morning and carried out some performance testing yesterday, it wasn’t particularly strenuous testing, infact it’s the same testing that I have been doing to all of the other storage solutions so far.

    The testing I did yesterday was the same test carried out for and by Vladan.

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  • Renaming a datastore fails with “The name ‘datastore_name’ already exists”

    In my recent experiments with various NAS\SAN solutions I suddenly came up across an issue where my usual name for my iSCSI datastore all of a sudden failed when trying to add it into my ESXi environment.

    Having decided to do some more SAN\NAS testing using several different solutions I had made the decision to power down all of my VM’s so that I was only using the single IOmeter VM, at the same time I had also decided to power down 2 of my ESXi servers so that I was using similar resources across all tested platforms. With the ESXi servers powered down I then had to move all of the VM’s to different storage, using Veeams’ FastSCP I copied the VM’s across from my existing Openfiler environment to my main IX4 rather than my ESXi dedicated one.

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  • Active Directory Web Services Event Log Errors – vCenter Server (4.1u1)

    I am going through a project at home to centralise my ESXi and Windows Event Logs using Splunk and Snare and part of that process was going through my Event logs to try and fix any niggling issues.

    Going through my vCenter event logs I discovered some errors in the ADWS logs that I did a Google for and came across a post from Gregg Robertson over on his site that resolved the issue.

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  • FreeNAS 8 has been released

    For those of you interested in Freenas 8 it’s now been officially released and can be downloaded from here, expect testing results shortly.

  • Additional testing for Vladan – Update #2

    Having seen Vladans Openfiler results yesterday I told him that I would re-run my tests using the same Iometer script that he used, just to make sure that the results he saw weren’t down to his hardware.

    Unfortunately his results were good (or rather.. bad)

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