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In this edition of the VCP Brown Bag we’ll cover the requirements for objective 5 of the VCP4 Exam Blueprint (Here). This will include the installation and configuration of virtual machines and vApps.
The critical details for this Brown Bag:
Date: March 23, 2010
Time: 2PM CST
Registration: Here!
Hope to see you there!
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s call, and subsequent "lab fail” we’ve got today’s follow-up post. The topic we covered was storage, however that didn’t stop us from rambling into other areas.
First, the links:
Another follow-up post can be found here and here (RTFM-ed.co.uk).
Last but not least the video from the session. This is actually pending a re-encode from the “janky” format that Goto Meeting uses.
Speaking of next time. Drop a line in the comments with anything you’d like to see or talk about.
For those of you following along with or VCDX Brown Bag series, we figured you might be interested in the “Lab” architecture used during our discussions. This is in the hopes that y’all will benefit from it, suggest improvements, etc.
Surprisingly there isn’t much to it in this case. The lab is running on a Dell D630, with 4GB ram, and a second hard disk caddy for VMFS storage. This box is running vSphere ESXi 4 with the free license.
Because we’re using ESXi as the base platform, it means the rest of the setup is contained within virtual machines. Quite a few virtual machines actually.
There are quite a few of these to be spun up or down as needed for different brown bags. As our focus right now is on the Enterprise Admin Exam, there wont be much in the way of traditional guest work loads. Here is a breakdown starting with the storage and working up from there:
We have two in this case:
- EMC Celera VSA
- Openfiler
Why two? Well, the EMC Celera is a bit heavier than Openfiler in terms of ram use, but provides a more realistic environment to configure our storage.
In this case as the current release of the Enterprise Admin exam is focused on VI3 and ESX 3.5, we have (depending on the focus of the Brown Bag) one or two ESX 3.5 VMs configured as follows:
1x vCPU
2 GB Ram
15 GB Disk
This is on top of the physical vSphere setup mentioned above.
This is another VM that will be spun up and down as the lab and focus of the Brown Bags dictates. It is here to facilitate the things only vCenter can, and is configured as follows:
OS: Windows Server 2003 Std x86
1x vCPU
1 GB Ram
20 GB Disk
This is just the start of the VCDX Brown Bag lab. As the lab moves, changes, expands, this post (or a follow-up) will be updated. Have any suggestions? Drop a line in the comments!
Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends… we’re so glad you could attend, step inside, step inside.
It’s time again for the next VCDX Brown Bag. This one will focus around the storage requirement of the VMware Enterprise Admin exam. To prep, please pull down and review the Enterprise Admin Blueprint from here.
The critical details:
Date: 03/16/2010
Time: 2PM CST
Registration: Here
If you have any comments, or specific areas you would like to see covered, drop a line in the comments.
We had an all-star cast on the call yesterday, including TWO VCDXs #34 himself, Jason Boche and #29 Frank Denneman. There was even a bit of Twitter interaction from Duncan, pointing out that when it comes to HA, there can be only one. Unfortunately, due to the seat of the pants nature this call took, I neglected to add a sound card to the VM hosting the call, and could not record it. That said, there were an excellent number links and knowledge that were passed around:
Again, thanks for coming, and see y’all at the next one.
The reason this is a beta is we are testing a new platform for hosting these. I figure so long as we’re testing, might as well make it a live one, no? If you’re up for it, here are the critical details:
Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Time: 2:00 PM CST
Registration: Here!
This session will be recorded (I hope) and put up under the new “Brown Bag” section. Note: The VCDX Link does not work at present.
In trying to get used to ESXi and it’s console-less nature I’ve been forcing myself to use the vCLI or PowerCLI to do things. Along the way I’ve learned that the vCLI is generally really well though out, if different. Here is an example of this: Setting up a vNetwork Standard Switch (vSwitch) using PowerCLI and the vCLI:
A very basic example that, no uplinks and the like, but it does show that the action is very straight forward in PowerCLI.
This one is actually much much more complicated than the above (not really, but well…)
vicfg-vswitch.pl –add vSwitch1 –server 1.2.3.4 –username root –password yourP4ssword
There you go. Two one liners to add a vSwitch to your ESXi (or ESX) host. Both are simpler than I’d thought. Questions? Comments? Drop a line in the comments or hit me up on Twitter (@cody_bunch)
Today I was reviewing my post on ESX Crash Dumps and found that well, for vSphere, it is quite broken. How? Well…
As referenced in this KB article, vmkdump has been replaced with some additional flags on esxcfg-dumppart:
In ESX 4.X, esxcfg-dumppart is now used to extract the logs files.
The syntax is:
esxcfg-dumppart –log <ESX dump file>
esxcfg-dumppart -L <ESX dump file>
The file:
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 6790236 Feb 18 10:11 vmkernel-zdump-021810.10.11.1
# esxcfg-dumppart –log vmkernel-zdump-021810.10.11.1
Created file vmkernel-log.1
Log wrapped
# ls -l | grep log-rw-r–r– 1 root root 262144 Feb 25 06:49 vmkernel-log.1
There it is. Woot! Questions? Comments? Drop us a line.
It is time to empty my RSS reader and Firefox tabs yet again. Basically this week has been much like drinking from a firehose, so I’ve not had as much time to read. That said, here are some of the posts from this week that I found particularly interesting:
vscsiStats Into Excel – Gabes Virtual World
VMware Technical Resource Center – TechHead
The Resource Pool Priority-Pie Paradox – Yellow Bricks
Resource Pools and Slot Sizing – Frank Denneman
VMTN Podcast 83 Links – Yellow Bricks
HA Deepdive Overhaul – Yellow Bricks
Each of these posts is well worth the time to read. If you’ve any others you would recommend, drop them in the comments.
Normally I save press release posts of this sort for virtualization.info. However, I have a special place in my heart for HyTrust. Perhaps it comes from a past life where I flirted with InfoSec or so. HyTrust since the first has been putting off the right vibes, their technology, methodology, engineers, and product seem to be doing “The Right Thing”. As such I’d like to note a few big events that have recently taken place for HyTrust:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – (Business Wire) HyTrust (www.hytrust.com) today announced the appointment of Jim Gannon as vice president of Sales. Gannon is a seasoned executive with over 19 years of tenure at category-leading organizations such as VMware, EMC and General Electric (GE). He will leverage his experience in building high-performance sales teams to accelerate HyTrust’s penetration into the high-growth production virtualization market and extend the company’s leadership position.
HyTrust, Inc., the leader in policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure, announced today that it has secured $10.5 million in Series B financing. New investors Granite Ventures and Cisco Systems participated in the round of financing, as did existing investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. Len Rand, partner at Granite Ventures, will take a seat on the HyTrust Board of Directors. HyTrust will use the capital to drive development, sales and marketing, and fuel the company’s next stage of growth.
While both of these individually are pretty cool and are awesome news for HyTrust, it will be interesting to see what happens now with both strategic sales led by Gannon & investment by Cisco (Strong UCS ties perhaps?).
Note: If I sound a bit fan boyish in this post it is because well… I am. Normal techie posts will continue shortly.
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