Posted by Brian on Jun 12, 2010 in Certification, VCAP, VMware | View Comments
The first exam in the new VMware intermediate series has released the Blueprint document. Blueprints are intended to give you a list of topics that are covered on the exam. So that if you are well versed in these topics you should do well on your exam. For this type of exam there is no substitute for real world experience or hundreds of hours of lab time.
The VCAP4-DCA is the VMware Certified Advanced Professional exam focused on Datacenter Administration. This is going to raise the level for VCP’s who want to show that they know their stuff. The exam is 100% hands on lab based exam material. The VDCA410 exam consists of approximately 40 live lab activities and a short pre‐exam survey consisting of 9 questions. Live lab activities consist of multiple tasks, where each task is scored. The total number of activities provided is based on the total number of tasks. Because of this, the actual number of lab activities may vary slightly between exams.
The scoring for the exam is not fully worked out until after the Beta period is over. The scale for scoring this exam will be like other exams and will have a range from 100-500.
For now the exam is available in English and countries where English is one of the languages will get an additional 15 minutes of time for the exam. The retake policy will require someone to wait 10 business days before they are able to try again. Something different or at least I have not noticed this before is that once you achieve a passing score you are not allowed to take the exam again.
Since you cannot yet book this exam the pricing is not yet available. According to earlier estimates from John Hall of VMware this exam should be in the $400 range depending on your location and exam provider.
You can find out all of the details on VCAP and download the blueprint from here.
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Posted by Brian on Jun 11, 2010 in VMware | View Comments
First off let me say that this is all in good fun and everyone gets a laugh out of a celebrity look alike. Although in this case and in our community we all know who the real vCelebrity is. This is just something that was kind of bugging me for a while and I was watching some late night TV and saw the car make over show with Chip Foose and it hit me. That Chip is Chad’s Doppelganger. For those of you that don’t watch the “How I met your mother” show on TV. A Doppelganger is someones double or look-alike. Heck even their names Chad and Chip both are 4 letters and start with C. This is something that parents do all the time.
Both guys are creative and passionate people in their fields and create some awesome stuff. They could work together and create a sweet ride for Chad and drop a vBlock in for Chip. Heck maybe Chip could design a custom vBlock with a cool paint scheme on the rack. Anyways have a look for yourself and maybe I’m just sleep deprived.
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Posted by Brian on Jun 10, 2010 in VMware, vCenter Server, vSphere | View Comments
Hot off the presses! The latest update for VMware vSphere is now available for download. Both Update 2 for ESX 4.0, ESXi 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 are all available now. Run don’t walk to your nearest PC with a fast connection and start downloading. Ok don’t run you might crash into something. Have fun playing with the latest update in your labs. You can download the latest version here.
Here are some of the release notes for ESX 4.0 U2, see full list here.
- Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors.
- Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors.
- Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors.
- Enhancement of the esxtop/resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 Update 2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utilities, esxtop and resxtop. The esxtop/resxtop utilities now provide visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that they display the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s, MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s(guest latency).
- Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04.
Here are some of the release notes for ESX 4.0 U2, see full list here.
- Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel Xeon 56xx Series processors.
- Enablement of Fault Tolerance Functionality for Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors without Fault Tolerance. vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables Fault Tolerance functionality for the Intel i3/i5 Clarkdale Series and Intel Xeon 34xx Clarkdale Series processors.
- Enablement of IOMMU Functionality for AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors— vSphere 4.0 Update 1 supports the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors without input/output memory management unit (IOMMU). vSphere 4.0 Update 2 enables IOMMU functionality for the AMD Opteron 61xx and 41xx Series processors.
- Enhancement of the resxtop utility— vSphere 4.0 U2 includes an enhancement of the performance monitoring utility, resxtop. The resxtop utility now provides visibility into the performance of NFS datastores in that it displays the following statistics for NFS datastores: Reads/s, writes/s, MBreads/s, MBwrtn/s, cmds/s, GAVG/s (guest latency).
- Additional Guest Operating System Support— ESX/ESXi 4.0 Update 2 adds support for Ubuntu 10.04.
Here are some of the release notes for vCenter 4.0 U2, see full list here.
- Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
- Windows XP Professional SP2 (x64) serviced by Windows Server 2003 SP2
- SLES 11 (x32 and x64)
- SLES 10 SP3 (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 5.5 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 5.4 Server Platform (x32 and x64)
- RHEL 4.8 Server Platform (x32 and 64)
- Debian 5.0 (x32 and x64)
- Debian 5.0 R1 (x32 and x64)
- Debian 5.0 R2 (x32 and x64)
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Posted by Brian on Jun 10, 2010 in VMware | View Comments
Well I knew this day would come eventually, we had run out of space on this HP MSA. I knew going into this small project but this is the direction that the team took. So we purchased another 2 TB of space and I needed to add it to the configuration. We ended up buying 6 450 GB SATA disks to use in the MSA 2312sa unit. The drives were used to create one vDisk with just over 2 TB of usable space that was split up into 2 Datastores in VMware.
The configuration was a breeze just like the initial setup. The disks were placed evenly across the disk shelves and appeared into the console as expected. A couple of clicks later I had a vDisk setup and then created to volumes and assigned them to my hosts once I had created the Datastores from the first Host.
If you need to know more about how to setup these you can read my initial post on how to setup a HP MSA 2300 series array here.
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Posted by Brian on Jun 9, 2010 in VMware, vSphere | View Comments
Just announced today VMware and Novell are partnering up on SUSE adoption and support. By having a valid support agreement with VMware and a qualifying purchase you can gain access to use SUSE Linux in your data center. This really cuts out the licensing worries that larger accounts may have had around using SUSE.
The other important part of the partnership is that VMware will now start using SUSE for their appliance machines that are released. In the past they have mostly used CentOS.
You can read a public copy of the news release here.
You can see the official VMware announcement here. Also have a look at the qualified sku’s here.
Personally this is funny timing since we just got a large client to create their first couple of Linux virtual machines. They just happened to also be SUSE machines.
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Posted by Brian on Jun 3, 2010 in Troubleshooting, VMware, vCenter Server | View Comments
While I was upgrading my vCenter server to Server 2008 I came across the following issue. I was trying to install VMware License Server on a Window Server 2008 32bit server and the install would fail saying it cannot start system services. After checking to make sure that I had not made some dumb mistake with my account I hit the intertubes and found that others had the same issue.
I was able to get pass this issue by downloading the latest copy of Virtual Center server 2.5 update 6 and then extracting the License server install file from the VPX folder. Seems that the copy from the install .iso file is newer than the file available for direct downloading. Maybe VMware can fix this soon. I did not try it but according to some other posts the version in VC 2.5 U5 might also work. Once I installed this version it worked the first time.
Error 1920.Service VMware License Server failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.
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