Demitasse

I’m helping out some past students with a storage issue at a View implementation.  They need a question answered about moving between datastores when Tiered storage is in use. 

Without Tiered storage it is fairly easy to add and remove datastores from a pool, as is described in the VMware Knowledgebase article on the subject or the other Knowledgebase article also about the subject.  The two articles imply that the same is true with tiered storage, however it isn’t true until it’s tested.  So here’s my testing.

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The APAC Virtualization podcast is back for 2012.  The first session is all about the C word.

Details are all on the Podcast Blog.

I am very pleased to announce that a series of VCAP Brownbag sessions is being started for the APAC region.

For those who haven’t come across the ProfessionalVMware BrownBag they are a series of webinars started by Cody Bunch to help people prepare for VMware certification.  At present Damian Karlson is running the VCP5 series in a time slot that suits US based attendees.  Each session is an interactive discussion of an area of the exam curriculum, helping you to keep motivated to study and achieve certification.

The VCAP Brownbags were initiated by a past student on a course in Singapore, Iwan Rahabok is an SE with VMware in Singapore and will be presenting some of the sessions along with his colleagues.

We plan to cover the VCAP5-DCD certification first and will probably then move on to the VCAP5-DCA certification.

Live sessions will run at 6pm Sydney time every Thursday and the recording will be available for download after the event.

The current schedule is:

2 February – Overview, Design methodology and Business Requirements

9 February – Security Design

16 February – Storage Design (sure to be an entertaining session)

23 February – Network Design

You can register for the sessions on GoToMeeting at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/505624097

If you’d like to lead one of the sessions please contact me (details on the about page), preparing to present is a great way to study!

Earlier I posted about the setup of my VCP5 study lab.  Today I’m going to cover the lab setup I used to study for the VCP4-DT exam. This is the Desktop certification that is all about deploying and configuring VMware View 4.x.  As you will see on the certification page you must first be a VCP4 and then pass the VCP4-DT exam.  As usual for VMware exams there’s a good blueprint listing the subject areas you will be tested on during the exam.  In the past there was a requirement to complete the VCA4-DT certification as well as VCP, this requirement has now been removed, although reportedly the exam registration process for VCP4-DT hasn’t been updated.

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Continuing with my series of articles about VMware exam study I’m going to look at what I built to study.

I’ve spent a while writing about what physical and virtual hardware you can use, your existing PC, retired servers or a white box ESX server. I’ve also written about how to find out what to study.  But so far I haven’t linked the gap between.  This article will talk about the VMs I built for my successful VCP5 study and what I installed in them.  I built this lab on my laptop as mentioned in the existing PC article.

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The vExpert spotlight is an opportunity to take a step back and look at how and why you go to the point where you joined the vExpert program.  My vExpert spotlight post went up on the VMTN blog over the weekend and I’ve already had two friends tweet about it, thanks Andre and Stu.

One of the things I would like to stress is that the certifications and awards should not be the reason for your actions, but the result of them. Get certified to show you know products or technologies and get involved in community because you enjoy the people.

By the way I’m always looking for people with interesting things to say about Virtualization on the APAC Virtualization podcast let me know if you have something to say or know someone who would be a good guest.

Last week Damion (a student on a vSphere course) mentioned an issue with the View Client.  His client is a secondary school and uses View to provide a secured desktop to students.  The View desktop is well controlled and locked down, as you’d expect for a school.  One of the school policies is to control access to social networking sites, without this control students would spend all their time on Facebook and never complete their assigned work.  There is an ongoing cat and mouse game between the students at the school and the IT department, as fast as one hole is closed the students find or make a new one.  I know from my own children how important Facebook access is to teenagers.  On a side note you have to admire the creativity of a young mind and I was surprised that it tended to be the girls who came up with the most complicated exploits to get to Facebook.

One hole that Damion hasn’t yet properly plugged is with the re-purposed PCs.  These Windows PCs were re-used as View clients, locked down to launch only the View client when they are started.  Re-purposed PCs are a common way to defer the cost of buying thin clients into subsequent years or avoid it altogether.  The issue here is that the View client’s help button and help menu launches the system default web browser to access the help web page.  Students quickly learned to use this to get access to Facebook.  Damion wasn’t the first to find out about the issue, there’s a VMware communities thread about the issue in the View 4.6 client as well as an older thread relating to the View 4.0 client which talks about hacking a dll to remove the button.  There has to be a better solution, one that doesn’t compromise the supportability of the View Client.

My solution is a little Visual Basic 6 application called NoBrowser.exe that can launch in place of the default browser.  The application can display a help test file or, if the file doesn’t exist, silently close.  Being written in VB6 it doesn’t need any runtime libraries and is very small.  There is an installer that sets the one registry entry required to make NoBrowser launch in place of a web browser, NoBrowser resets this registry entry every time it’s run.

NoBrowser is provided free to use with no warranty or support, use it for your own benefit and at your own risk.  If there are improvements you’d like to see then please email me and I’ll see whether I can help.  If you use NoBrowser please comment this post, let me know the effort was worthwhile.

NoBrowserSetup can be downloaded from here.

If my whole datacentre runs on virtualisation, should my firewalls be Virtual Machines?  How about routers?

This will be our final session for 2011, after a well earned break for Christmas we will return in late January 2012.

The experiment with GotoWebinar continues, register to take part in the podcast at:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/580298398

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Time: 9:00 PM – 10:00 PM AEDT

Once the recording is in the can I will get it onto talkshoe as usual at http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/tscmd/tc/75046

I’m a big fan of pre-failure warnings in my ESXi servers and that’s the single biggest reason for deploying my hardware vendor’s management tools.  Since my lab currently runs on HP Proliant servers that means I want Systems Insight Manager (SIM) running in my lab.  In addition I want the HP CIM (Common Information Model) management providers on my ESXi hosts.

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This is my third article on building a lab to study for VCP5, the first was about using a computer you also use for other things  and hosted virtualisation, the second was about retired servers. This one is about dedicating a PC running ESXi.

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