Demitasse

Following the interest at my Certification Quickstart sessions at vForum Sydney I am doing a series of blog posts about studying for the VCP5 exam.  One of the big things I believe you need to become a VCP (and good at working with vSphere, which is even more important) is a test lab.  The test lab is a place where you can make and break every feature of vSphere without having to ask permission.  In a previous post I looked at using a PC with VMware hosted virtualisation as a lab.

This blog post is about the most obvious lab, a set of retired servers.  ESX has always been happiest running on server class hardware and it is the best representation of the hardware that is used in production.  A lot of customers retire their physical servers after three or four years service, Quad core CPUs are being retired now, early Nehalem CPUs can’t be far away from retirement.  These servers typically have multiple NICs and a fair amount of RAM, they may even have Fibre Channel and if you’re lucky there may even be a retired SAN.

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Today I sat and passed the VCP5 exam. 

This is the fourth version of VCP I’ve taken in the five years since I started teaching VMware courses and the fifth VMware certification I’ve sat this year.  Consequently I didn’t do a lot of study for this exam.  I didn’t even wait my customary couple of months of teaching the new version. 

I did read some more of Frank and Duncan’s clustering book and I would have read Scott Lowe’s V5 book if I’d bought it, I may yet buy.  Of course the answers to the questions are all in the documentation if you can read through the 25 documents linked from the blueprint.

The exam is tough, the hardest yet of the VCP exams.  As we’ve come to expect you need detailed knowledge of every area of the exam blueprint, which covers a huge range.  I liked that questions are being written more as a problem faced by an administrator rather than directly asking about a feature.  I also liked that I had plenty of time, maybe if I’d taken a bit more time I would have scored better.  Definitely different from the VCAP level exams where there’s too much to do and not enough time.

I also enjoyed the 400 KM of driving to and from the testing centre, mostly as I’d found the feed of the Professional VMware Brown Bags.  Good to listen to people I met at VMworld and learn some more about vSphere.

After a long pause between vBeers we will return for another get together.

A great chance to catch up with other Virtualisation geeks, maybe even make some new friends.

 Location: Bluestone Room
Address: 9 – 11 Durham Lane , Central City, Auckland
Date: Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Time: 6:00 pm

Remember to check out the APAC virtualisation podcast for updates.

The simplest home lab to study for VCP5 certification is a single PC with at least 8GB of RAM and running VMware Workstation, Fusion or Player.  The benefit here is that you may already have all the hardware you need and if it’s a laptop it can go to work, home or on the road with you so you can study anywhere.

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This is the first in a series of articles about building your own lab to study for the VCP510 exam or the VCAP-DCA exam.  I will look at a few options for building a home lab but first we need to lay the requirements out.  Like all technical requirements there are a few ways to achieve them and which you choose depends on your circumstances.

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At the start of September I began an experiment to track the disk growth of View Composer Desktop that was not recomposed or refreshed for a while. The initial article last month covered the first month of growth and wasn’t very surprising, an initial step of 1GB followed by sporadic growth of another 1 GB for a total of just over 2GB after a month. I left the VM running and taking critical updates, over the first two thirds of October the growth was steady, after seven weeks the delta had reached 2.5GB.

Today I noticed that Office 2007 SP3 had started to deploy through WSUS, so I took a look at the growth of the VM again. In the 3 days since my last check the delta had grown from 2.5GB to 4.7GB, eating about another three months worth of extrapolated growth.

This isn’t a big issue for me as I had only a single VM sitting on an NFS datastore with nearly 2TB of free space. But what if you had 200 or 2000 VMs and had only budgeted for deltas to grow to 4GB? When the update was applied you’d run out of space on every datastore holding affected desktop VMs and every affected desktop VM would stop, showing a question about out of datastore space. This is standard vSphere behavior when a datastore runs out of free space, every VM on the data store halts.

Every user would loose access to their desktop.

This is not something you ever want to happen, not for server VMs and not for desktops either.

So what does this mean?

1. View Composer doesn’t produce totally predictable disk use. Like any thin provisioned storage you must budget and monitor available capacity carefully. The important thing is to understand the consequences of design decisions and accommodate them in operational processes.
2. If you are going to use WSUS or any other mass patching tool to update deployed Linked Clone VMs be very careful about what patches you release. Test patches on a sample Linked Clone VM and measure growth before releasing to production.
3. Better still, use the recompose feature to deploy updates to Linked Clone VMs. Refresh and recompose regularly. Put the Linked Clone VMs in an AD OU that doesn’t receive automated updates.

As always there are multiple possible solutions and no solution is universally applicable. know your options, accommodate the compromises that must be made to accommodate the requirements and document everything, especially the why.

At vForum Sydney 2011 I presented three Certification Quick Start sessions on preparing for the VCP510 exam.  A number of session attendees asked whether the slides would be available for download, I haven’t been able to get an answer to that question, so here is a summary.

All of the information you need is available through www.vmware.com/go/vcp  The training requirements are listed along with links to the download page for the blueprint, a mock exam and the Exam Registration link.

My top tip for knowing you’re ready to sit the exam is to read through the blueprint.  If you can honestly say you are comfortable with the subject area and activities of every objective of the blueprint then you’re ready. 

I have highlighted in my copy of the blueprint the areas I feel I need to study more and I will read the documentation and then build up the component in my test lab.  My initial list for more study has about 25 items on it and I’ll be reading and working in my lab for a while.

I think a lab environment, where you can build and break ESXi and vCentre as much as you need, is critical to really understanding the products. I will be doing a roundup of the various lab environments I have in a following post, however Jase McCarty has posted about his home lab setup and some links to other home lab blog posts.  Jase’s post seems to be the most recent, there don’t seem to be a lot of mentions of vSphere 5.0 in home labs yet.

Today is the first time since vForum Sydney I’ve sat down at my desk and stopped to think about the event.  It was a huge event, six thousand attendees across two days.  That’s nearly as large as VMworld Europe!

I presented four sessions of Certification Quick starts, mainly covering preparing for VCP5 certification.  I will be doing some follow-up blog posts about the subject, including options for a home study lab, hopefully this week.

I also had a very successful VMDownUnderground party, around 80 people came together to talk virtualisation, beer and life.  A huge thank you to the sponsors, Veeam and NetApp, who made the whole thing possible.  In addition to meeting quite a few people I’d only emailed with in the past I was pleased to meet Randy Groves, CTO of Teradici. I have heard back from a number of people that it was well worthwhile and that more people would have come if they’d known it was on.  Next year will be bigger and earlier organised, watch for the news here.

I didn’t make it to a lot of sessions or labs, but both were good and the keynotes were entertaining which was a great thing.  I spent a lot of time in the solutions exchange talking to people, mostly community but a few vendors too.  I’d like to see a community lounge like the VMworld community lounge, with somewhere to sit down and give my feet a break.

vForum was again a great event and well worth the trip.  Now I have to work out how to get to the VMUG User Summits in Brisbane and Melbourne in December.

The usual crew will be along to talk about vForum Sydney and VMworld Europe. Hopefully we’ll have a special guest who can talk about the management products that were announced last week.

All the details are on the podcast blog at http://apacvirtual.com/

vForum 2011 Sydney is over, the dust is settling.  This year, like last year, one of the last sessions at the show was the End User Computing Experts Exchange, a panel discussion around issues in EUC.  David Wakemen again recorded the session so those who couldn’t make it to the session (or vForum) could get access to the information.

The recording is on Talkshoe at the usual location of http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/75046