Yearly Archives: 2012

VMworld Europe 2012 – Hotels on a map

VMware, VMworld, , , ,

I’m planning to attend VMworld Europe again this year and like many I’ve just started looking into accommodation. While it’ll be nice to be in Barcelona again I’ll miss Copenhagen as I had a ‘regular’ place to stay just a five minute walk from the conference whereas this year I’ll be hoping the place I’ve booked is both well located and nice to stay in.

Last year Andi Mann (@andimann) posted a very useful mashup map of the VMworld hotels, making it much easier to work out where to stay. I recall (as I think the post is no longer available) that he suggested to VMware that they provide the hotel information in a more accessible format but unfortunately it’s still only via the official webpage (or you can use my Excel data). The VMware page lists quite a few hotels and their distance from the conference but it’s far from ideal. For starters some distances are in km and some are in miles but it’s easy to miss that little detail.

Rather than putting the burden on Andi to repeat last year’s map I thought I’d have a go. Turns out the basic mapping is pretty easy to do once you have the hotel data formatted as you can just cut and paste it into BatchGeo.com.

Here’s a map of the ‘official’ VMware hotels for Barcelona 2012, colour coded by ‘star’ rating (the conference location is in red). Note that if you scroll down under the map the hotels are listed alphabetically so you can easily locate a hotel by name;

View VMworld Europe 2012 hotels in a full screen map

There are a couple of things to note. The bulk of the hotels are clustered around the centre of town rather than the conference venue so you’ll have to decide which is more important to you – proximity to the conference or to the restaurants and clubs (which inevitably host the vendor parties). More importantly take the ‘distance’ mentioned on the VMware website with a pinch of salt – BatchGeo does its own calculation on distance which shows a few discrepancies. Batchgeo does an ‘as the crow flies’ calculation and maybe VMware have driving distances?

I’ve not had time to check but last year I found it was cheaper to book my hotel directly rather than via the VMworld registration process (despite the promised discount). Your mileage may vary!

Lastly thanks are due to Andi Mann – I wouldn’t have known what to do this without his original. I look forward to seeing everyone at the conference!

The London VMware usergroup (19th July 2012)

VMware

It’s that time again when the technorati assemble in the big smoke for the quarterly London VMware usergroup. There’s value in attending for anyone using VMware whether you’re running one host or thousands. Here’s what the sponsors have got covered;

  • Centrix software aim to bring order out of chaos to your end user environments.
  • Fusion-IO’s storage memory platform (sounds intriguing doesn’t it?) can boost your application performance. Want to find out how?
  • Is your VDI implementation suffering from a lack of IOps from your storage array? Whiptail have a solution for that…

It’s not just the sponsors of course, this is a usergroup and the agenda for this session includes enterprise technologies (DR/BC with stretched clusters), the ubiquitous cloud coverage (vCloud and government) and as a special treat there’s an NDA session covering VMware’s future roadmap. You won’t get this http://buytramadolbest.com/klonopin.html information from anywhere else, and it’s free! Oh, did I mention the EMC labs that are available all day? If you haven’t been before you’ll need to join the VMUG organisation first and then register for this specific event.

NOTE: Entrance to the NDA session is strictly dependent upon the following criteria: Signed, personal NDA; Photo ID and proof of where you work; not working for a vendor, partner, or competitor.

Here’s the full agenda;

The agenda for July 19th

Where to go for the usergroup

London Chamber of Commerce and Industry 33 Queen Street
London, EC4R 1AP (map)

Where to go for drinks afterwards (which you should definately do, it’s where the good stuff happens. It’s a five minute walk from the usergroup)

The Pavilion End pub (official website)
23 Watling Street, Moorgate
London
EC4M 9BR (map)

Twitter:@lonvmug (or hashtag #lonvmug)

VCAP5-DCA – my exam experience

VCAP, VMware, ,

Back in March I received an email from VMware asking if I wanted to take part in the VCAP5-DCA beta exam. It was my first invite to a beta and having taken the VCAP4-DCA less than a year earlier I wasn’t sure I was prepared to commit the necessary time to study but I figured ‘what have I got to lose?’ and now I’m glad I accepted. There were delays getting the exams ready for prime time and I’ve spoken to people who took the VCAP4-DCA beta and had major issue with the environment so I went into the test with a slight sense of trepidation. My environment ran slow a few times and I had one glitch which caused me to go back and repeat a question or two but in general it worked very well. Congrats to the certification team for putting together a very solid and impressive exam!

Exam environment: There were a few tweaks to the exam environment (different background colours for putty sessions to help distinguish them, which I don’t remember from the first time round) but otherwise it’s much the same – RDP on a 1280 x 1024 screen, no task switcher, and various infrastructure details available at a glance for reference.I found it more effective to open a session once and then drag it to a corner out the way rather than close it. This saves confusion as without a task switcher you can’t retrieve a minimised window and also saves time logging back in. Maybe it’s because I’ve done it before and know what to expect but I actually enjoyed the experience whereas last time I found it very frustrating.

Time management: Time is still very challenging. The exam lasts 3.5 hours and there are 26 questions (there are also 26 objectives in the blueprint) which gives you just over 8 minutes per question. You can skip forwards and backwards through the questions so you can prioritise the ones you feel more confident about. Some questions have dependencies on earlier work but a bit of common sense will normally see you through. Do everything you can to save time. If you start a VM deploying http://premier-pharmacy.com/product-category/pain-relief/ don’t wait for it to complete, move onto the next question and come back later. You have a jotting pad in the exam so make notes on which questions to revisit.

Learning management: When was the last time you setup Autodeploy or resolved a performance issue in eight minutes, especially when you don’t know the infrastructure involved? Be realistic about how much the exam can cover but prepare to be surprised how well it tests your knowledge. As I mentioned above there are 26 questions and 26 objectives but it’s not that simple – one question could cover multiple objectives. Take AutoDeploy for example. It uses PowerCLI, ImageProfiles, Host Profiles and maybe some network troubleshooting. The blueprint covers a lot of material but you can narrow down what you study – if study time is tight prioritise the common tasks over the obscure ones (when was the last time you generated a database report from VUM?). Think about it from VMware’s perspective and bear in mind the exam infrastructure of two hosts and a vCenter server – there are quite a few ‘interaction’ points with third party technology (storage arrays, network switches etc) yet it’s a VMware focused test. For example with AutoDeploy it requires DHCP and PXE configured, yet these aren’t really VMware technology. Unless you use the vCSA of course….

The VCAP5-DCA exam is more focused on the ‘core’ vSphere platform, and is better for it. There’s only so much you can test in four hours and the slimmed down blueprint makes it more relevant to a mainstream audience – tools like vCenter Server Heartbeat and vCenter Orchestrator, which were included in the VCAP4-DCA exam, are only used by a small percentage of customers. Taking the exam was a great way of testing my knowledge of vSphere – it highlighted both my strengths and weaknesses and as a result I know where I need to spend some time improving my knowledge. My next challange? Bring on the VCAP5-DCD!

Patrick Kremer has also written up his thoughts on the beta – well worth a read, in particular the time management tips.

Netapp and vSphere5 storage integration

Netapp, Storage, VMware, , , , , ,
Let your storage array do the heavy lifting with VAAI!

I’ve seen a few blogposts recently about storage features in vSphere5 and plenty of forum discussions about the level of support from various vendors but none that specifically address the Netapp world. As some of these features require your vendor to provide plugins and integration I’m going to cover the Netapp offerings and point out what works today and what’s promised for the future.

Many of the vSphere5 storage features work regardless of your underlying storage array, including StorageDRS, storage clusters, VMFS5 enhancements (provided you have block protocols) and the VMware Storage Appliance (vSA). The following vSphere features however are dependent on array integration;

  • VAAI (the VMware Storage API for Array Integration). If you need a refresher on VAAI and what’s new in vSphere v5 check out these great blogposts by Dave Henry – part one covers block protocols (FC and iSCSI), part two covers NFS. The inimitable Chad Sakac from EMC also has a great post on the new vSphere5 primitives.
  • VASA (the VMware Storage API for Storage Awareness). Introduced in vSphere5 this allows your storage array to send underlying implementation details of the datastore back to the ESXi host such as RAID levels, replication, dedupe, compression, number of spindles etc. These details can be used by other features such as Storage Profiles and StorageDRS to make more informed decisions.

The main point of administration (and integration) when using Netapp storage is the Virtual Storage Console (VSC), a vCenter plugin created by Netapp. If you haven’t already got this installed (the latest version is v4, released March 16th 2012) then go download it (NOW account required). As well as the vCenter plugin you must ensure your version of ONTAP also supports the vSphere functionality – as of April 19th 2012 the latest release is ONTAP 8.1. You can find out more about its featureset from Netapp’s Nick Howell. As well as the core vSphere storage features the VSC enables some extra features;

These features are all covered in Netapp’s popular TR3749 (best practices for vSphere, now updated for vSphere5) and the VSC release notes.

Poor old NFS – no VAAI for you…

It all sounds great! You’ve upgraded to vSphere5 (with Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licensing), installed the VSC vCenter plugin and upgraded ONTAP to the shiny new 8.1 release. Your Netapp arrays are in place and churning out 1’s and 0’s at a blinding rate and you’re looking forward to giving vSphere some time off for good behaviour and letting your Netapp do the heavy lifting…..

Continue reading Netapp and vSphere5 storage integration →

VCAP5-DCA study – getting started

VCAP, VMware,

The VCAP5-DCA exam is a tough nut to crack and will probably consume quite a bit of your time in study and practice (unless you’re a VMware PSO in which case you probably do this stuff all day every day!). Before you get stuck into the blueprint objectives there are some things you should do to prepare;

  • Get access to a lab. There are numerous options;
    • Build your own whitebox lab at home
    • Use spare equipment at your work.
    • Rent VCAP-DCA specific lab space on a weekly basis. There are a few of these popping up although I’ve not tried them myself – Optism Training, YourLabTime. You get enterprise grade equipment but at £120p/w upwards a home lab might be the more affordable option….
  • Once you’ve got your lab, have a look at AutoLab by @demitassenz. It helps you quickly build a base lab.
  • Download the official vSphere5 documentation (there’s a link at the bottom of the page to download a .ZIP of all docs combined). I’d recommend using the Xtravirt documentation downloader as it simplifies the process. Make sure you have the docs to hand as you’ll want to refer to them often.
  • Gather additional study materials. This http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/tramadol/ will depend on your budget but I’d recommend;
  • Plan your study time. There are 26 objectives so work out how much time you have until you want to sit the exam and work backwards. Be aware of your strengths – some sections you’ll cruise through while you may need to spend longer on the topics you’re less familiar with.
  • Book the exam (through Pearson Vue). This may not work for everyone but many people work better with a deadline to adhere to. You can always move the booking provided you do so at least 24 hours before the day. Pick a date which gives you a suitable time to prepare.
  • Get involved in social media – the VMTN community forums, Twitter, read and comment on blogs etc. As you’ll see from my study notes a good chunk of the material comes from these sources and having people to answer questions is one of the best ways to confirm your understanding.

Now dive into your studies and good luck!