Tag Archives: VCAP

VCAP5-DCD Official Cert Guide – my thoughts

Summary: A good book which is ideal for those new to design with plenty of real world examples and exam preparation tips.

I’ve been meaning to take my VCAP5-DCD certification for a couple of years but still haven’t made the required time available.  I attended the Design Workshop (last year) and was lucky enough to have Paul McSharry as my instructor – I’d not met him previously but I was familiar with his work through his website (www.elasticsky.co.uk) and via Twitter.

Now Paul’s written the official VMware Press certification guide to the VCAP5-DCD exam. This book takes a slightly different approach compared to other study resources as it includes a practice test and considers the mental transition a VCP-DCV certified engineer might need to make when moving into design. To quote Paul;

I decided to approach the guide with the mindset of a VCP5-DCV qualified engineer who has yet to complete a full design.

 How do you make the transition from engineer to architect? Whats the process? 

I like the format of the book and found Paul’s writing style to be very easy to read. In many ways the VCAP5-DCD is a less technical exam compared to the VCAP5-DCA but there are some concepts which can be hard to wrap your brain around if you’re used to an operational focus (which I am). There has been plenty of discussion on the web around functional vs non-functional, logical vs physical designs, and constraints, risks, assumptions, and requirements and Paul’s book tackles them all pretty well.

One thing you’ll notice when you look at the contents page is Continue reading VCAP5-DCD Official Cert Guide – my thoughts

VMware certification exams – 50% discounts (2013 offer)

defy-conventionIf you’re in the market to take a VMware certification exam, there’s some good news – provided you’re quick. For the next couple of days (while VMworld Barcelona is running, Oct 14th-17th 2013) you can book the VCP and VCAP exams at a cool 50% offeven if you’re not at the conference! For VCP that’s a saving of approx £50 and more like £200 for the VCAP exams! If you want to blitz some of the new certification tracks recently announced you’re not limited to just one – study your little legs off and you could save even more by taking multiple exams….

The codes you need to register with are;

  • VWBAR50 – for the VCP exams http://buytramadolbest.com/valium.html (VCP-DV, VCP-DT,VCP-Cloud,VMware IaaS, VMware View)
  • VWADVBAR50 – for the VCAP exams (VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD, VCAP-CID, VCAP-CIA, VCAP-DTD)

UPDATE 15th Oct: There is also a code for the new VCA exams (completely free) which looks to be good until the end of the month (October 2013).
CORRECTION 15th Oct: I incorrectly stated the VCAP code as VMADVBAR50, which has now been corrected (as above).

Conditions:

  • You MUST book the exam while VMworld Barcelona is running. You don’t have to be attending the conference, it’s just the period of time the offer is valid.
  • You MUST take the exam by the end of the year.

What are you waiting for? Head over to VMware Certification and get registered certification junkies!

VMware certification exams – 50% discounts

If you’re in the market to take a VMware certification exam, there’s some good news – provided you’re quick. For the next couple of days (while VMworld Barcelona is running, Oct 9th-11th 2012) you can book the VCP and VCAP exams at a cool 50% off. For VCP that’s a saving of approx £50 and more like £200 for the VCAP exams! If you want to blitz some of the new certification tracks recently announced you’re not limited to just one – study your little legs off and you could http://imagineear.com/pharmacy/buy-ambien/ save even more by taking multiple exams….

The codes you need to register with are;

  • VMWBAR50 – for the VCP exams (VCP-DV, VCP-DT,VCP-Cloud etc)
  • ADVBAR50 – for the VCAP exams (VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD etc)

Conditions:

  • You MUST book the exam while VMworld Barcelona is running. You don’t have to be attending the conference, it’s just the period of time the offer is valid.
  • You MUST take the exam by the end of the year.

What are you waiting for? Head over to VMware Certification and get registered certification junkies!

Home labs – the Synology 1512+

I’ve been running a home lab for a few years now and recently I decided it needed a bit of an upgrade. I’ve been looking at the growing trend towards online lab environments but for the time being I made the decision that it’s still cost effective to maintain my own. I need to learn the latest VMware technologies (which requires lab time) and partly because the geek in me wants some new toys. 🙂

Storage was the first thing I needed to address. While I’ve got an Iomega IX2-200 (the two disk version) it’s not really usable as shared storage for a lab due to slow performance (about 17MB/s for read, 13MB/s for writes). If I were a patient man that would be fine for testing but I found myself putting VMs on local disks so I could work quicker which rather defeats the purpose of a lab for HA/DRS etc. I’ve built a home NexentaStor CE server which is feature rich (ZFS, snapshots, dedupe, tiered SSD caching) but I’ve found the configuration and maintenance less than simple and it’s a big, heavy old server (circa 2007) which won’t last much longer. My wishlist included the following;

  • Easy to use – I want to spend my time using it, not configuring and supporting it
  • Small form factor, minimised power consumption
  • Hypervisor friendly – I’d like to play with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V
  • Cloud backup options. I use Dropbox, SugarSync and others and it’d be useful to have built in replication ability.
  • Hook up a USB printer
  • Flexibility to run other tasks – bit torrent, audio/movie streaming, webcams for security etc (which my Iomega also offers)
  • VLAN and aggregated NIC support (both supported by my lab switch, a Cisco SLM2008)
  • Tiered storage/caching (NOT provided by the consumer Synology devices)

My requirements are by no means unique and there were three devices on my shortlist;

I choose Synology for a couple of reasons, primarily because I’ve heard lots of good things about the company from other bloggers (Jason Nash comes to mind) and Synology have a wide range of devices to choose from at different price/performance points. They’re not the cheapest but many people say the software is the best around and having been bitten once with the IX2-200 I figured I’d go upmarket this time. The model I choose was the relatively new DiskStation 1512+, a five bay unit which satisfies most of my requirements with the exception of tiered storage. I was excited when I first read a while ago that some of the Synology units fully support VAAI but not so this particular model according to Synology (the DS412+ has only limited support). I guess it’s always possible that support will find its way into lower end models such as the 1512+ (even if unsupported) at a future date – here’s hoping!

UPDATE Sept 14th 2012 – While both NFS and iSCSI work with vSphere5.0 the 1512+ is only certified by VMware for iSCSI on vSphere 4.1 as of 14th Sept 2012. Previous devices (the 1511+ for example) are listed for both NFS and iSCSI, also with vSphere 4.1. Rather than being incompatible it’s more likely that they just haven’t been tested yet although there are problems with both NFS and iSCSI when using vSphere5.1 and DSM 4.1.

UPDATE Oct 3rd 2012 – Synology have released an update for their DSM software which fixes the compatibility issues with vSphere 5.1 although it’s referred to as ‘improved performance’ in the release notes. I’ve not tested this yet but hopefully it’s all systems go. Good work Synology!

There are some additional features I wasn’t looking for but which will come in useful for a home lab;

  • Syslog server (especially useful with ESXi nowadays)
  • DHCP server
  • CloudStation – ‘Dropbox’ style functionality

Having chosen the unit I then needed to choose the drives to populate it with as the unit doesn’t ship with any. My lab already includes some older disks which I could have reused plus I had two SSDs in the NexentaStor server which I considered cannibalising. After reading this excellent blogpost about choosing disks for NAS devices (and consulting the Synology compatibility list) I went with five WD Red 2TB HDDs as a compromise between space, performance, compatibility, and cost. I missed the introduction of the ‘Red’ range of hard disks that’s targeted at NAS devices and running 24×7 but they get good reviews. This decision means I can keep all three storage devices (Iomega IX2, Nexenta and Synology) online and mess around with advanced features like StorageDRS.

UPDATE Feb 18th 2013 – Tom’s hardware had a look at these WD Red drives and they don’t seem great at high IOps. I’ve not done much benchmarking but maybe worth investigating other options if performance is key.

I bought my Synology from UK based ServersPlus who offered me a great price and free next day shipping too. I was already on their mailing list having come across them on Simon Seagrave’s Techhead.co.uk site – they offer a variety of bundles specifically aimed at VMware home labs (in particular the ML110 G7 bundles are on my wish list and they do a cheaper HP Microserver bundle too) and are worth checking out.

Using the Synology 1512+

Following the setup guide was trivial and I had the NAS up and running on the network in under ten minutes. I formatted my disks using the default Synology Hybrid RAID which offers more flexibility for adding disks and mixing disk types and only has a minimal performance impact. Recent DSM software (v4.0 onwards) has been improved so that the initial format is quick and the longer sector check (which takes many hours) is done in the background, allowing you to start using it much faster.. My first impression was seeing the management software, DSM, which is fantastic! I’m not going to repeat what others have already covered so if you want to know more about the unit and how it performs here’s a great, indepth review.

I enabled the syslog server and was quickly able to get my ESXi hosts logging to it. Time Machine for my MBP took another minute to configure and I’m looking forward to experimenting with CloudStation which offers ‘Dropbox like functionality’ on the Synology.

Chris Wahl’s done some investigation into iSCSI vs NFS performance (although on the Synology DS411 rather than the 1512+) and I found similar results – throughput via iSCSI was roughly half that of NFS. I wondered if I had to enable multiple iSCSI sessions as per this article but doing so didn’t make any difference. All tests were over GB NICs and the Synology has both NICs bonded (2GB LACP);

  • Copying files from my MBP (mixed sizes, 300GB) to the Synology – 50MB/s write
  • Creating a file (using dd in a VM, CentOS 5.4) via an NFS datastore – 40MB/s write
  • Creating a file (using dd in a VM, CentOS 5.4) via an iSCSI datastore – 20MB/s write
  • Creating a thick eager zeroed VMDK on an iSCSI datastore – 75MB/s write

Given Synology’s published figures which claim a possible write speed of 194MB/s these were rather disappointing but they’re initial impressions NOT scientific tests (I also tried a similar methodology to Chris using IO Analyser which also gave me some odd results – average latency over 300ms!) so I’ll update this post once I’ve ironed out the gremlins in my lab.

Tip: make sure you disable the default ‘HDD hibernation’ under the Power settings otherwise you’ll find your lab becoming unresponsive when left for periods of time. VMs don’t like their storage to disappear just because they haven’t used it in a while!

LAST MINUTE UPDATE! Just before I published this post the latest release of DSM, v4.1, was finally made available. DSM 4.1 brings several enhancements and having applied it I can attest that it’s an improvement over an already impressive software suite. Of particular interest to home labs will be the addition of an NTP server, a much improved Resource Monitor which includes IOPS, and an improved mail relay.

Overall I’m really impressed with the Synology unit. It’s been running smoothly for a couple of weeks and the software is definitely a strong point. It’s got a great set of features, good performance, is scalable and might even include VAAI support in the future.

Further Reading

A performance comparison of NAS devices (fantastic site)

Indepth review of the Synology 1512+ (SmallNetBuilder.com)

Another one bites the dust – VCAP5-DCA passed!

What a week! My son was born on Sunday and on Friday night I finally received notification that I passed the VCAP5-DCA beta exam I sat back in May. Good things come to those that wait!

I really thought I’d failed as I didn’t even attempt four or five questions and I know I missed a few bits on the ones I did answer. It’s a great relief to have it out of the way however – with vSphere6 slated for a 2013 release it means I’ve got around two years grace before I have to consider http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/dostinex/ upgrading again (assuming it takes a year for the exam to become available like last time!). It’s worth noting that 37% of the visitors to my blog (who responded to my poll on the right) don’t think the VCAP exams add any value over and above the VCP so maybe I’m just ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ for the sake of vanity!

Next up for me is VCAP5-DCD, VCP-IaaS, and VCP-DT, probably in that order. It’s like a cereal pack competition where you have to collect them all…