Hello from Switzerland

Hey guys... just want to put something up to say I am here in Switzerland now via Chicago and have some cool projects cooking. The coolest which is an entire multidatacenter VM Backup design. Hope to have something decent to say in the coming weeks/months and hope to have the time to actually do it :-).

VCP 4 passed

So I kept meaning to write a post about this since I took the exam Nov 20th. I passed and was happy with my score... It is not an easy exam by any means.

Since the NDA prevents me from saying a lot, what I can do is recommend how to study.. I personally completely read Scott Lowe's book 'Mastering Vsphere 4' from cover to cover. Then afterwards I read EVERY PDF VMware made available in their Vsphere Documentation sets. Then I regularly took the Mock VCP 4 Exam on the mylearn site and also Simon Long's Exams. They were especially handy in learning the config maximums. Also his study notes are great and quickly pointed me to imporant parts in the PDFs. This can be found here:

http://www.simonlong.co.uk

Some people go in cold and do well... But I spent a good 3 months of hardcore studying. Good luck to everyone taking it.. Make sure you know your stuff and if you haven't used Vsphere in your daily job it will not be an easy task to pass this exam.

Vmware Vsphere: Install, Configure and Manage final wrapup summary

This is delayed a couple of days but I figured I should finish what I started. Well the class is finished and the main thing I took away from it was contact with some other students to discuss ESX and the requirement to take the VCP 4. The last day rolled on much the same the other days did. We covered a bunch very quickly but really just scratched the surface. As the final day was moving along I began to think that everything was rushed because we lost almost the whole first day as far as labs go. There was one little surprise left, the last chapter we covered was Installing ESX. There was a lab to go along with it however as before it did not work... At this point many students just left the class frustrated. I can't say that I blamed them.

Day 3 : VMWare Vsphere 4 Install, Configure and Manage

One more day to go and we are almost done. The labs we did today were really still nothing new to me. Creating and playing with Alerting, Modifying virtual machines, creating and committing snapshots, and other simple Vsphere Admin tasks. Looking back I should have taken the Fast Track class but for the price my company NEVER would have approved that.

The name of the game is VCP Certification and this class will fill the requirement. I feel like if you are looking for knowledge tho you could learn just as much by reading Scott Lowe's book 'Mastering VMWare Vsphere 4'. From what I have read of it so far it seems to go even deeper than the class.

Stay tuned for my final summary of the class tomorrow.

Day 2 : VMWare Vsphere 4 Install, Configure and Manage

So today started out a lot better. The labs were finally ready and we slammed thru the first 7 of them in the morning. It was real easy stuff like creating Distributed Switches and modifying network settings.

The rest of the day we covered everything from the basics of Storage to creating Virtual Machines and Templates. The labs covered stuff like like configuring iSCSI, growing and extending LUNs, Creating virtual machines, and all aspects of templates.

I still have not learned anything new but it is still cool to play around in the lab environment. Today is a short post.. I will update again tomorrow.

Day 1 : VMWare Vsphere 4 Install, Configure and Manage

On my quest for my VCP 4 I am taking the course VMWare Vsphere 4: Install, Configure and Manage. I thought I could write a quick summary of my thoughts on it as I go along. It might be useful to others in deciding weather to choose this class or the Fast Track class.

So as most of you know it is required to take one of the VMWare classes to qualify for VCP. Due to scheduling and me wanting to take the test ASAP I signed up for this one. Also this is one of the 'Partner Run' classes and not done directly by VMWare.

So here we go Day 1 of my experience and there is a problem. The lab material is not prepared. It wasn't the instructors fault it appeared to be an issue with the partner and someone dropped the ball bigtime. So the instructor did the best he could and covered what he could. We covered all the basic stuff and the deepest we got was networking and distributed switches. I haven't learned anything new but the instructor does know what he is talking about. So we left early so that the instructor could work on getting the labs working and he said they should be in the morning. It is a bit frustrating since the cost of the training is so much. I wonder what the actual problem is?

Check back tomorrow for my Day 2 summary and hopefully there will be something more positive and technical to blog about.

Nehalem Processors + ESX 4 = Guest Monitoring Issues

Recently we bought a Dell PowerEdge T610 with a couple of Intel Xeon Nehalem L5520 processors to serve as a ESX Foundation Server for our new Seoul South Korea office. It was installed and set up on site with two guest machines running nothing heavy but still room for some growth.

After about a week or two we started to notice that vCenter was regularly reporting memory at 95%-100% utilized on the guests and it was constantly in an alert state. After doing some investigating I noticed the actual guest machines were not using very much memory at all. So I gathered some information and did some googling on it and I came across this thread on the VMware Communities Forums:

ESX4 + Nehalem Host + vMMU = Broken TPS !

It seems that this is more an issue of vCenter reporting the information incorrectly (not only Nehalem processors) and the temporary fix is to set Mem.AllocGuestLargePage to 0 instead of it's default which is 1. It has been stated that this could cause a noticeable performance issue. However, the guests on the particular host I found this on should not really be affected since they are some simple infrastructure services and a file server. So I made the change and had to reboot since I could not vMotion the guests off (foundation box). Instantly it began to work and report the correct memory usage.

VMware stated that an actual fix for this should be released in Patch 2 with a rough time estimate of mid to late September. Still have not seen this patch released but now have two hosts experiencing this issue I have corrected with the workaround. I will be keeping my eyes on the new KBs and updates for this.