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.

the parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created

Now I know this is an old one dating way back but just wanted to add this as a note on my blog here. If you can use it great... I will start by telling a story:

So today my colleague decided to move one of his test servers from a ESX Foundation box to our ESX cluster. The mistake he made was he did not remove the snapshots before he moved the guest to the cluster. Also he had already deleted the original server from the ESX Foundation box, easiest fix ruled out. He contacted me for help when he received the message trying to boot the server:

the parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created

Easy fix here, But backups must be taken of everything for safety sake. This is the VMDK from the actual base disk (see below). Now this is a simple one because it had one base disk and one delta file. It would be easiest just to change the VMX file to point to the base disk VMDK but problem here is the snapshot had all the necessary apps loaded it into it and the base disk was a plain installation.


# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=fc9c727e
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="vmfs"

# Extent description
RW 25165824 VMFS "flapjacks-flat.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.geometry.heads = "255"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "1566"
ddb.uuid = "60 00 C2 9d ee 19 a7 ba-71 16 1c ac cc 2b 2b 09"
ddb.toolsVersion = "7202"
ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"


See the CID above? Check the VMDK of the Snapshot and I bet you money it doesn't match the parentCID. Simply change the parentCID value to match the one on the base disk and the server should now boot. By forcing the CIDs to match it should think it is was never out of sync.

We had another problem. The old snapshot could not be deleted/merged because something still was not quite right. So I did a v2v with converter to a new guest and was able to merge things that way. Now I know this is probably not a perfect situation but the new server is running stable now so I will take it!

If this was a more complex situation and more changes had been made before the server was moved the data should have simply been recovered after getting it to boot and the server reloaded because chances are in that situation it would not be very stable.

Quick thoughts on VMWare long distance Vmotion

I can't say much more than what has already been said about VMWare announcing long distance VMotion capabilities up to 200km but I had some quick thoughts about it and figured I would put it down here.

It is nice to see Cisco, EMC and VMWare teaming up on this but right now it has some serious limitations. Minimum bandwidth of 622 Mbits/sec isn't quite too bad. In my mind 5 ms latency is pretty low.. At this point it might be useful for evacuation to some kind of disaster recovery site with a bigger pipe, but not quite a 'follow the sun' approach between datacenters. When they figure out how to deal with higher latency and are able to go inter-continental with Vmotion this will change the way global companies IT operations work!

Here is a video demonstration done at VMWorld by Chad Sakac with EMC:

Upgrading vCenter 2.5u4 to vCenter 4.0

Today I began my first phase of upgrading our 3.5u4 ESX environment in our Chicago office to 4.0. Upgrading vCenter is the first step. I would have preferred to create a whole new fresh install but decided I would upgrade and see if it came out ok. With snapshots and the like I always have the opportunity to go back. My next step is to change two of our hosts over to ESX 4.0 in a week or so and test it out for a couple of weeks before I fully vSphere-icize our environment. I am already fairly certain everything will be fine as I already have a 4.0 cluster going in our Zurich office. Here is a cut and paste of some braindumping I was doing into notepad as I was doing the upgrade:

upgraded memory on vCenter server from 1GB to 4GB

added a second processor to the vCenter Server

Seperate Database Server. Bumped Memory from 1GB to 3GB

Double checked all my SQL dbo perms

Made backup of the virtualcenter db

Disabled HA – Taking very long and sluggish then suddenly finished

Ran Upgrade on vCenter Server

Updating the client

re-enabled HA

Test Drove it a little bit to make sure it was performing properly

Uh oh… Trouble

Database server is cranked.. Have to give it a second CPU. Should have seen that coming

Now DB server is fine and virtual center server is cranked 100%.. lol

statsupdate eating cpu on DB server – working on it decided to service pack SQL server

Turned out to be this problem

LINK TO VMWARE DOC

Hmmmmm…. it appears even tho it states 2.5 this is still a bug in 4.0 and the fix works

In this version tho you have to drop the views before you create them.

Install new version of converter and update manager and tested to see if they worked.

All is running good now… Next phase re-install two of my hosts with ESX 4.0 and test for a few weeks before going all the way