ProfessionalVMware - vBrownBag

Scott’s Take Away: Know the products you are working with. Then, know them some more. …Really, know them frontwards and backwards Also, know how they interact with other technologies Links: Scott’s Blog - http://blog.scottlowe.org/ Jason’s Blog - http://boche.net/ Buy the “vShpere Design” book - http://amzn.to/hPyyPz Summary A HUGE thanks to Scott for coming along and chatting with us. Another for Jason for his ongoing support. If you have thoughts, ideas, comments, or would like to present at a BrownBag, drop a line in the comments.

Were you there? It was awesome! Thanks Kendrick for presenting & thanks to Jason Boche for the VCAP Exam vouchers!

First, a big thank-you to both Elias for taking the time to chat with us, and to Pearson for providing copies of his new ExamCram book for BrownBag goers. Now onto the content: For those that missed this BrownBag, we talked to Elias Khnaser about his new VCP4 ExamCram book.

And then, there was a winner! Matt Liebowitz is the winner of the first VCAP-DCA Voucher! Congrats sir. Details will be e-mailed to you shortly. Stay tuned, we still have at least one more voucher to give away. This time with a live lab! Now, onto the video, flash cards, and correct answers

First and foremost thanks to our three (yes THREE) guest presenters: Paul Richards - Virtualization lead on the Product Engineering team at SunGard Availability Services. His background is in virtualization, storage, and now this cloud stuff. Brian Knudtson - just a simple Systems Engineer trying to make his way through this virtual world he’s found himself in. Burke Azbill - an IT professional with 15 years of experience in tech-support, network administration, web development, programming, and automation. He is the founder of www.vcoteam.info and a member of the Cloud Orchestration Services team in VMware’s PSO. Links http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-orchestrator/ http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/orchestrator_pubs.html http://www.vcoteam.info/ http://www.vmwarevideos.com/vcap http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vix-vco http://communities.vmware.com/thread/291125 http://www.seancrookston.com/2010/10/06/objective-8-2-administer-vcenter-orchestrator/

We had a decent, if quick show last night, during with we covered VMRun/VIX, PowerCLI, and a few other things. Here are the show notes: Objectives: Objective 8.1 PowerCLI Notes: Getting started with PowerShell - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee221100.aspx PowerCLI - http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/automationtools/powercli Update Manager cmd-lets - http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ps-libs/vumps/ Hal’s book - http://amzn.to/g0WmPc Sean’s PowerCLI Section - http://www.vfail.net/other-pages/powercli/ Getting Started with PowerCLI - http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/11/10/powercli-where-do-i-start/ My VIX section - http://professionalvmware.com/?s=vix Sean’s 8.1 page: http://www.vfail.net/2010/09/07/vcap-dca-objective-8-1-execute-vmware-cmdlets-and-customize-scripts-using-powercli/ Objective 8.2 Orchestrator Notes: N/A - We didn’t touch on Orchestrator this go around.s Objective 8.3 vMA Notes: There are any number of great resources here. Instead of covering this directly in the BrownBag, I decided to self reference a BrownBag we did in the past with Sean Crookston of vFail.net here. Other Resources: Saffa Geek’s VCAP Prep page has been updated - http://thesaffageek.wordpress.com/vcap-dca-dcd/ Sean Crookston’s VCAP-DCA page - http://www.vfail.net/vcap-dca/ Sean’s result - http://www.vfail.net/2011/01/04/and-the-vcap-dca-results-are-in/ Summary As this particular BrownBag was short, and we didn’t cover Orchestrator as well as we should have, so we’ll be doing the next BrownBag specifically on Orchestrator.

Other than the video above, I don’t have much in the way of links or show notes this time around. As always it was a pleasure to have Jon along. Also, a quick thanks to TrainSignal for their ongoing support.

Black Friday? Nah… BrownBag Friday!

Thanks all who stuck around even after our late start. We still managed to have a productive call, both with the flash cards during the call, as well as the long fireside chat with Jason Boche afterwards. Thanks again Jason! Also thanks to everyone else who hung out on the call. Now onto the meat and potatoes of this post: vFail “Question of the day” Original question here. You have received a new storage device that supports the iSCSI protocol. This device will be used to run several production virtual machines in your environment, which consists of a single cluster of 3 hosts with HA and DRS enabled. Setup your environment to support the use of this device. Ensure redundant paths for the storage are configured to minimize single points of failure. Links: There are plenty to go around this week, a bunch of which were generated as part of the fireside chat: Jason Boche! Find him on the web here Find him on Twitter here VCAP Test experiences here and here DCD Demo here VCDX Design Prep resources here (virtuallifestyle.nl) BrownBag recordings here SAS “SANs” HP Here San w/o an “AN” here More from HP here Jon Hall VCAP-DCA Demo here Watch the video… look for the Manual folder on the desktop.

VMware vMA - http://vmware.com/go/vma Resoureces: http://vfail.net http://geeksilver.wordpress.com http://vexperienced.co.uk http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/certedu/certification/vcap http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vcap-datacenter-administration-exam-landing-page-vdca410.html http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com/ VCAP Updates - http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com/2010/10/if-youre-regular-reader-of-blog-youll.html

Uber Celerra VSA - http://nickapedia.com/2010/09/12/ubertastic-celerra-uber-vsa-v3-unisphere/ Storage Blogs http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/ http://storagemonkeys.com/ VCAP-DCA Resources http://thesaffageek.wordpress.com/vcap-dca-dcd/ http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/certedu/certification/vcap http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/vcap-datacenter-administration-exam-landing-page-vdca410.html http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1585-Looking-for-VCAP-practice-questions-Here-they-are….html iSCSI Multivendor Post Pluggable Storage Architecture http://geeksilver.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/vmware-vsphere-4-1-psa-pluggable-storage-architecture-understanding/ How does load balancing change in 4.1? -> VCAP is presently 4.0, and likely wont have a revision until the next version of vSphere (here) Change the pathing policy: esxcli -server localhost.local nmp satp setdefaultpsp -psp VMW_PSP_RR -satp VMW_SATP_EQL

Today we had Jim Curry and Jonathan Bryce of the OpenStack project come by to tell us a bit about the project. What it is, does, etc. What is the correct spelling? - OpenStack (Capital O, Capital S, all one word). OpenStack vs. VMware vCloud - Complimentary, not competition. You’ll need to watch the video for the full answer. Who is the intended audience for OpenStack? - Anyone looking for easy entry into the cloud market. Providers, private companies, etc. More info? - OpenStack.org and wiki.OpenStack.org also #openstack on FreeNode Participation? - See More Info. Will OpenStack be at VMworld? - Rackspace will have a booth supporting their Private Cloud offering. However, you may find some folks in the booth to talk to regarding OpenStack.

Sorry about this folks, I’ve had some random “Life Happens” issues that caused this not to get posted on time.

Thanks again to Ed Haletky (@Texiwill) for coming along and presenting this week.

Tuesdays Brownbag had a good turn out and also featured the excellent debut of our newest co-host: Guillermo Rodriguez. Guillermo (Gee yair mo) like many of the folks on the call is a budding VCP, having taken his class, studying for his exam and interested in helping others reach the same goal.