Just this Tuesday I took the VCP-510 exam and passed it.

VMware did a really great job in putting the exam together and I must admit, it felt a bit harder to me, than the VCP4 exam did. No more maximum configuration questions, but good to know the values anyway, not just for the test.

The exam was more a collection of questions towards the understanding of the work of a vSphere Administrator, fixing problems, choosing the right solutions for a given task, etc. .

So if you are a vSphere Admin and know your ESXi from the inside, just add a little cloud knowledge, some more networking skills and don’t forget the value of knowledge about VMwares appliances/plugins for vCenter installations. This should get you pretty far in completing the exam.

To those who will give it a try: good luck and have fun!

I hope this blog will get filled with more posts in the next year, when I start my work in the position as a VMware consultant in our company, focusing on VMware only, free of other tasks which distract me from my work with vSphere and co.

Paule

I installed 1 host with the standard VMware ESXi 5.0 ISO, one with the HP customized ESXi 5.0 and a third one with the standard VMware ESXi 5.0 ISO plus the HP offline bundle.
Listed below are the differences in the installed packages.

Differences between VMware ISO, HP ISO and VMware ISO plus HP offline bundle

We thought the HP offline bundle would transform a plain ESXi 5.0 installtion into a HP customized one, but some components are still missing. Most useful would be the hponcfg, as it allows you to configure iLO settings. Another package we could make use of is hpbootcfg, as it would allow us to do PXE installations in the future, without having to do too much work during the boot process, using the iLO remote console.

As the HP customized ESXi 5.0 ISO even saves us 1 reboot during the installation and we don’t have to manually install (yes we could script it, but why should we if HP deliveres) additional tools, we will stick with the HP ISO.

What I did was:
I disabled the DRS feature of the ESXi Cluster, just to check some settings.
This led to the loss of all resource pools, which wouldn’t be such a big problem, as you can easily recreate them, if you use them in a normal environment.

But with vCloud Director, things are a little different:
If you loose the resource pools, vCD can’t create any new machines, as the resource pools are missing.
I tried to recreate the resource pools by hand, but this didn’t work.
Next thing was a discussion on the VMware forums with Chris Colotti.
No solution over there, except the GSS support call, but as I am still in the phase of testing, I didn’t want to bother them and the whole recreation process of the vCloud Director organizations etc. doesn’t take that long and is a nice training for the productive phase when new customers will be placed on our Vblocks.

Today I red this article on Chris Colotti’s blog and thought to myself:
Let’s give the Inventory Snapshot scriptthe from VMware Labs a try.
I recreated some customers, VMs, networks, etc. and let the script do it’s snapshot work.
After creating my inventory snapshot, I disabled/enabled the DRS/HA features of the cluster and all resource pools were deleted.
Next thing to do is let the recovery script, which was created by the inventory snapshot script, run against the vCenter to let it recreate the resource pools and folders.
As promising as it looked, the script did not help, as, according to Chris’s article, the MoREF ID’s don’t seem to match (this is just an educated guess, but seems legit) so vCloud Director doesn’t take the recreated resource pools.
Maybe someone from VMware could take a look at this and adjust the script, so it will cover the missing parameters.

Until that day, DRS and HA have to stay untouched, to keep the vCloud Director working.

As we will use the VBLOCK as a home for our new cloud offering to customers, extending their production server LAN to the VBLOCK and securing it is our primary task.

German BSI institute offered a real tough hardening guide for the VBLOCK, so we still have a lot of work to do, but first test showed some of the real potential of the VBLOCK.

We will be using vCloud Director to make the lenghty process of deploying machines a task of a few minutes. vShield will take care of the security withing the vSphere worl, the rest is done by Cisco switches, VLANs and our firewalls.

I am currently looking forward to monday, when I will get my hands on this astonishing piece of hard- and software again.

After having some performance problems during the migration of VMs from several FC datastores to FATA datastores and back, I did a performance analysis.
With the help of Duncan Epping from Yellow Bricks Blog and his Article about blocksize ( http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/02/18/blocksize-impact/ )
and some other users of the VMware Forums, I changed the blocksize on all effected datastores to match each other. This led to an enormous performance boost during storage vmotion, as shown in the following table:

SVmotion of a 15GB VM on a HP EVA 8100 Array, containing 145x300GB FC disks in 1 diskgroup and 40x1TB FATA disks in a second diskgroup

As you can see, having the same blocksize on all datastores involved in a storage vmotion process greatly improves the performance.
Keep this in mind, when setting up new datastores, as even if you configure a large blocksize on a small datastore which could take a smaller one, this does not impact the performance at all.

The discussion about the blocksize and the performance was done here.

Thanks to Duncan Epping and ThompsG from the VMware forums for their fast and detailed help.

So now, as I am a VCP, VSP and VTSP, I’m a able to provide everything that’s required to become a VMware Partner.