Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
After my previous post about studying and the exam experience of the VCAP5-DCA exam
(and 3 weeks of waking up to check my phone for the email all night) I am pleased to say that I received my Exam Score last week and it was a pass! I was really pleased to see that I passed with a very decent margin too, which was great! The rushed nature of the exam and long wait for the results leaves you going over the exam in your head convincing yourself how badly you’ve done, so it came as a huge relief and surprise.
There’s not a lot more to say than the title of this post – if you create a new Virtual Switch using PowerCLI without specifying the NumPorts parameter, it defaults to 64 ports. This strikes me as odd when the default for a standard switch is 120.
You can see in the screenshot below that when I create a Virtual Switch without the parameter, it creates it with 64 ports. Once you minus the 8 reserved for physical NIC ports (uplinks), CDP traffic, and network discovery it leaves you with 56 ports available for VMs.
One of the many perks of being a vExpert is the cool vexpert.me URL shortener provided by Darren Woollard (@dawoo). There are several ways for vExperts to use it once they’ve signed up – there’s a PowerShell script by Jonathan Medd (@jonathanmedd) and Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) and now even a GUI interface based on the PowerShell.
You’d be surprised how many times I see datastore that’s just been un-presented from hosts rather than decommissioned correctly – in one notable case I saw a distributed switch crippled for a whole cluster because the datastore in question was being used to store the VDS configuration.
This is the process that I follow to ensure datastores are decommissioned without any issues – they need to comply with these requirements
I started the TrainSignal VMware vSphere Optimize and Scale (VCAP5-DCA) Training course as part of my preparation for taking the exam which I took at the beginning of this week - I’m still waiting to hear the results. One thing I found when I started preparing is that there is an overwhelming volume of information - the Exam Blueprint is a great place to start as that lays out what will be tested. There are 9 sections and 27 objectives laid out, with knowledge, skills and abilities and tools required for each objective. The volume can be overwhelming, even if you already know most of it!
Yesterday I attended my second ever #LonVMUG and did my first ever VMUG presentation! Generally it was a great day, with loads of really good sessions and some really cool community and vendor content.
As ever it was great day for socialising and networking with people who you interact with on twitter. For me one of the major benefits of the VMUG is learning from other people’s experience. Twitter was alive with the hastag #LonVMUG and it definitely adds something to the day to be active
The VM estate that I manage is large: there are more than 20 different clusters and over 300 hosts of varying ages and hardware levels – as a consequence there are various different versions of ESX and ESXi running. Upgrading the hosts is somewhat akin to painting the Forth Bridge, a never-ending task. So keeping the thousands of VMs at the correct hardware and VMtools versions can be a bit of a losing battle.
This is such a bread and butter task that it doesn’t require more than a few words – it’s definitely worth looking at the Sizing PDF before you deploy (VMware-vCenter-Log-Insight-1.0-Beta-Virtual-Appliance-Sizing.pdf
) as it’s not small even for a test installation. If you’re using less than the recommended 8GB RAM there are additional steps to change the heap size for performance.
The vSphere UMDS provides a way to download patches for VMware servers that have an air-gap, or for some reason aren’t allowed to go out to the internet themselves – in my case a security policy prevented a DMZ vCenter Server from connecting to the internet directly. The solution is to use UMDS to download the updates to a 2nd server that was hosted in the DMZ and then update the vCenter Server from there. It also can save on bandwidth if you’re running multiple vCenter Servers, which again was the case (though bandwidth isn’t really a constraint).
If you work in company with strict password compliance rules, for example under SOX, you might well have to change administrator passwords every month. Doing this on any more than a few hosts is tedious work – even on two hosts it seems like a waste of time logging on the host via SSH (or even enabling it first) before changing the password. Then we also need to audit the change, there’s no point making it for compliance reasons if we can’t then prove we did it!
Yesterday I attended my second ever #LonVMUG and did my first ever VMUG presentation! Generally it was a great day, with loads of really good sessions and some really cool community and vendor content.