VMware

So this morning I took the VMware Infrastructure as a Service exam (VCPVCD510) to gain the VCP5-Cloud qualification. The IaaS exam is available for existing VCP5-DCV holders to take without any other pre-requisites. I am very pleased to say I finished the exam in good time and scored 466/500 – the pass mark is 300.

The Exam

The exam itself is 85 multiple choice questions, and gives you 90 minutes to do them. The last two exams I’ve sat were VCAPs, which require you to move very quickly through the questions, so I am in the habit of answering quickly: I finished with over an hour to spare! The questions and answers are not particularly wordy but it is important to read carefully and pick out the important information.

According to VMware, Infrastructure Navigator is

…a component of the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. It automatically discovers application services, visualizes relationships and maps dependencies of applications on virtualized compute, storage and network resources.

Effectively it takes a look at the network connections that are running between your VMs (and physical servers) and works out which applications and services are running on each, and the dependencies – both upstream and downstream – for each VM.

There’s no doubt that vCOps is a great product for proactively monitoring your vSphere environment, but it’s a hefty package for the lab. The minimum recommended RAM is a whopping 16GB – in my lab that’s the whole of my management host! I recently needed to do some testing so I wanted to get it running in the lab with the barest minimum I could get working, and it turns out you can get working with just 4GB and 2 CPU…albeit you wouldn’t want to monitor much! I also want to use vFlash Read Cache to accelerate I/O in the lab – this requires upgrading VMtools and the VM hardware to version 10.

After attending the “ Future of IT ” Google hangout in September, I was asked to give a quick summary on what 2014 may hold.

So without further ado..

I believe in 2014, we will see an increased demand for - and usage of - hybrid clouds, especially among SMEs who are trying to avoid large investment on private clouds to accommodate high demand, short term projects.

2013 has been an amazing year for me – I was awarded the vExpert title, I’ve taken and passed my VCP5-DCV, VCAP5-DCA and VCAP5-DCD and spoken at the London and UK national VMUGs. I’ve attended my first VMworld and spent countless hours in the lab and on study, generating about 30 blog posts. All I can say is that it’s been a truly blessed year.

After two and a half years working as a Senior Infrastructure Analyst for a global insurance company, the time has come for a change! For a while now I’ve felt that I’ve outgrown my current role and that perhaps it was time for a change. I have worked with some really excellent people on my team while here, and I’ll definitely be sad to say goodbye to some of them! I’ve had the opportunity to work on some huge-scale environments and highly complex systems – all of which allowed me to learn and grow in ways not possible in a “normal” size environment.

In my post yesterday (vexpert.me/hS) I talked about how to recover from an expired default SSO administrator password – this prompted a discussion on twitter with Anthony Spiteri (@anthonyspiteri) and Grant Orchard (@grantorchard) about the defaults for expiration and how to mitigate the risk.

The first solution is to modify the password expiration policy for SSO. I’m not advocating this necessarily – I think that expiring passwords ensure that you change them regularly and increase the overall security of your SSO solution. However, I can envisage situations (similar to mine) when the SSO administrator account is not used for a long time and expired – that causes headaches.

Today I found out that in vSphere 5.1 the SSO administrator account (admin@system-domain) has a password that expires after 365 days. See KB2035864:

vCenter Single Sign-On account (SSO) passwords expire after 365 days, including the password for admin@system-domain.

Awesome.

In vSphere 5.5 it gets even better – the password expires every 90 days by default! (See the vSphere 5.5 SSO documentation)

There are different schools of thought as to whether you should have SSH enabled on your hosts. VMware recommend it is disabled. With SSH disabled there is no possibility of attack, so that’s the “most secure” option. Of course in the real world there’s a balance between “most secure” and “usability” (e.g. the most secure host is powered off and physically isolated from the network, but you can’t run any workloads ). My preferred route is to have it enabled but locked down.

Today was always going to be a bit of a funny day as I scheduled the VCAP5-DCD exam for 10am this morning. I am happy to say that I passed! I’m a bit light on VMworld to report today, so forgive my DCD experience to pad it out!

Preparation

I have to confess my prep for this exam was light – I literally only watched the TrainSignal course by Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) and just about finished that last night in the hotel! I don’t spend much time focussing on design during my day job, so I approached this exam as a bit of a learning experience rather than a serious bid to pass. I decided to book the exam here at VMworld just because you can get 75% off – if you’re funding yourself it’s not a discount to be dismissed easily!

I flew from Gatwick to Barcelona last night to my very first VMworld!

I’m staying in a hotel that is actually quite far from the conference, it’s a metro, train and bus journey away from the conference center and it takes about 40 minutes to get here. On the plus side I was only 5 minutes away from the VMUG party last night so I went over there for an hour or so. Note for future years - stay a little closer to the conference!