Vmware

I recently got my hands on a copy* of Chris Wahl and Steve Pantol’s Networking for VMware Administrators and was very keen to read it – especially given the reputation of the authors. I came to the book as someone who is at CCNA level (although now expired) and someone who regularly designs complex VMware networks using standard and distributed switches. I would class myself as having a fairly decent understanding of networking, though not a networking specialist.

It was with great honor both Sam and I were awarded vExpert 2014 (my first and Sam’s second award!) we are both proud to be listed alongside so many others in the vExpert programme.

You can view the announcement and the full list here -  http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2014/04/vexpert-2014-announcement.html

I’m fairly new to SRM, but even so this one seemed like a real head-scratcher! If you happen to be using CA signed certificates on your “protected site” vCenter and “recovery site” vCenter servers, when you come to linking the two SRM sites you encounter SSLHandShake errors – basically SRM assumes you want to use certificates for authentication because you’re using signed certificates. If you use the default self-signed certificates, SRM will default to using password authentication (see SRM Authentication). Where the process fails is during the “configure connection” stage, if either one of your vCenter servers does not have CA signed and the other does (throws an error that they are using different authentication methods) or that you are using self-signed certificates for either SRM installation (throws an error that the certificate or CA could not be trusted).

This had me scratching my head, what seemed to be a common problem wasn’t fixed by the common solution. It was actually my fault – too familiar with the product and setting things up too quickly to test.

I installed a VCSA 5.5 instance in my lab as a secondary site for some testing and during the process found I couldn’t log on to the web client – it failed with the error:

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.

As a proof of concept I recently tried to virtualize OS X (Mountain Lion) - It is important to note that VMware is now licensed to do so and you can read more here .

The following is an overview of the steps I followed to achieve my goal in some cases it was trial an error as I am not a regular Mac user.

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 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!

John Troyer (@jtroyer) asked a question on Twitter last night about a CloudCred prize of $1000-2000:

That got me thinking – was it possible to create an entire 2 host lab with storage on a $2000 budget? My first step was to convert it into a proper currency:

I figured that I’d stick to the Intel NUC route that I’ve gone down for my lab at home – I love the NUC for its tiny form factor, silent operation and really low power consumption. There are down sides – it can only take 16GB RAM, only one mSATA disk and only has one gigabit NIC. I don’t think any of those are too big a deal for a personal lab though – certainly I’ve not had any problems building and testing VMware products on my single NUC. I’d drop in an 8GB stick of RAM and an Intel 60GB mSATA SSD per NUC – you could always go 16GB later by adding another 8GB stick in the 2nd slot. I picked the Intel mSATA disk for it’s controller and throughput figures – there are larger and cheaper ones but not with the same write performance. Since the use of SSD is massively in focus with vFlash, PernixData FVP and several other technologies, you wouldn’t want to miss out. I’ve also added an 8GB USB3 flash drive per NUC to boot ESXi from.