Here we go; I’ve finally made it to this January London VMUG. To be honest, it was worth it,  worth it because I’ve finally ended up meeting some people, geeks and enthusiastic that I knew only over on Twitter or via their own blogs and worth it as well to get my #LonVMUG memorabilia attend some few presentations ( coming there shortly). The Sponsors for the Events were Symantec, NimbleStorage, Xangati and Embolics

Arrived at the London Chamber of Commerce at around 12:30 and missed the morning sessions, Auto Deploy by Alan Renouf and Max Daneri and also the new ApplicationHA and Backup Exec Auto Recovery Demo by Symantec. (See presentations below)

I’ve had a chance to meet the Xangati representative and talk about the features that their product can give you and how is different between their own and the new vCenter Operation Manager (Big fight but two robust products)

After Lunch, I’ve attended the Nimble Storage presentation and though that all the presentation was very good and impressed but the product but will have some hard time to pierce into the market that is dominated mainly by the big fishes like EMC, NetApp, EqualLogics and so on.

A short break, a quick coffee and fresh air, I’ve attended the second session  “Private vCloud Architecture Deep Dive” presented by the two VMware gurus Dave Hill and Aidan Dalgleish. I have a limited knowledge of the Cloud Director but I was again impressed about what features and how a cloud can be built with in multiple setups, network pool methods and all the separations between the external and the internal pools and what each can give you.

The final session was also an interesting one, VCP5 Session by Gregg Robertson from theSaffaGeek.co.uk, Gregg went through all the necessary requirements that you need to get yourself prepared and ready for your VCP5 Exam. Gregg started his presentation a bit nervously but managed to get it wrapped up properly, some few simple questions were put to the audience and that was fun.

My conclusion:

I think this is a great event to attend and also an opportunity to learn, discover and also meet new people around the VMware community, VMUG has done a great job to setup these events and most credit is going to the people with the Blue polo (@alaricdavies, @Rimmergram, @Virtual_stu, @vinf_net), these people are helping the community us a lot to get together and for those who are interested in getting a subscription (Optional) which cost around £130, you will get a great adventage like a 100$ discount on the VMworld meeting, 1 Year Free Subscription on all eLearning cources and also about a 30% discount on Software (Fusion and Workstation).

The next Presentation will be held at the same place and on the 17^th of May and I’m sure I will again attend this session.

All the link and presentation can be downloaded from box.com.

I remember a week ago replying and entering this by just replying to a survey and I wasn’t that sure that I would be selected and have an entry for a Vote but guess what? I’m there! I’m selected in the top new blogs under 1 year old.

The vote is split into 10 Section:

• Best Storage Blog (Must have more than 50% of posts storage related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have more than 50% posts cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have more than 50% posts VDI/EUC related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have more than 50% posts Scripting related)
• Best podcast (Audio or video podcasts)
• Best official VMware Blog (Blogs part of VMware’s website)
• Best Videos used in a Blog (Must have produced a good percentage of videos)
• Best New Blog (Blog must be less than a year old)
• Best Independent Blogger (Can’t work for VMware or a hardware/software vendor).

And the rules are for you to elect 10 of your favourite blog from the list and then rank these in your order of preferences and the result would be: the 1^st Blog will get 10 Points and the last will get 1 Point.

The vote will be open until the 2^nd of February and the result will be determined and announced live at the VMware Partner Exchange.

Note that suspicious votes will be discarded as this time they have implemented a solution for cheats, there will be Geo-location tracking, IP Addresses and cookies to track and protect against any fraudulent votes.

And to finish, Voters will be entered to win a Train Signal copy of vSphere5 and VMware View 5 video training courses.

Now I’m not expecting to be elected as one of the best as I’ve just started blogging but to be faire I’m far than happy to be entering this contest but hay hoo a vote from you will make a difference.

Get now guys and cast your votes and why not mine!!

This must be a new feature “vSphere HA Heartbeat” of VSphere 5.0.

Let’s digin.

Prior this version, if we have a Host which is isolated from the cluster on its network management, HA will kick in and restart the VMs running on this host on a different ESX host and now with vSphere 5.0, a new feature has been added to the HA, vCenter will check the heartbeat on the Management network and also on the Vmkernal side. This Datastore Heartbeat feature should give a more accurate and determine if the given host has failed or this has just had a glitch somewhere.

Now once I’ve presented my storage to these two ESXi hosts, this warning disappeared and both ESXi have chosen the presented LUNs for storage heartbeating. How cool is this?

During the last few weeks, I have been gathering lot of information’s and book marks about the exam preparation and time has come for me to give a bit to the community. for those of you who don’t know about the Exam, the current VCP 4 holders can upgrade to version 5 without taking the course which will save us few ££/$$ but you need to sit for an exam before the end of February (still 47 Days Left from now).

Below is a diagram copied from VMware which will show the exam/upgrade process and what you need to do to Certify yourself.

The theory (reading) won’t be enough and I must recommend procuring yourself a small Lab, few computers (1 or 2) where you can get your hands dirty installing and configuring, breaking and fixing your vSphere Lab. over at eBay, you can find some descent 2nd hand desktops and even servers which can support ESXi. Make sure that you drop a visit to the VMware HCL before buying anything.

At Techhead.co.uk has setup a page on his blog where you can get a rebate of some few HP Proliant MicroServer for around 100£, these are really a good investment and one of my colleague have already invested in 3 and he is happy as a bunny.

In the other side of preparation, you can find anything and everything on the net and one of the obvious location that need a pilgrimage is of course the mother Land vmware.com

I’ve set up some few links to little documentation that worth a look at. These are all hosted on VMware website but more and in-depth documentation can be found there too.

My Recommended Links:

VMware vSphere 5.0 Basics Document

VMware vSphere 5.0 Installation and Setup

vCenter Server and Host Management Guide for vSphere 5.0

VMware vSphere 5.0 Examples and Scenarios

Installing and Admnistratoring vSphere Update Manager for vSphere 5.0

vSphere 5.0 Security Guide

VMware vCloud Requirements for a Cloud

VMware vCloud Service Definition for a Public Cloud

VMware vCloud Service Definition for a Private Cloud

VMware vSphere 5.0, Licensing, Pricing and Packaging

VMware vSphere Networking Guide

VMware vSphere Storage Guide

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance Installation and Configuration Guide

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance Administration Guide

Installing and Configuring VMware Tools

VMware Virtual Machine Administration Guide

VMware OVF Tool User Guide

vSphere 5.0 Availaibilty Guide

vSphere Resource Management Guide

VMware Data Recovery Guide

vSphere Host Profiles

vSphere Troubleshooting Guide

vSphere 5 Command Line Guide for Service Console Users

vSphere 5 Configuration Maximums

Other than that, Trainsignal have a really good learning resource and it is also worth investing in VMware vSphere 5 Training  by David Davis and Elias Khnaser have done an excellent job (as the usual) and gathered around 17 Hours in three DVDs and this This course covers exam objectives required for you to pass your VCP5. You can have these Audio and Videos on multiple formats and available on your computer phone or even on your video Player (I’m using Zune).

One more resource that can be used for your preparation is the Mastering VMware vSphere 5 written by Scott Low. Scott has already published the same for version 4 and this version 5 is a real deal. Over at Amazon you can get a copy for 21-25£ and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed reading his work. Mike Preston over at blog.mwpreston.net has written an interesting overview worth reading as well

Again as stated earlier, hovering the internet I came across these wonderful blogs about the Exam study and preparation for VCP5.

You might also hover on this piece or Art vRefrence Card 5.0 by Forbes Guthries over at vreference.com which has tones of information like storage, networking maximums and loads and loads of information.

Exam Blog Posts:

-         VCP 5 The original blue print by vMWare.com

-         VCP5 information and preparation and Post related to vSphere 5  by Scott Vessey

-          How To Pass The VCP5 Exam from petri.co.il

-          VMware Certified Professional 5 out at valCo Labs

-          What’s new part1, part2 and part3 by Simon Greaves

-          VCP 5 Blueprint by Mike Preston

Experiences from the follow VCP 5:

-          Exam Experience over at rayheffer.com

-          The Exam Review by Scott Vessey

-          One of the first people to pass this exam by vjason.com

-          Eric Sloof’s VCP5 Exam experience by ntpro.nl

-          VCP5 Exam Experience by TheSaffaGeek

Some Practice Exams:

Few but huge resources found on the net and I advise having some tests before taking the official exam.

-          VCP 5 Practice Exams  at simonlong.co.uk

-          The official VCP5 Mock Exam  at mylearn.vmware.com

-          Kalen Ardnt VCP5 Quiz – kalenarndt.com

Well surely this post will grow and grow over time and I would be pleased to have some feedback or maybe add some links to interesting sites you might suggest.

UPDATE:

For those of you who are sitting for the VCP5 Exam, I’ve just received a Tweet about a  25% discount.

Use: copen25 and you will get your 25% back, Note this will expire on the 31st January so Hurrrryy!!

Good Luck!!

Auto Deploy Architecture – YouTube.

Hectic and annoying when you wanted to start working with the vSphere 5 but luckily the fix for this was by removing the vCenter VM from the hosted ESXi  inventory and re-adding it back to it.

When you think that everything was resolved I got a second error popping up

Call”Datacenter.QueryConnectionInfo” for Object “home” on vCenter Server “vCenter.home.intra” when trying to add my newly upgraded ESXi host to version 4.1 “no error to report when I’ve added the second ESXi 4.1 to the vCenter”.  The error state that there is a connection error when trying to add this host so I tried to add it using the IP address and this was a success, that was a problem with the FQDN with this host. From the vCenter server I’ve pinged the Host FQDN and I’m getting no response and had a look at the DNS and cannot see the ESXi A record of this one “I must have deleted this before”, a simple add of the A Record Entry in the DNS, ipconfig /flushdns and /registerdns was sufficient to have my host pingable from my vCenter and from there adding this was a success too. Badabing badaboom we back to work.

Anyway, my point in this article is to talk about my plan in upgrading my Home lab and also my Certification . Lot of reading gone on in the last few weeks/months preparing myself and I think time has now come to start by upgrading my Home lab. This is now sitting on the vCenter and ESXi version 4 and looking forward to do an upgrade rather than a migration.

My current setup consists of:

Physical:

-          2 x ESXi hosted on 2 x identic Xeon XW6400 with 8gig Ram, 500gig local storage each that I’ve had from my former employee (RIP Symbian).

-          1 x external NFS, iSCSI storage (QNAP SS-439 Turbo NAS) with 800gig Storage.

-          1 x NetGear Prosafe 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch.

-          1 x NetGear Router for DHCP.

-          1 x HP NC6400 Laptop with Veeam Backup and replication V.5 installed on it (Thanks to Veeam).

Virtual:

My Virtual infrastructure sit on a Windows 2008 and R2 versions (AD/DNS, MS SQL, Citrix XenApp, vCenter).

Lots of reading and planning gone and though of and now it’s my turn to give back to the community what I’m planning to achieve.

My first step is going to be the migration of the vCenter to Version 5 before moving my ESXi hosts to the same version. Some few requirements that will to be taken into consideration are:

Pre-Upgrade Tasks:

• The Software and Hardware requirement:  vCenter 5.0 Server requires a 64-Bit Software and Hardware.
• Database requirement:

1-      Do backup your Database or take a snapshot of this one from your ESX/ESXi host before moving on.
2-      Might be the time to upgrade your vCenter Database if you are still on Express 2005 as this is no longer  supported or move to an a Database Server that is now supported (vSphere 5.0 Upgrade Guide, pg  29.)
3-      Be sure that you have/Created a 64Bit DSN prior the migration and the DSN is using the SQL Native Client driver.

• Make the most of the vCenter 5.0 upgrade installation file by using the vCenter Host Agent pre-Upgrade Checker as this will report any issue and might prevent a successful upgrade.
• If the VMware Heartbeat or the Microsoft (MSCS) are being used to protect the vCenter, make sure that these are disabled prior the upgrade or you will have your vCenter started somewhere else (Unintentional Failover).

Post-upgrade tasks:

Once the upgrade has been successful and tested all your vCenter to resolve any issues before moving to the next level it is the time to do a Post-upgrade for this migration. The list is not limited to the bellow but these are important as far as I’m concerned.

Some of these Post-Upgrade are:

• Re-install and re-configure the vCenter Plug-ins on your vSphere.
• Again make the most of vCenter and use the 60 days Trial licence until your VMware infrastructure has been upgraded to version 5.0 and then install your vSphere 5.0 Licence key.
• If you are still managing a vi3.x hosts, install the VirtualCenter 2.5 Licence Server.
• If you have been using your VMware Heartbeat or the Microsoft Cluster Server MSCS, this is the time to re-enable these.

You can find several resources on how to migrate a vCenter server to 5.0 and one of which I do recommend is reading this blog from vmguru.nl

In the next couple of days (Starting from tonight), I will go around and play with the upgrade and also stage a migration as well for testing and also posing the result and experience on this blog.

Any comment are more than welcome.

Hard way Study Tips:

1) Installed a lab environment at home. So that i could evaluate, test and get “hands-on” experience on vSphere. (2x ESX hosts + openfiler for shared storage) This is by far the absolute best way to learn about vSphere and get experience and knowledge about this great product.

2) Read and memorized the “vSphere documentation notes” (http://www.vreference.com/downloads/…4-notes1.0.pdf) and the “vSphere reference card” (http://www.vreference.com/downloads/…re4card1.0.pdf) from vreference.com. Many thanks to Forbes Guthrie for his excellent work on these pdfs.

3) Read the “VCP on vSphere4 Exam Blueprint” from VMware () to define what i had to learn to pass the exam. All questions, reflections and obscurity’s that i had on the content of the blueprint i looked up and read about in the main documentation set for vSphere. You can download this in pdf format or you can (as i did) search it in the online version found here WebWorks Help 5.0 . This is the definitive resource and answers all your questions.

good luck!!

Finally VMware version 7 is out now, tested this when was on RC and with its great new features I must say that this is a great tool for any IT pro. One of the great things I’ve seen is the ability to run ESX4.0 on this version and also the support for new Linux and Unix Oss, what a great tool.

You can still have a chance to play with the RC 7.0.0 build-203739 by clicking here, trial is for 30 days.

Also VMware Player 3.0 and VMware Fusion 3.0 are out so why don’t you give it a chance?

ESX4.0 on VMware 7

Enjoy!!