2vcps and a Truck

Tonight I was sitting with my Mac Book Pro, wife and kids all in bed, perfect blogging time. Except no idea what I wanted to write. After a burst of twitter encouragement from @rickvanover here we go:

Five things you should know about VMware Certs:

1. If you work for a VMware partner, start with the VSP/VTSP Certifications. They require a lot less initial investment and give you the start into VMware products. Partners only.

2. You can take the “Install and Configure” or “Design Secure and Analyze” or the “Fast Track” (which is some kind of combo of the previous 2) then study and take the VCP. The VMware Certified Professional is the standard in Virtualization industry and has personally opened many doors for me professionally. VMware Partners NEED them, but it is quite an investment. The class is far from free and the test isn’t cheap. Something to know though, if you go to VMworld the tests are discounted. So everyone at VMworld take advantage! Save a few bucks.

3. As good as the VCP is, there is still a demand for VMware knowledge more advanced than the base cert. I lost my job last year, while job hunting I saw listings asking for VCDX certified people. At the time no VCDX’s were publically known. It just shows the demand for proof of advanced knowledge in VMware and a possible dilution of the VCP due to brain dumping.

4. Testing experience is fairly standard technical testing. Although I wish it was all lab practical rather than memorization. Multiple choice type questions are the majority of the questions. My best test taking tip is to actually know how to Install and Manage Virtual Infrastructure. You can run it all in VMware Workstation 7, so there is no excuse to just memorize answers. I say that but you will have to memorize max and minimums and other facts in order to pass the VCP.

5. Check what is on the blue print on the VMware Certification website, this website is the final word on what is on the test.

Bonus: Use the communities/blogs/twitter to find information and answers. Don’t just post “Hey what is on the exam?”. Ask questions about technical topics, then make sure you could articulate the concept to someone else. I find if I understand enough to be able to teach it to someone else then I really am starting to learn things.

Bonus #2: Be willing to be always learning. If you already know everything you probably don’t need the certification.

*No clue who the original artist is of that picture. It is awesome, so if you know who to credit let me know.

Due to the performance hit while zeroing mentioned in the Thin Provisioning Performance white paper this article in the VMware knowledge base could be of some good use.

I would suggest using eagerzeroedthick for any high IO tier 1 type of Virtual Machine. This can be done when creating the VMDK from the GUI by selecting the “Support Clustering Features such as Fault Tolerance” check box.

So go out and check your VMDK’s.

Well time to get on over to Eric Siebert’s vSphere-land and vote for the top 25 VMware Blogs. The goal this year is to have someone besides my Mom and myself vote for me. So if you happen to like the content of this blog please vote for me. Now some recap of recent posts to remind you why a vote for 2vcps is a vote for vAwesomeness.

Remember the what not to tweet list? Always fun.
What about the time I ranted some nonsense from VMworld? Here. and here.
Who could forget the time I said some stuff about VMware?

I trust equiped with this information you will now be able to place 2vcps in your list of votes.

All kidding aside, I think it is just cool to be on the ballot.

Thank you to everyone out there that gave any attention to this little blog. I tried to supply new information where I could and also document my journey trying to improve at the esxcfg- commands. In 2009 the traffic increased from less than 100 visits in a week to approaching 500 in a week. That is a slow hour for some of the best vm bloggers (Yellow-Bricks, Scott Lowe) but I am not trying to replace them.

In March I was layed off. I spent 2 months full time looking for work. The VMware community really stepped up. Special thanks go out to a few people that tried to help out or checked in with how the search was going: @jasemccarty @maishk @jasonboche and many others. By the end of April I started a new position as a Virtualization Infrastructure Engineer at Veristor Systems. This job required moving the family from Memphis, Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia. All the fun of a new job, house hunting and moving to a completely new city. We closed on our new house just a few days after VMworld 2009. My first trip to VMworld was amazing but I would suggest not buying a house while you are in and out of conferences, labs and seminars. Lots of details to fix, I will be happy if this is not the case ever again.

Getting into the VMworld stuff.

More VMworld Stuff

After such a busy year it was only the beginning of September. The rest of the year was filled with VMware Installation projects and VMware health checks. I was all over the Southeast US. Maybe I can come visit some of you in 2010?

Technical/VM/Blogging Goals for 2010:

1. Continually improve the quality of content going to this blog.
2. Schedule, take and pass the VCDX exams.
3. Improve my overall storage knowledge.
4. Renew my expired CCNA (bad move letting this lapse in 2009)

2009 was such a big year personally. I hope and pray for a little more stability in 2010 but I also love the excitement of new challenges, but the VCDX should be enough.

Our Backyard in December

Also, I scheduled a Merry Christmas post, but for some reason I didn’t do what I thought I did. So a late Merry Christmas to all of you out there.

Recently I have spent time re-thinking certain configuration scenarios and asking myself, “Why?” If there is something I do day to day during installs is this still true when it comes to vSphere? or will it still be true when it comes to future versions.
Lately I have questioned how I deploy LUNs/volumes/datastores. I usually deploy multiple moderate size datastores. In my opinion this was always the best way to fit in MOST situations. I also will create datastores based on need afterward. So will create some general use datastores then add a bigger or smaller store based on performance/storage needs. After all the research I have done and asking questions on twitter* I still think this is a good plan in most situations.
I went over a VMworld.com session TA3220 – VMware vStorage VMFS-3 Architectural Advances since ESX 3.0 and read this paper:
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1059
I also went over some blog posts at Yellow-Bricks.com and Virtualgeek.

An idea occurred to me when it comes to using extents in VMFS, SCSI Reservations/Locks, and VDI “Boot Storms”. First some things a picked up.
1. Extents are not “spill and fill” VMFS places VM files across all the LUNs. Not quite what I would call load balancing, since it does not take IO load into account when placing files. So in situations where all the VM’s have similar loads this won’t be a problem.
2. Only the first LUN in a VMFS span gets locked by “storage and VMFS Administrative tasks” (Scalable Storage Performance pg 9). Not sure if this implies all locks.

Booting 100’s of VM’s for VMware View will cause locking and even though vSphere is much better when it comes to how quickly this process takes. There is still an impact. So I am beginning to think of a disk layout to ease administration for VDI, and possibly lay the groundwork for improved performance. Here is my theory:

Create four LUNs with 200GB each. Use VMFS to extents to group them together. Resulting in an 800 GB datastore with 4 disk queues and only 1 LUN that locks during administrative tasks.

Give this datastore to VMware View and let it have at it. Since the IO load for each VM is mostly the same, and really at the highest during boot other tasks performed on the LUN after the initial boot storm will have even less impact. So we can let desktops get destroyed and rebuilt/cloned all day with only locking that first LUN. This part I still need to confirm in the LAB.

What I have seen in the lab is with same sized clones the data on disk was spread pretty evenly across the LUNs.

Any other ideas? Please leave a comment. Maybe I am way off base.

*(thanks to @lamw @jasonboche and @sakacc for discussing or answering my tweets)

It took just about a year. Which shows I need more consistency with my blog (should have been about 1 month). I finally finished a brief explanation of each esxcfg command. My little self study for the VCDX, this is in no way exhaustive.

Make sure to check out other great resources out there:
Simon Long
Harley Stagner
Both good places to start.

Hopefully my VCDX compilation page can help.

The esxcfg-vswif command allows you to create and modify Service Console ports and their IP information. Many times I have to change stuff after the install process is complete and the only place is via the direct service console because network communication is not possible. This usually happens when the network team changes a vlan in the middle of the install or they change a subnet. Not to disparage network teams many times I am the network team and the virtualization team.
Create a new vswif:
#first add a port group with esxcfg-vswitch
esxcfg-vswitch -A "Service Console Test" vSwitch-Test
#then use esxcfg-vswif to create a new vswif
esxcfg-vswif -a -i 172.16.50.40 -n 255.255.255.0 -p "Service Console Test" vswif1
#List your vswifs
esxcfg-vswif - l
#Example:
[root@esx3 root]# esxcfg-vswif -l
Name Port Group IP Address Netmask Broadcast Enabled DHCP
vswif0 Service Console 172.16.50.50 255.255.255.0 172.16.50.255 true false
vswif1 Service Console Test172.16.50.40 255.255.255.0 172.16.50.255 true false

Modify your Service Console network information:
esxcfg-vswif -i 172.16.50.41 -n 255.255.255.0 vswif1
#example
[root@esx3 root]# esxcfg-vswif -i 172.16.50.41 -n 255.255.255.0 vswif1
Setting IP config
Nothing to flush.
[root@esx3 root]# esxcfg-vswif -l
Name Port Group IP Address Netmask Broadcast Enabled DHCP
vswif0 Service Console 172.16.50.50 255.255.255.0 172.16.50.255 true false
vswif1 Service Console Test172.16.50.41 255.255.255.0 172.16.50.255 true false


You need to have VMkernel ports to do VMotion, Software iSCSI and Fault Tolerance. These ports can be easy to create and manage from the command line. I generally can be found adding them for vSphere iSCSI. I especially use the cli for tasks that are repeated over and over. Creating multiple ports per ESX host is time consuming and tends to introduce typing errors. So it is always a good idea to get them all done in a script file to reduce the chance for error.

List out all the VMkernel Nics:
esxcfg-vmknic -l

Create a new portgroup first with esxcfg-vswitch then create a vmk port with esxcfg-vmknic, example:
esxcfg-vswitch -a VMkport vSwitch1
esxcfg-vmknic -a -i -n VMkport

In VI3 you can only have one Vmkernel port per vswitch, in vSphere this is changed. It is especially usefully setting up iSCSI multipathing. As the software iSCSI initiator will initiate IO from each iSCSI enabled vmkernel port when using Round Robin as your path selection policy.

I was looking for last couple weeks for a good way to re-purpose PC’s as thin clients to ease the investment in VDI. I stumbled across this PDF from VMware and I thought it was great. I would tend towards using group policy to deploy the new shell described on pages 3 and 4. It can always be undone if the PC is needed as a PC again.

Check it out.

You pretty much replace the default shell (explorer.exe) with the VMware View Client. I would suggest using some group policy to keep people from using the task manager to start new processes. This should be a temporary solution until you have budget to buy some real thin clients or net books even.

There are of course lots of options out there for thin clients, and software to provision a “thin OS” to machines. This is free and easy though. I thought it was cool so I decided to share.

I was in my personal ESX about to upgrade to update 1. I was distracted by trying to setup iSCSI from the command line. Right before I looked to the vSphere Client to get the iqn I said, “There is surely a way for me to find this from the command line.”

Searching around I found the command vmkiscsi-tool. Really good stuff, I can complete the rest of my setup without the GUI. One thing though to list out the iqn for iscsi after you enable it you must know the device name (ie vmhba??).

Using this command:
vmkiscsi-tool -I -l

I usually guess the iscsi hba is vmhba33 or 32 but how do I know for sure?
Try:
esxcfg-scsidevs -a

Ok great, now we know it is vmhba33

[root@esxhost01 sbin]# vmkiscsi-tool -I -l vmhba33
iSCSI Node Name: iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:esxhost01-35151883
[root@esxhost01 sbin]#

Now with a few more vmkiscsi-tool commands I can finish configuring my iSCSI.
Add the Ip of the SAN:
[root@esxhost01 sbin]# vmkiscsi-tool -D -a 172.16.23.251 vmhba33
Now rescan:
[root@esxhost01 sbin]# esxcfg-rescan -a vmhba33