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.

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.

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

OK, SRM and View 4 are out. Go ahead and start planning those upgrades from 3.x to 4. I mean really, vSphere is out now for almost 6 months. Get Enterprise Plus or the Acceleration kit, just get to vSphere. Here are a few of my reason’s why.

1. Round Robin Storage IO. Those without can giant Fiber Channel SAN infrastructure can start to stack the Software iSCSI ports and get performance above and beyond what was possible before with iSCSI. Equalogic, Lefthand and other iSCSI SAN manufacturers have to be throwing huge parties about this. While talking about iSCSI you don’t need a Service Console just for every iSCSI VMkernel port. This always seemed like extra setup in 3.x.

2 Thin Provisioning, I am not technical enough with storage to know if SAN based thin provisioning is better for some reason. It is great to be able to save space with template and other large footprint VM’s.

3. dVSwitch, VMsafe and vShield zones. New hooks for security will eventually give us insight into areas of the VI we could not see before. VMsafe will let vendors tie into the kernel (at least that is how I understand it). Additionally the new dVSwitch (Distributed Virtual Switch, sometimes it is called something else) will give control and sight into the network stack in ways that was impossible before.

This is stuff many may have read on the release date in May, but now that I have seen vSphere in action and some of the biggest hurdles (SRM and View) have been overcome, it is now time to upgrade, already.

I have been missing for a couple weeks again, which means we have been busy doing VMware installs and that is a good thing. Next command in the order is esxcfg-nics. From the command line you can get some good information about the physical nics on your host. Additionally for troubleshooting purposes or configuration you can hard set physical nic speed and duplex.

I just saw this on twitter and thought it was so cool I would post it.

The knowledge base team added some video KB entries.

Here is one: Restarting the Management Agents on ESX

Not everyone can just read a KB article and know right what to do. So this is a cool move by the KB team.

esxcfg-nas

Standard use of this command is to add or list your NFS mounts.

List: esxcfg-nas –l

Add: esxcfg-nas –a –o <host> -s <share> <name>

Not much more I can say. A little more detail here:

http://b2v.co.uk/b2vguide2vmware3.htm

A thread in the communities about a problem someone had where the nfsclient wasn’t loaded:
http://communities.vmware.com/message/864559

So go out and add some NFS datastores!

It has been almost 1 year since I started looking at the esxcfg-* commands. It initially came as a look at the first part of the Enterprise Administration Exam’s Blueprint very first bullet point. In that post I talked about using esxcfg-mpath to identify which luns are fiber, iSCSI, NFS or local.

Today lets look a little bit deeper at the command and how it can be used to help you day to day.

We can always use esxcfg-mpath -l to list all of the luns and their paths. A good thing to check here is that you have the same number of paths to each datastore that comes from the SAN. You may have a zoning issue if a certain lun can only be seen from 1 path rather than all of them. In general each hba will see the lun through each controller in an active active type fiber channel SAN. So hba A should see the lun from Controller A and B. Likewise, hba B should see Controller A and B for a total of 4 paths. If you are using fixed or MRU as the pathing policy only one will be active but esxcfg-mpath -l will show four paths.

Of course if you have more hbas and controllers you will have more paths.

You can follow the examples given by the esxcfg-mpath -h to get help. One useful tool is to create a crude script using esxcfg-mpath –policy with the –lun tag to change the policy from say MRU to Fixed. I am not a perl scripter and I sure someone already has a real shell or perl script to set the policy but I do like to prepare multiple command in notepad then paste them into the cli.

esxcfg-mpath –policy=fixed –lun=vmhba0:0:1
esxcfg-mpath –policy=fixed –lun=vmhba0:0:2
and so on…

Then try to feel really smart by alternating the paths so every fourth lun will use different paths.

esxcfg-mpath –path=vmhba1:0:1 –lun=vmhba0:0:1 –state=on
esxcfg-mpath –path=vmhba2:0:1 –lun=vmhba0:0:2 –state=on
esxcfg-mpath –preferred –path=vmhba1:0:1 –lun=vmhba0:0:1
esxcfg-mpath –preferred –path=vmhba2:0:1 –lun=vmhba0:0:2

The first two lines set the path for the respective luns to different hbas. The last two lines set the preferred path to that same port on the hba. So when there is failover the path will fail back to your set config when all is well.

Well I passed the VCP 4 and my CCNA expired (can’t get around to renewing it). At work I did the VTSP as required by the partner program. Since I am in a test taking grove I think I need to push to passing the Enterprise Administration Exam. There was a series I started a while back on command line management of ESX. So like several others I will set my next goal at the Enterprise Administration Exam.

Here are some good sites I have recently seen on studying for the Exam.

VCDX Study Guides
Simon Long’s Site
follow @vcdx001 on twitter he is giving hints about the design defense, great info, but don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.

I think for this first test you just have to know what you are doing with VI 3. My big problem is having worked with vSphere for a couple months now I hope that doesn’t hurt me.

This morning’s keynote was more geared toward the engineer at least I felt more interested. Not to say yesterday was bad, today played more to my interest level.

The Wyse Pocket Cloud is one thing I will be sure to check out. Actually how usable it will be on AT&T shotty 3g network remains to be seen but if you are in range of a good wifi, you probably have your laptop around, but hey it is still freaking cool. Having tried RDP and Citrix via Mobile PC a couple years ago I am interested to see how far the usability has come. Before the usability was equal to zero so there was nowhere to go but up.

Springsource was on the stage again. I believe VMware is trying to show their relevance in the direction they are planning.

Attended a really good Exchange 2007 on vSphere session. Most of it I was familiar with having tried to keep up with the whitepapers on Exchange over the last year. It was good to see a customer success story. Technically the focused more on topology and server role layouts than any kind of “set this setting to x, to make it fast”. From what I can see you need a 3rd party snapshot (san level) software to protect the database from corruption. All other methods do not keep multiple copies of the data. It was good to see a baseline of 1500 users per mailbox server on a single vCPU VM when using the Intel 5500 series procs. That will be good ammo to build one vCPU box and scale out and use FT for hardware failure.