Craig

VCP5-DCV Delta Passed

Posted on 28 September 201511 January 2021 by Craig

After receiving a friendly reminder from VMware that my VCP5-DCV was due to expire in December, my first thoughts was to take the VCP6-DCV exam, but with less than two months to go and a busy schedule for the rest of the year, I decided to take the easy option and opt for the VCP550 delta exam.

Seeing that the closing date for the exam was 30th September and the fact that I had a spare hour, I sat the exam on 26th September. A quick flick over the exam blue print and there was mention of VSAN and vCOPs.

I dusted off my Essential VSAN and VMware vCenter Operations Manager Essentials books and downloaded the Whats New in VMware vSphere 5.5 Platform pdf. I was ready time to click proceed.

The exam itself was a lot tougher than I expected, but I guess that’s because it is focused towards administration and my daily job is around design. After around forty five minutes I received a ‘congratulations’ you have passed.

The purpose of this exam was simple, to give me some breathing space before I attempt the VCP6-DCV.

As with all things, the day after I pass the exam, VMware announce that the VCP550 delta exam is to be extended until 31st December 2015. If I had known this then might have taken some time out to prepare, but I guess a pass is a pass.

VMworld 2015 Announcements – In a Nutshell

Posted on 1 September 201511 January 2021 by Craig

The excitement of VMworld 2015 is upon us, and below are the key announcements.

Naturally, we will need to dig a bit deeper to understand the technology in more detail along with the limitations and costs.

VSAN 6.1
- 2 x Node Cluster Supported
- vSphere Metro Storage Cluster Supported
- Windows Server Failover Clustering Supported
- vROPs Integration (not sure if a management pack is needed)
- vSphere Replication Enhanced 5 Min RPO

This answers a lot of use cases for me, especially the 2 x Node Cluster and vMSC support.

VMware Hybrid Cloud
- Support for Layer 2 Networking Extension
- Encryption over the WAN and optimisation
- Cross Cloud vMotion (on-premises to vCloud Air)

Layer 2 is key here as a lot of customers have apps that break if you change subnets. Zero downtime is pretty decent as well, however you still need to design for user access to applications and services in vCloud Air.

SRM 6.1
- Metro Stretch Clusters, ability to live migrate across vCenters. Think vMSC but with control for test and planned failover.

Another key enhancement here, lots of campus type customers such as Universities and NHS Trusts will look into this more deeply..

VAIO (vSphere API’s for IO Filtering)
- Enables third party data services to intercept IO and optimise before hitting storage.
- Initial use cases are caching and replication
- Works with VMFS, Virtual Volumes and VSAN

Although VAIO was announced at VMworld 2014. We should start to see some practical use-cases. My best guess is that we will see in-memory optimisation for IO, same as Atlantis but without the need for a separate appliance.

Want To Go To VMworld Europe For Free?

Posted on 22 August 201511 January 2021 by Craig

VMTurbo are giving away three chances to go to go to VMworld Europe.

All you need to do is enter for free here and check the three drawing dates when the tickets are being drawn:

21st August
28th August
4th September

Good luck, see you in Barcelona.

Cisco UCS Platform Emulator – ‘Slot ID Must Be A Range In The Format [a-b]’

Posted on 11 August 201511 January 2021 by Craig

This is another quick blog post to help anyone using the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator and is configuring a chassis or blade and runs into the error message ‘slot ID must be a range in the format [a-b]’

The [a-b] is misleading, however you do need to enter details in a specific format for it to be accepted by the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator.

The easiest way to do this is to jump onto Cisco UCS Manager and expand the component you are trying to add and check the properties of the item.

In the above case, I’m trying to add fans to a 5108 Chassis. So I have drilled down to the component and checked the format of the ID and Tray.

The format to enter the fans in is 1-1 or if you want to populate all 8 at once enter 1-8.

To give another example, I want to configure a Cisco UCS B200 M4 Blade and want to add in Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2650 v3 2.30 GHz 105W 10C/25MB Cache/DDR4 2133MHz. The format for this is 1-2 which represents the CPU slots.

Cisco UCS Platform Emulator – Unable to Launch UCS Manager

Posted on 7 August 201511 January 2021 by Craig

This is a quick blog post to help anyone who is setting up and configuring Cisco UCS Platform Emulator for the first time and is staring blankly at a screen wondering why they have no ability to launch UCS Manager.

Problem Statement

Connecting to the VIP Address of the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator, you are unable to launch UCS Manager.