Who would have thought it!! I only set it up to help me revise for the VMware VCP4 Beta Exam.
3 Months later, it now has over 60 Questions (increasing all the time). I receive emails daily thanking me for helping them prepare for their VCP4 exam. People as far away as New Zealand are being told to use my Exam’s and Study Notes by VMware instructors.
But the most amazing part was when i checked Google Analytics to see how many people are using it:
I never expected it to be soo popular. As you can see the hits per day are increasing at a steady rate, so i’m going to do my best, to keep adding more resources, to make sure you visitors have a reason to keep coming back.
A couple of months ago i spoke about the possiblity of using VMotion over a WAN connection. Well yesterday at VMWorld, VMware announced that long distance VMotion was now supported for up to 200 Kilometers.
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A brief overview of what the TCO / ROI Calculator does:
This tool is designed to provide a total cost of ownership analysis comparing your current environment to a virtualized VMware environment.
By answering a few questions related to your existing environment, including the number of servers intended to be virtualized, person hours to provision a new server, and existing storage requirements, default assumptions are made based upon Alinean research, 2008, to determine your current costs.
Through virtualization with VMware, servers and desktop infrastructure can be consolidated resulting in a significant reduction in costs, as well as improvements in service levels, reduction in risks and improvements in business agility.
VMware Virtualization TCO / ROI Calculator
What is VMware VMDirectPath I/O?
VMDirectPath allows guest operating systems to directly access an I/O device, bypassing the virtualization layer. This direct path, or passthrough can improve performance for VMware ESX systems that utilize high-speed I/O devices, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A single VM can connect to up to two passthrough devices.
VMDirectPath I/O is experimentally supported for the following Storage and Network I/O devices:
- QLogic QLA25xx 8 Gb Fibre Channel adapters
- Emulex LPe12000 8 Gb Fibre Channel adapters
- LSI 3442e-R and 3801e (1068 chip based) 3 Gb SAS adapters
- Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller
- Broadcom 57710 and 57711 10 Gigabit Ethernet controllers
VMware regularly adds support for new hardware. Check your hardware’s support at the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide portal.
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This morning I awoke to two Emails from Twitter titled “Your account has been suspended” (Not quite sure why they felt the need to tell me twice).
Written in the Email was the following;
If you are one of my Followers you will know that earlier on this week someone/something got hold of my username/password for my Twitter account and used it to spam all of the people I follow. As soon as I found out, I changed my password and removed any Twitter apps that could have been used to gain access to my account and since then there has been no more spam.
So why have Twitter done this? I have opened up a Support Ticket with Twitter to try and find out.
Update: Just found out that Duncan over at Yellow-Bricks has also had his Twitter account Suspended.
No sooner had I opened the ticket, the ticket was showing as “Solved”. I checked my account, it was still suspended! So I have re-opened the ticket and I await to hear back.
After reading through the ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 Server Installation Guide I noticed the following requirement for adding vCenter to a Linked Mode group;
“All vCenter Server instances must have network time synchronization. The vCenter Server installer
validates that the machine clocks are not more than 5 minutes apart.”
Now this got me thinking…..
If a company had two Data Centers, lets say one in London and one in Amsterdam, They’ve decided they wanted to use vCenter Linked Mode to help them manage both Data Centers from a central location. According to VMware’s documentation this wouldn’t be possible due to the time difference between the two cities, London GMT and Amsterdam GMT+1 would mean that the vCenter Server clocks would be 1 hour apart.
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Whilst revising for the VCP4 Beta Exam and also replying to a thread on the VMTN Forum, I’ve come across a couple of instances where there is a lack of “using NPIV in VMware ESX 4” information. The only good post I can find is Jason Boche‘s post; N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and VMware Virtual Infrastructure, but his post is written and tested using ESX3.5. So I have decided to find out as much information as I can and post it here.
Definition: NPIV stands for N_Port (Node Port) ID Virtualization
What does NPIV do? NPIV is a useful Fibre Channel feature which allows a physical HBA (Host BUS Adapter) to have multiple Node Ports. Normally, a physical HBA would have only 1 N_Port ID. The use of NPIV enables you to have multiple unique N_Port ID’s per physical HBA. NPIV can be used by ESX4 to allow more Fibre Channel connections than the maximum physical allowance which is currently 8 HBA’s per Host or 16 HBA Ports per Host. See the image above for a graphical representation of NPIV.
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Tomorrow (17th July) I have the pleasure of sitting the VCP4 vSphere 4 Beta Exam, all 4 hours of it..
One of the main things I remember from taking the VCP3 exam was the amount of Configuration Maximum questions that VMware ftel the need to put into it. So I downloaded the vSphere 4 Configuration Maximum PDF and began reading, reading again and reading again. But nothing seemed to stick in my memory.
I have decided to make myself 3 mini vSphere 4 Configuration Max Practice Exams, so I can test myself over and over until I have learnt them. I haven’t added all the maximums to the exams, just the ones I think might be included in the VCP4 Exam.
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This morning i received an email from VMware;
VMware is proud to announce the availability of the VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4 (VCP4) beta exam! We would like to invite you to participate in this beta. Your experience as a current VCP3 and vSphere beta product user will be valuable in helping us craft a high quality exam.
But it has to be taken by 17th July…. So i had better get revising
Here are few details about the Exam:
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VMware has just released a joint Proof of Concept with Cisco titled VMotion between Data Centers.
Just lately I’ve been doing a lot of extra reading about how Cloud computing is shaping and evolving and I believe this to be another step taken by VMware to closer themselves on becoming a “Private Cloud” solution. Will we soon be seeing Virtual Infrastructures spanning separate Data Centers?
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