New Book Coming Out VCP 5 Study Guide
April 27, 2012 
Sean Crookston 
For those looking to gain their VCP 5, or become more familiar with vSphere in general a new book is being released next month by fellow vExpert Brian Atkinson (Twitter @vmroyale). Brian is an experienced VMware engineer who also has made large efforts of his time in the VMware community serving as a moderator in the forums. IF you’ve spent any times in the forums asking or looking at questions you will certainly have seen his participation in there.
His book is currently available for pre-order and I would highly recommend it if pursuing the VCP 5.
From the Back Cover
Includes Real-World Scenarios, Hands-On Exercises, and Access to Exam Prep Software Featuring:
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Custom Test Engine
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Over 300 Sample Questions
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Electronic Flashcards
The Ideal Product to Prepare You for the Leading Virtualization Certification
As the demand for virtualization skills continues to grow, you need to earn the newest certification to stand out from other IT professionals. This guide gives you the tools to pass the VCP-510 exam so you can highlight your capabilities. It walks you through all of the requirements, including planning and installing ESXi, configuring vCenter Server, deploying and managing virtual machines, and much more. Inside these pages, you’ll also find:
Full coverage of all exam objectives in a systematic approach, so you can be confident you’re getting the instruction you need for the exam
Real-world scenarios that put what you’ve learned in the context of actual job roles
Challenging review questions in each chapter to prepare you for exam day
Exam Essentials, a key feature in each chapter that identifies critical areas you must become proficient in before taking the exam
A handy tear card that maps every official exam objective to the corresponding chapter in the book, so you can track your exam prep objective by objective
Sybex Exam Prep Tools
Go to www.sybex.com/go/vcp5 and download a full set of electronic test prep tools to help you thoroughly prepare for the exam. These include:
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Custom Test Engine
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Over 300 Sample Questions
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Electronic Flashcards
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Glossary of Terms in PDF
Download practice exams and chapter review questions
Reinforce your understanding with electronic flashcards
New Book : Optimizing vSphere Deployments
Over the past months I have been busy working on a book with Harley Stagner that will be released by VMware Press later this year. The book is focused on recommendations for configuring and optimizing existing and new deployments. I’ll write more about the experience of writing and other details in the future but wanted to pass out a quick couple link including a rough cut preview of the book.
Available for Pre-order
Roughcuts Available
Setting vCenter Alarms with PowerCLI
vCenter as of version 5.0 defines 54 default alarms that can be configured for notification. What vCenter does not provide however is a way to automatically configure all those alarms to be sent to a single email address without having to manually go into each alarm. The below PowerShell script however will take care of that. After configuring the vCenter server connection information and changing the email address, this script will setup emails that are triggered by any change in alarm state. This is a one time email per state change, however you could use the –repeat option to set repeat emails for certain states if desired.
Note that in the Code you will not see anything to set the Yellow—>Red state. I could not find this documented anywhere but by default it appears this will be set. Including it in the code would result in errors.
http://www.seancrookston.com/set_alarms.ps1
I also managed to find someone who has written a much smaller set of code that will look for all existing alarms and set email notifications as well as another individual with a similar script for setting alarms.Check out these two posting for more details.
If you would like to know more about the various PowerCLI commands for alarms be sure to check out this VMware posting:
http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2010/12/managing-vsphere-alarms-with-powercli.html
Forcing a Kernel Dump on a vSphere Host : The Purple Screen of Death
This is nothing new however I thought I’d share on how to force a PSOD on a vSphere host in case you were not aware. I had done this a while back but was unable to retrieve the information my self when searching. Thanks to @CianoKuraz & @lamw(http://www.virtuallyghetto.com) for their help on Twitter.
Eric Sloof (http://www.ntpro.nl) documented this quite some time ago on his website here. The process is quite easy and goes as follows:
- Connect to the vSphere host via SSH.
- Type vsish
- Type set /reliability/crashMe/Panic
Alternatively you can send an NMI interrupt. This depends on your hardware and if you are interested in learning more about this check out VMware KB 1014767
Great VMware VCP 5 Resources Page
I’ll be needing to renew my VCP 5 and with some down time towards the end of the year I figured now is as good of a time as any to go through the blueprint and do some studying for the exam. Damian Karlson who previously took over the VCAP-DCA study guide for me also has a great resource page for the exam with links to a lot of great community resources. If you are also taking the xam I would highly recommend checking this page out.
Another Great VCAP-DCA Resource
Chad King over at http://virtualnoob.wordpress.com has posted a great resource for VCAP-DCA studying. Using a Mindmap he incorporated some of the great resources already out there and you can check this out at the URL below. Mindmaps are definitely a great way to break out a blueprint like those for the VCAP exams and should prove as a great resource for your studying.
http://virtualnoob.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/vcap-dca-uber-awesome-study-guide/
Chad also has a nice set of VCP resources up on his page.
VCDX Defense Preparation
I have officially decided that I will target defending for the VCDX in May of next year in Toronto. This may or may not also be the first opportunity to defend for the VCDX 5, however I find it highly unlikely being I haven’t even heard of a beta for the VCAP-DCA/VCAP-DCD5 to date. Incidentally at this time this is also going to be the last change to defend a vSphere 4 design.
While doing a little browsing in the VCDX forum I found an interesting fact. Since November of 2010 there have only been 5 people who have achieved the certification.
The limited growth shows two things:
- One the number of individuals defending is obviously going to be limited based on requirements for a VCP/VCAP-DCA/VCAP-DCD and financial restrictions of defending including travel. There are only approximately 400 VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD certifications issued, with what I gather to be a high overlap of individuals having both. If I had to guess you are probably only looking at 550-600 people who would be eligible to submit a defense.
- Secondly they aren’t just giving these things out to everyone that does defend.
I see the fact that only 5 have been issued in almost the past year not as a point of intimidation but rather a challenge. I currently have a design picked out that I will be using for the defense and will be working over time to put my submission together. Luckily I have until March where anything needs to be submitted.
Over the next 7 months or so I will blog quite a bit about the process and in the end the result that follows.While I of course would like to see this process end in certification, I know that I will learn a great deal along the way regardless.
But don’t take that as a losing attitude, I am fully planning on passing the defense = )
Using VMware View for Server Linked Clone Desktops
While playing in my home lab I recently had the idea pop in my mind of if View would support linked cloning of server operating systems. And by support I mean allow as there is no way any of the following is supported by VMware.
There are a number of reason I can think of that would be a good use case. Firstly if there was a need to have a pool of test servers available for quick installation or functionality testing. Secondly for saving some space in lab setups where disk space is of particular concern. The limited space of SSDs become much less of a concern if so.
You may say well lab manager and vCloud Director exist for this. And I would agree with you there. My main concern is simplicity and being I already have View setup and running this would be a very simple solution. Now there does already exist several PowerShell scripts that will create linked clone desktops for you. They work very well but for me my lab becomes so disorganized that the idea of managing my clones through a GUI interface like VMware View is very appealing. Besides its cool.
While I did get View to somewhat work it wasn’t perfect. I still am unable to connect with the View client, which is not something I truly desire but would have been cool. For automatically assigning desktops to individuals this would have been necessary, but logging in via RDP or the vSphere client is more then enough for me. The agent to my surprise installed without issue so I was hopeful it would work but unfortunately it did not.I also found that the only way to get systems to automatically be named was through the use of a customization specification.
Below is what you’ll need to do. Note that I only tested this with vSphere 5 and View 5 and don’t know if it will work any more or less then it does with other configurations. If you’ve tried this before or gotten any further then I have I’d be eager to hear from you.
- A requirement for View to even detect the system and snapshot when creating the pool is that it be a desktop operating system. So I also had to change my 2k3 machine to a windows xp hardware profile and my w2k8 server to a Windows 7 hardware profile.
- As mentioned above the only way to get systems to be named according to any type of naming pattern was to use a customization spec.
VMware Autodeploy Using Cisco DHCP
I have been working in the lab trying to get some hands on time with all of the new features of vSphere 5. Currently on the block is Autodeploy. There are a lot of great resources out there for Autodeploy already and I’ll include some links below. The main purpose however of this entry is to expose an issue I found when using Cisco DHCP scopes. I’ll follow up with saying that most of my experience in DHCP is with Microsoft AD.
When trying to enable options 66 and 67 I could not connect to the PXE Server I received the DHCP address but could not get connected to the TFTP server. The message I received back was PXE-E32 TFTP Open Timeout.
I banged my head against a wall for a bit checking configs, making sure the tftp service was running and making sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious. In a last ditch effort something I read alluded to the below commands that could be used in lieu of option 66 and option 67. After configuring the below for the scope it worked immediately.
next-server 192.168.1.44
bootfile undionly.kpxe.vmw-hardwired
Autodeploy Links
https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Evaluation-Guide-4-Auto-Deploy.pdf
http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/Tech-Blog/using-vmware-autodeploy-for-esxi.html
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/08/25/using-vsphere-5-auto-deploy-in-your-home-lab/
http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/vsphere-5-auto-deploy-pxe-booting-through-cisco-asa-firewall/
http://ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1819-vSphere-5-Auto-Deploy-Demo.html
What Happens With VMFS3 LUNs Greater Then 2 TB
I had someone run into an issue earlier in the day that I couldn’t’ explain in regards to a datastore size. We found the LUN size itself was greater then 2 TB, which was acknowledged as not being supported but the amount of space that did become available did not make sense.
So we all know that there is a 2 TB-512 LUN size limit for VMFS3, but do you know what size LUN you will be presented with when you present a LUN bigger than this?
Lets say we add a new VMFS3 volume on a presented LUN that is 3,5 or 7 TB? One would expect that you would then receive a 2TB LUN at least, but in actuality you will end up with a 1 TB LUN. How about a 3.5,5.5, or 7.5 TB volume? You would end up with a 1.5 TB LUN in each of these cases.
I looked for a knowledgebase to back this but could only find one community posting which alluded to the LUN size being based on the remainder of what was presented after taking 2 TB chunks out at a time. This means you could end up with some really weird sizes you weren’t expecting.
*Note-Frank Denneman(http://frankdenneman.nl) made an important observation that this information only applies to VMFS3. This entry has been updated to reflect that this information applies to VMFS version 3. VMFS version 5 will support a 64TB LUN.
