Eric Sloof - Entries from July 2012

Sunday, July 29. 2012

VCP5-Infrastructure as a Service - Mock Exam

The VMware Certified Professional 5 – Infrastructure as a Service (VCP5-IaaS) validates your ability to install, configure and administer a Cloud environment using vCloud Director and related components. Achieving this certification demonstrates your understanding of basic cloud concepts including public/private/hybrid clouds, multi-tenancy and cloud security, as well as your skills in using vCloud Director to create and manage vApps, service catalogs, and organization/provider VDCs, as well as administering cloud enabled networking and storage.

The VCP5-Infrastructure as a Service - Mock Exam is a practice exam. NOTE: A score of 100% will prevent re-taking the exam. It is recommended that you answer one known item with an incorrect choice to keep your score just under 100%.

Questions: 25

Time Allowed: 45 minutes

Passing Score: 100.0%

Attempts Allowed: Unlimited

Go to the VCP5-Infrastructure as a Service - Mock Exam

Friday, July 27. 2012

VCP5-IaaS exam will be available at VMworld San Francisco

All VMware Certification exams, including advanced certifications, are being given for 50% off the regular price at VMworld San Francisco!

Space is limited: Reserve your seat today!

VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
VMware Certified Professional – Infrastructure as a Service (VCP-IaaS)
VMware Certified Associate – Desktop (VCA-DT)
VMware Certified Professional – Desktop (VCP-DT)

VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Datacenter Design (VCAP-DCD)
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Datacenter Administration (VCAP-DCA)

Via SOS tech and Kat Christenson

Also take a look at VCP5-IaaS Certification Released for the blue print

Tool Update - VMware WSX July Tech Preview Release

Over a month ago Christian Hammond (chipx86) has released the first technology preview of WSX. This tool enables users to access the console of their shared virtual machines via a web browser without installing any plug-ins or web controls. This service renders an HTML5 web page that can connect to your workstation hosts or ESXi servers (requires vSphere 5.0), enumerate the available virtual machines and allow you to power them on and interact with the desktop.

The July tech preview holds many improvements:

Improved Home Page
Improved Server Page
Big Honkin’ Power Button
Better Touch Input
Mouse Wheels
Better Retina Support
SSL Support
Easier Installation
Smarter Defaults
Performance Tweaks
Bug Fixes

If you're intrested and want to give it a try, just hop over to the ChipLog website and find out the latest news and downloads.

Thursday, July 26. 2012

July VMware vNews is out!

Via Scott Sauer over at virtualinsanity.com

Wednesday, July 25. 2012

Training Course - VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage the VMware Cloud

VMware's new vCloud Director 1.5 training course has recently been released! This intensive four-day, instructor-led course demonstrates to technical personnel how to deploy VMware vCloud for a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment and manage the ongoing operation of the deployment. The course focuses on the private and public vCloud solutions but also includes information on how this approach supports a hybrid solution.

Deploy vCloud Director
Manage vCloud Director to satisfy private, public, and hybrid cloud business needs
Configure VMware vSphere® storage to enable multiple tiers in provider virtual datacenters
Create and manage vCloud Director organizations and vApps to satisfy business needs
Create and manage vCloud Director catalogs
Configure networking for organizations and vApps
Connect organizations with VPN tunnels and static routes
Interface vCloud Director to OpenLDAP and Microsoft Active Directory servers
Configure network security between vCloud Director vApps and organizations with VMware vShield Edge™ firewalls
Use VMware vCenter Chargeback™ to meter vCloud Director resources
Understand the interactions between VMware vSphere Distributed Resources Scheduler clusters and vCloud Director.

An extra edition of this training course will be delivered (in Dutch) by VMware Certified Instructor Eric Sloof at the 13th of August till the 16th of August, please ping me for more information.

More information about the course can be found here: VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage the VMware Cloud [V1.5]

Tuesday, July 24. 2012

Cool Tool - Veeam Explorer for Exchange

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange gives you instant visibility into your Exchange backups. You can browse, search and selectively export items (emails, notes, contacts, etc.) directly from Veeam backups of your Exchange virtual machines (VMs).

Veeam Explorer for Exchange works directly with your Exchange VM backups—even compressed, deduplicated and incremental backups. There’s no need to provision storage or restore entire mailbox stores—just choose the Exchange Servers and restore points you’re interested in, and Veeam Explorer will present the contents of those mailbox stores for browsing, searching and export.

Veeam Explorer for Exchange is a new feature of Veeam Backup & Replication. Currently available as a beta, Veeam Explorer will be included in all editions of Veeam Backup—even Free Edition. You no longer need expensive standalone tools for Exchange item recovery that are licensed per mailbox.

Use Veeam Explorer for Exchange to find and retrieve information for internal or external investigations. The Advanced Find feature lets you zero in on exactly the items you need.

When users accidentally delete emails or scripts corrupt calendar items, you can save the day with Veeam Explorer for Exchange. Simply export a good version from a previous Veeam backup and transfer it to the affected user.

http://www.veeam.com/microsoft-exchange-recovery.html

Arista & VMware Present: Enabling Multi-Tenancy in the Cloud and VM Farm

Join VMware and Arista Chief Technology Officers for an in-depth engineering discussion and educational session on how to design and deploy multi-tenant infrastrucutres that enable new cloud services, greater customer isolation, and simplifies scalable network architectures.

This session will dive into technologies such as:

VXLAN, NVGRE and STT (Stateless Tunnel Transport - an IETF Draft) discussing advantages and disadvantages of each and when to use them
Network architectures to support scalable cloud deployments
How to integrate network virtualization and provisioning into a common framework and service catalog

http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/vmware-july-26-webinar

Sunday, July 22. 2012

Cool Tool - PowerShell WMI Extensions module

Expose WMI classes as rich PowerShell commands with detailed documentation and manage local and remote systems using WMI via the wmix module for PowerShell.

The PowerShell WMI Extensions module is a project that I wish I had started as soon as PowerShell 2.0 was released in 2009. It has been in development since late 2011, after I had been working on my pspx module for many months, and it is one of the most ground-breaking modules I have ever produced. The purpose of this module is simple: to auto-generate advanced functions that look and feel like cmdlets, complete with rich parameters, help documentation, examples, remoting support, security customizability support, and everything that you would expect from top-notch PowerShell commands by harvesting the rich data that is stored inside WMI, reducing as much as possible (or ideally eliminating) the need to dig through WMI documentation or to use more complicated WMI cmdlets to manage your infrastructure.

WMI is a very broad and powerful management interface that has been exposed to PowerShell since it was first released. Unfortunately, the manner in which this rich management interface was exposed to PowerShell was through a very small set of generic commands. Figuring how to use these generic commands to manage WMI is challenging at best. None of the documentation embedded in WMI is exposed. Objects returned from the WMI cmdlets don't look or behave the same as objects returned from .NET classes. WMI management classes are not easily discoverable. WMI contains many classes that you will never need to know about or think about, and this large pool of classes makes it difficult to find what you are looking for. These opportunities, and many more, were the inspiration behind the wmix module.

http://wmix.codeplex.com/

Kirk Munro, Product Manager, Architect, and PowerShell MVP for hire

Thursday, July 19. 2012

Who's interested in joining the StratoGen Beta program for the upcoming VMware vCloud Director?

John Coley over at StratoGen is looking beta testers that can really push their new platform to the limits. In particular he's looking for power users familiar with building complex environments using VPNs, inter-vApp networking and SAN storage. StratoGen are pleased to announce the start of their VCD beta program which will provide valuable feedback on our implementation of the next version of VMware vCloud Director.

Beta testing underpins all of their product launches and is crucial in our ability to provide services that lead the hosted VMware market whilst remaining highly resilient. In this program they are particularly interested in working with experienced “power users” who are familiar with VPNs, complex internetworking and able to utilize SAN storage.

By participating in this program you agree to be contacted to provide feedback on usability and platform performance. In return you will be one of the first to use this exciting new technology, and allocated temporary resources on our USA based enterprise platform.

If you would like to take part in the program please visit this link and follow the link for the Beta program to register your interest.

Wednesday, July 18. 2012

OPS-CIM1775 - VMware vCenter Operations Customers Come Forward to “Tell Their Story”

Ben Scheerer over at the “VMware Virtualization & Cloud Management” blog has announced the winners of the VMware vCenter Operations “Tell Your Story” Contest. Congrats go out to:

Frist Prize: Joseph Filippello, Apparatus

Second Prize: Allen Tramouze, Lorantec

EMEA

First Prize: Eric Krejci, EPFL

Second Prize: Gregg Robertson, xTravert

I’ll help moderate the VMworld 2012 Barcelona OPS-CIM1775 - VMware vCenter Operations Customers Come Forward to “Tell Their Story” session and David Davis will help-out at the VMworld 2012 in San Francisco

With overwhelming response, customers of vCenter Operations Management Suite have submitted their own stories for the opportunity to attend and present during this highly touted session at VMworld 2012. This session covers many of the unique use cases captured during this promotion, as well as highlights the most compelling and unique story as determined by an all-expert judging panel made up both internal VMware employees and independent vExpert bloggers (David Davis, Eric Sloof, Tommy Trogden, Duncan Epping, Martin Klaus and Ben Scheerer). Don’t miss the opportunity to hear your one of your favorite bloggers from the judging panel present side by with a vC Ops customer to hear how VMware management has transformed their ability to ensure business critical application performance, configuration & compliance, capacity & optimization through effective management of their virtual/cloud infrastructure.

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