VMware - 40

This course is open to anyone but is designed for students who have already taken a VMware Infrastructure 3 instructor-led course. It assumes a strong working knowledge of VMware Infrastructure 3. The course contains sixteen brief eLearning modules. Topics include: an overview module of many the new features, a module on upgrading an existing VMware Infrastructure to ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, and several guided demonstrations on how to operate three of the key new features: Storage VMotion, VMware Update Manager, and Guided Consolidation. In addition, the course provides eight interactive simulations, which give the student hands-on practice with the procedures being demonstrated.

The VMware Certified Design Engineer certification will be available later this year. The certification involved taking several courses and exams, including:

• Courses
  Install and Configure
  DSA
  Design course (currently under development)
• Exam
  VCP on VI3
  Enterprise Exam (currently in private beta)
  Design Exam (currently under development)

Once all of this has been completed the candidate must present a defensible design to a panel of VMware Solution Architects for consideration. As you may guess, this is a certification specifically targeted for VMware partners that will be assisting VMware in design and deployment and is only intended for a relatively small audience. That being said, the Enterprise Exam, which has a number of live lab style questions, should be available to the public in the next few months and may become part of a mid-line certification between VCP on VI3 and VCDX. That is also under consideration.

Jon C. Hall Technical Certification Developer VMware, Inc.

VMware is proud to announce a new forum on the VMTN community, the VMware Certified Professional forum. This forum is for discussion and questions regarding the VCP program and exam. It is moderated by members of the certification team and frequented by VCPs and others knowledgeable in VMware products.

Scott has sent me a heads’ up this morning, he completed the physical build out of the lab this weekend.  Now he’s loading up various hypervisors to test the “ease of use�? and performance of each.

Most intelligent men would not state this, but I was fortunate enough to have my wife spending a week in Spain visiting her sister. This allowed me to pull a few late nighters and not only finish racking and cabling all the servers, but also custom cut and run all network cables (those that I could unplug for now anyways). To top it all off, I even got all 5 of my PE 1435's configured with various hypervisors.

Today one of the attendees in the Virtual Infrastructure 3 Install and Configure class discovered a new ESX 3.5 warning. When you want to use the VI-Client to take over the console of a virtual machine and at the same moment you are already on this VM running the VI-client. Are you still following me ;-) ? The following warning will appear in the console screen. By the way the WebAcces console doesn’t throw this error and is still singing around.

VMware plans to improve virtual infrastructure through technologies such as high availability, automatic restart, better tolerance and masking of hardware failure, and site disaster recovery, the company's chief scientist and co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, told reporters in Bangalore last Monday. A virtual machine would, for example, be able to record its execution on another virtual machine in a compact form, so that if one of them dies the other one takes over, Rosenblum said. He did not disclose the time frame when products based on these technologies will be available.

On the same day Marathon Technologies Corporation announced everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. Based on the same everRun® automated availability software employed by over 1800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

1. Companies can now reliably run high value production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications.

2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies.

3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption.

Last week one of my students pointed me to an interesting site. The Holy Hypervisor contains columns written in Dutch and English the content raised my eyebrows and changed my point of view.




The site is dedicated to the hypervisor. The hypervisor saves you money, and that's what makes it great! It can also make some other things easier. Along with the money saving, it makes the hypervisor one of the most pleasant things in computing. What it does you ask? It partitions a piece of hardware in more pieces of virtual hardware, so it seems like you have more hardware than you actually purchased.

Many bloggers already discovered the video on YouTube showing that Hyper-V Quick Migration breaks network connections. In other words quick migration in the beta of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor leads to network connection failures in virtual machines. VMware created their own page on blib.tv showing a comparison between VMotion and Quick migration and  VMware VMotion does not break network connections. VMotion in VMware Virtual Infrastructure leaves network connections intact as virtual machines travel from one physical server to another. Sometimes a video says more than a hundred words ;-)

During the first month of GA, Veeam Backup was heavily downloaded and evaluated by their customers. The development team received a lot of useful feedback that helped them to create the new product update.

What's new in Veeam Backup 1.0.1:

1. VMware VCB 1.1 support.
2. Improved performance for backup, replication and file-level restore .
3. Light version of setup is available now.
4. Various bug fixes and improvements.

Scott Herold over at VMguru.com is building up his lab. He is still waiting for the Dell server to arrive, but today he completed the installation of the iSCSI server.

I was able to finally build my iSCSI server a while back and wanted to highlight some of the details of this particular system. I wanted to try to do something unique with this configuration that would help to support a higher-end workload than a typical server.