My thoughts straight out of the exams VCAP5-DCA and VCAP5-DCD

After you read my post below you might think am I crazy to do two advanced exams together.

Well first and foremost keeping me glued to 4 long hours to answer series of questions are challenging and reading lengthy scenarios made me exhausted time and time again.

My piece of advice for this is being mentally prepared. A strategy for this might be keep reading a Design book for 4 hour straight without a break. Not even water. Yes! I just said it.

Cuz you are not even to allow to go to washroom nor take water with you…

You get the results of DCD exam there it self unlike DCA Exam you have to wait 14 business days.

It is a literally a marathon!

DCA exam was another challenging experience, I lost precious time trying to figure out how to scroll down the screen.  Every aspect was questioned Network I/O, Auto Deploy, Update manager service. If you are not a hardcore vSphere Admin, then literally know the screens and doing stuff by heart. There is no time for u to check your stuff. My 4 hours just flew just like that.

I think I have to build my speed, and do the lab until u can visualize the screens on your mind.

But the experience was awesome I literally loved the challenge though I was exhausted.

Time to get back to study… Anyways all thanks and praise to Almighty God! Hope he will help me in my next sitting of my exam.

PLEASE DON’T ASK ME WHAT QUESTIONS WERE THERE I AM BOUND TO NDA AGREEMENT.

vSphere Fault Tolerance 16 vCPU support demo’d at VMworld

As you all know as of now VMware only support 1 vCPU virtual machines. But todays virtual machines are demanding to have more than one vCPU. So hardly customers benefitted by this feature.

Rumours were floating when vSphere 5.1 was to be released that 4 vCPU support for FT was to come but that didn’t happen. I personally got frustrated since I know there is this feature from VMware that’s too awesome but cannot use it due to its limitation.

But this VMworld there was a session VMworld 2013: Session BCO5065 – vSphere Fault Tolerance for Multiprocessor VMs – Technical Preview by Jim Chow and Xu Wei presenting a 16 vCPU support for Fault Tolerance.

The session of 59 minutes and 45 seconds long is recorded and is on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu69VjLhkdw&feature=youtube_gdata

Our beloved Vladan Seget has blogged about this in his blog too.
http://www.vladan.fr/16-vcpu-vms-for-fault-tolerance/

Hopefully with the next vSphere release this should be a feature to lookout for…

Where does VMware get a beat down from Hyper-V?

Where does VMware get a beat down from Hyper-V?

I am trying to put down my personal opinion where Hyper-V is gaining ground in the virtualization war at the Pre-Sales meetings that I have sat down. I think the views are important since it is we Pre-Sales Engineers who are at the forefront who are presenting the Pros and Cons of technology.  I was involved in an unbiased discussion (even though I would love to be biased towards VMware) in front of the customer which technology can compensate the business and a cost comparison.

Please note that these views are mostly when I sat at SMB customer discussions. It might be unfair to compare the vSphere Essentials Kits to the System Center Suite. But that’s the customer.

These views might differ from one geographical location to another. But simply put I would personally love to see VMware stay abreast in the game of Virtualization.

Sometimes you cannot do the same thing or say the same thing all over a long period. But making the correct moves and making those moves at the correct time is key.

1. Bundled comprehensive Backup Solution

This is an area of concern where VMware gets a beat down in my opinion where customers tend to think that they get a full Backup Solution for free when they purchase the System Center Suite.

As a Pre-Sales engineer I would love to say “VMware is not a backup vendor” but to realize the vision of “Software Defined Data Centre” a good backup solution is of paramount importance. The experience of VDP 5.1 was not so great. It cannot take backups to the tape drive. Whether we like it or not Customer’s love the word “FREE”. That’s where Microsoft scoring points. I would love to see VDP free edition would solve this problem, or I personally think acquisition of VEEAM will be a great move. (My sole crazy opinion)

2. Customers still buying the “Config Maximum” numbers

Hyper-V might not really be capable of delivering the maximum’s they state, and customers might not even need that kind of monster VM configurations. Still those increased numbers are a buying point for customers  for some reason.

Customers are now smart enough to get the datasheets from the respective websites to compare with the two hypervisors.

3. Like it or not Customers love the word “FREE”

The System Center Suite is appealing to customers since they see as if with one cost they get all other System Center products for FREE. May be its time to see that along with vCenter the Operations Management Suite, Site Recovery Manager, Security and Networking has to be bundled to one package and give out the bundled product as vCenter Management Suite. (I know its not practical but that’s where Microsoft is gaining in my opinion.)

Even though I hate to see this it’s quite appealing to see that you are getting so much more for one price.

• Operations Manager
• Configuration Manager
• Data Protection Manager
• Service Manager
• Virtual Machine Manager
• Endpoint Protection
• Orchestrator
• App Controller

I would wish to iterate that abover post was my sole personal views and I only want VMware to stay ahead of all other Hypervisor or Virtualization solutions out in the market.

How to get hardware information through ESXi console

For an assignment I was asked to get info on how memory have been plugged into ESXi host.

My colleague who is a Linux maestro said there is a command to get hardware level information.

# dmidecode | less

The above command works for ESX 3 to 4 versions as it comes with a service console.

But the command has been replaced with ESXi 4 onwards.

# smbiosDump | less

First post on wordpress…

This is my first post on any wordpress blog. And I would like to thank and praise the lord for who I am today in the IT industry, so all Praise and thanks to god!

You might wonder why I chose the title like “I am a VMware Guy”. Actually the title was inspired by Paul Heyman’s infamous association of elite wrestling guys. So I took the “I am a Paul Heyman Guy” statement and converted to “I am a VMware Guy”

http://www.wwe.com/classics/paul-heyman-guys

Why VMware is because I work and play around mostly VMware’s technology and my passion is VMware as well.

Maybe one day I will work at VMware if God wills….