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I just found out that I’ve passed the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 - Datacenter Administration exam and wanted to share my experience. When I first set out to take on this exam, I was apprehensive about it because of the number of possible questions that could be asked on it. The blueprint was quite large and covered basically everything related to vSphere. I got some helpful advice from a friend who told me that instead of worrying about if I could pass the exam, think about it like vSphere Olympics. It’s a chance to show off how much you know. It was a subtle change, but a different mindset really helped me. ...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot of customers having issues logging into vCenter after upgrading to vSphere 5.1. I upgraded the lab and had some issues as well, but was able to fix the issues and wanted to share what I’ve learned. As you may know version 5.1 of vSphere requires the SSO service to be installed before vCenter can be upgraded. SSO is required for this version and cannot be skipped. ...

I recently tried out the HP Insight Control plugin for vCenter and was very pleased about the added functionality that was provided in my vSphere client. http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html This plugin gives you additional control of your HP servers and storage that are being used by your vSphere environment. Like other storage vendors, the install will configure your VASA plugin, and will also allow you to do things such as create datastores and snapshots on the storage array from the vSphere Client. ...

 I’ve written posts in the past regarding LUN masking on a storage array, but it is possible to mask a path directly from your vSphere environment. I feel that if at all possible the masking should be handled at array level because the array is closest to the disk. Let’s face it, if vSphere shouldn’t see a LUN for one reason or another, then why is the array presenting it in the first place? ...

As you may well know, when installing VMware ESXi on an HP server, it is best practice to get a specific image of the hypervisor with the vendor’s drivers included. This will prevent issues such as having missing network cards once you’ve installed ESXi. But what about keeping the server up to date? Many companies update their servers on a monthly basis for compliance reasons or just best practices. It has been my experience that VMware patches are usually deployed at the same time. VMware Update Manager (VUM) can push updates to the ESXi hosts with the latest patches from VMware, but did you know that you can also use it to patch HP Drivers and CIM providers? ...

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about PHD Virtual after seeing them at VMworld and the Chicago VMUG Conference and thought that I’d try them out. I was quite pleased with their product and recommend that you check them out if you’re looking for virtual backup solutions. I know that the big player in the market seems to be Veeam so if you’d like a comparison of features, check out this information from ITComparison.com to get a non-biased opinion. ...

I know the subject of Microsoft licensing makes most administrators want to crawl under a desk and hide when the topic comes up, but it’s important to understand a few things if you’re going to be standing up a VMware View deployment, or any VDI project. During the install of a Windows 7 operating system you of course have to enter a license key. Once the OS has been installed and booted up, it needs to activate. Product activation is necessary so that Microsoft can make sure that the software is only installed on the number of PCs that were licensed to use it. This product activation can be done via a network connection or via telephone. When you enter your assigned volume license keys during installation you have two types of keys that you can enter: ...

Recently my friend Raj (@rajtech) and I presented two sessions at the Chicago VMware Users Conference in Schaumburg, IL. I’ve promised several people that attended the event, that I’d post the slides. They are below. SRM Presentation Chicago VMUG Conference 2012 DS Presentation Chicago VMUG Conference 2012

I signed up for the VMware Users Group last year at VMworld. I don’t remember, why I decided to do it but I assume that it had something to do with a free T-shirt. Since then, I’ve been to several meetings, all at my local Chicago VMUG chapter www.chicagovmug.com . At first I was pretty skeptical, but it turns out it’s been one of the best things I’ve done for my career. ...

I recently got my hands on a pair of HP P4300s in the lab and wanted to see how the performance was with Network RAID. One of the most read posts on this site is on Understanding RAID Penalty and I was curious to see how Network RAID played into this equation. Basic Setup I have 2 HP P4300s, each with eight 15k SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration. This means that I should have a total of 1400 RAW IOPS (8 disks * 175 IOPS) on each lefthand node. Since I have 2 of them, I’m calculating 2800 RAW IOPS. In order to get some real world functional IOPS, we’ll assume that we have 50% Reads and 50% Writes, and don’t forget to take out the RAID Penalty for the RAID 5. Let’s plug this into our Functional IOPS equation to get: ...