VMware Raising the Bar Part V
Please join VMware executives Paul Maritz, CEO and Steve Herrod, CTO for the unveiling of the next major step forward in Cloud infrastructure tomorrow Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM (PT) | 12:00 PM (ET).
Paul & Steve’s 45 minute live webcast will be followed by additional online sessions where you can learn more about the industry’s most trusted virtualization and cloud infrastructure products and services.
Join us and experience how the virtualization journey is helping transform IT and ushering in the era of Cloud Computing. Please register here
Optimize the disk(s) and partition(s) on your VM by using VMware Converter 5
By using VMware Converter 5 the following disk optimizations can be easily done on your existing VM:
- Convert one or more partition(s) on single disk to partitions on a separate disks. When you want to increase disk space on the C: partition this is a problem because of the D partition is on the same disk.
- Resize one or more partition(s)
- Align on or more disks. (not needed anymore for Microsoft Windows 2008, Windows Vista or greater). This example shows a partition that is not aligned
- Adjust the cluster size
V2V procedure:
- Power down the VM
- In VMware Converter select “Convert Machine”
- Follow the instructions on the screen till you got the options screen
- Edit the “Data to copy”
- Change the “Data copy type” from “Copy all disks and maintain layout” in
“Select volumes to copy”.
- Select “Advanced” and choose the “Destination” layout
- Change the disk size (in the example we change the C-partition to 30GB)
- Use “Add Disk”, the VirtualDisk2 is created.
- Move the partition down (in the example the E: partition)
- Be sure that the “Create optimized partition layout” option is selected for all the disks. VMware Converter optimize the disk partitions alignment”
- The cluster size in this example at the default value
- After the V2V the VM has 2 disks, the partition size is increased and both disk are aligned.
Check the disk alignment by using msinfo32.exe
VMware Converter 5.0 is available as public beta and can be found here.
VMware VCAP-DCA exam experience
I took the VCAP-DCA (VDCA410) exam on 12 May 2011 at Global Knowledge in Nieuwegein (The Netherlands). Today 27 May 2011 I received an e-mail that I passed the VCAP-DCA exam! Great news before the weekend!
Here are some VCAP-DCA exam requirements:
- The exam time is 4 hours (time is for non English speaking countries)
- The passing score is 300 out of 500
- It takes up to business days 10 days (or more 
before you know if you passed the exam
- Scheduling for the VCAP-DCA exam can be done by the Pearson VUE’s website
Don’t underestimated the exam, it’s a hard one! I was sweating for four 4 hours and didn’t finished all the questions because the time stops.
The exam is all lab based so you need to do stuff as configuring and troubleshooting vSphere environments. You need to compete tasks they asked. The best advise is to create your own test lab environment as mentioned in the exam blueprint. Then use the blueprint and practice the objectives. The VMware PDF documents are available but try to avoid because they cost valuable time. So don’t rely on the PDFs! Go to the toilet before the exam several times till nothing is coming out. After three hours I needed to go but I had no time. It’s not a good feeling to hold it………….
The following preparation materials I used:
- VMware Certified Advanced Professional Datacenter Administration Exam Blueprint
- VMware VCAP-DCA mock test exam
- Trainsignal VMware vSphere Troubleshooting training
- Edward Grigson vExperienced VCAP-DCA study guide
- Sean Crookston VCAP-DCA study guide
- Virtual Vargi VCAP-DCA videos
- My own VMware VCAP-DCA exam command-line cheat sheet
When I know my VCAP-DCA number I updated the post and if you have preparation resources please let me know. Good luck with the preparation for the VCAP-DCA exam!
Cool VMware utilities
Here are some cool utilities VMware labs created lately. They are definitely worth a try!
-Inventory Snapshot. Allows a user to "snapshot" a given vCenter inventory configuration and then reproduce it. The "inventory" includes the Datacenter folders, datacenters, clusters, resource pools, vApps, hierarchy, roles and permissions, configuration settings, and custom fields.
It takes a snapshot of the vCenter inventory and creates some binary files and creates a PowerCLI file called “createinventory.ps1”. This PowerCLI script contains commands to re-create the inventory that you’ve just archived.
Can be used on VMware vCenter 4.0 and above and support VMware DVS
-PXE Manager for vCenter. Enables ESXi host state (firmware) management and provisioning. Specifically, it allows:
Automated provisioning of new ESXi hosts stateless and stateful (no ESX)
ESXi host state (firmware) backup, restore, and archiving with retention
ESXi builds repository management (stateless and statefull)
ESXi Patch management
Multi vCenter support
Multi network support with agents (Linux CentOS virtual appliance will be available later)
Wake on Lan
Hosts memtest
vCenter plugin
Deploy directly to VMware Cloud Director
Deploy to Cisco UCS blades
-Thinapped vSphere Client. Run vSphere client 4.1 in a snap. No install, just download the EXE and double-click. Place the ThinApped vSphere client on any network share and it will automatically stream to any Windows PC with no installation, agents, drivers, or specialized servers required. Carry ThinApped vSphere client and your customization on USB stick and now your vSphere client is available on the GO!
-vCenter XVP Manager and Converter. VMware vCenter XVP Manager and Converter provides basic virtualization management capabilities for non-vSphere hypervisor platforms towards enabling centralized visibility and control across heterogeneous virtual infrastructures. It also simplifies and enables easy migrations of virtual machines from non-vSphere virtualization platforms to VMware vSphere.
- Management of the following Microsoft Hyper-V platforms:
- Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) with Hyper-V role enabled
- Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V role enabled
- Familiar vCenter Server graphical user interface for navigating through and managing non-vSphere inventory
- Ease of virtual machine migrations from non-vSphere hosts to vSphere inventory
- Compatible with VMware vCenter Server 4.0 & 4.1
- Scalable up to management of 50 non-vSphere hosts
Very handy when managing Microsoft Hyper-V hosts with VMware vCenter or do a migration from Microsoft Hyper-V to VMware vSphere.
-vCMA. VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) is a fully configured and ready to run virtual appliance that is required to manage your datacenter from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets (iPad). Using either a mobile browser or the native iPad application, administrators can now perform various troubleshooting and remediation activities in their VMware environments from anywhere in the world.
-VMware Auto Deploy. VMware Auto Deploy supports automatic PXE boot and customization of large numbers of ESXi systems. Auto Deploy allows rapid deployment and configuration of a large number of ESXi hosts. After a DHCP server has been set up, Auto Deploy PXE boots machines that are turned on with an ESXi image. Auto Deploy then customizes the ESXi systems using host profiles and other information stored on the managing vCenter Server system. You can set up the environment to use different images and different host profiles for different hosts.
VMware Auto Deploy uses Host Profiles, so it will only works if you have a VMware Enterprise plus license!
Display or filter VMs that are restarted by VMware HA
When VMware High Availability(HA) comes in action, the VMs are restarted (depending on the HA settings) on other VMware ESX servers in the cluster. It’s handy to know what VMs are restarted.
In the vCenter client the Tasks and Events page size can be increased. Default the vCenter client displays 100 tasks and events. In a cluster with a lot of host and a HA action the 100 tasks and events can be to low. So increasing the size will display the events that list what VMs ate restarted. Increasing can be done by using the following steps:
- Open the vCenter client
- Choose Edit
- Client Settings
- Lists
- Task and Events, Page size
- Increase the value (default value 100)
To find the VMs that are restarted click on the cluster, go to events tab and search for the following message:
Virtual machine <VM> was restarted on <host> since <hostname> failed
This is a time consuming task to filter out these messages.
An easier and quicker way is to use PowerCLI and use the following one-liner:
|
001 |
Get-VIEvent -MaxSamples 500 | select FullFormattedMessage,CreatedTime | Out-GridView |
This one-liner displays the last 500 events in a gridview. Filter on the keyword “restarted” and all the VMs that are restarted are filtered in the gridview.
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