Career Change – A Coalition That Actually Works

Jul 242012

I’m very happy to announce that I will be joining VCE as a vArchitect.

I am very exited to get on board with VCE and as I have been a huge fan of the concept from day one and have always made sure I kept a close eye on how things progressed and how the uptake of Vblock took off.

VCE represent a huge opportunity for me to develop my career to the next level and although im sure there will be tough challenges ahead I look forward to being part of the VCE team that take them to massive & further success in the future.

I would like to thank my previous employer. I started there at a time when their datacentre practice was very embryonic and helped it grow to a viable mature practice with a great outlook for the future.

Also, those who follow my blog probably noticed a bit of a decline in posts over the last year. Work commitments made it very difficult to be a regular blogger but im hoping that I will be able to raise the bar once again.

Nexus 1000v–Unable to active Port-Channel

Cisco Nexus 1000v No Responses »

Jun 212012

When following the Cisco Cheat sheet for deploying the Nexus 1000v for deploying the Nexus 1000v in L3 mode, make sure one of the first commands you run (or when applying your config) is ‘feature LACP’ without it you cannot activate your LACP port channel.

I set up something similar to the above, the port-channel is between the server ports and the 5k (2ks acting as fabric extenders) and setup to load balance using LACP. This is design was only recently supported by Cisco as previously you would have had to load balance traffic on the port channel via MAC-Pinning.

This annoying little oversight caused me an hour of grief on a customer site as the port-channel on the 5k and 1k would not become active until this feature was enabled.

To enable this feature:

n1000v# config t

n1000v(config)# feature lacp

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus1000/sw/4_2_1_s_v_1_4/command/reference/n1000v_cmds_f.html#wp1404742

VMware Workstation 8 Licence Give Away

Qualifications 14 Responses »

Apr 302012

Because I’m just so kind and generous, I’ve decided to give away my VMware Workstation 8 Licence I got for passing my VCP 5. I already have a Workstation licence and although I’m sure I could find a use for it I thought that someone out there might have a greater need for it than I do.

Whoever leaves a comment on this page on the subject of what is their favourite VMware product or feature and why (and I think is the best answer), will win the licence.

(dont write and essay, just a line or 2 will do)

UPDATE 15/05/2012:

I have selected Matts comment as the winning comment. Storage vMotion (even back in the 3.5 days) got me out of many a perils situation and with the improvements today along with Storage DRS it’s up there among my own personal favourites.

vEXPERT 2012–I’m in, JUST

vexpert 1 Response »

Apr 232012

After allot of nail biting and bum shuffling I can announce I got into the 2012 vEXPERT program.

It turns out that then the panel went to view my blog my hosting provider decided that it was a good idea to take it down. This resulted in an automatic deferral and with the volume of people the panel had to evaluate this resulted in me getting over looked. But Alex Maier was brilliant and when my blog was available again she got my application re-evaluated and I am in the program. Smile

The full list of this years vEXPERTS is here so be sure to check them out. I think Greg Robertson will be doing some more vEXPERT spotlights so be sure to check out the new guys on the program.

VCP-510 Success–Thoughts, Study Methods and Links

Qualifications, VCDX5, VCP 1 Response »

Mar 232012

Happy to say I passed the VCP-510 today.

I have to say the VCP exam has become harder since the VI3 days. The VI3 was the last time I took the VCP as skipped the vSphere 4.x as it wasn’t something I needed at the time.

The broadness of the technical content that the VCP 5.x can choose to ask questions on and the level at which you need to know that contact is considerable. Since my VI3 qualification we have seen a plethora of features like vDS, storage vMotion, Storage Profiles etc, etc, etc. For the VI3 I honestly thing you could do the course read a few whitepapers and pass the exam. The VCP5 is definitely a step up, if you have little or no hands on they you will struggle to pass this exam. I have been in a more presales role for a while now so I struggled to get up to speed.

Although this is a hard exam, its a good thing it is. Far to many early VCPs back in 2008ish were claiming to be something they were not and along with the VCAPs I think its clearer now who knows their stuff.

What did I use to get up to speed:

vSphere 5 ICM course

This covered off the basics but did not cover things like ESXTOP, Auto Deploy, vDS, VASA etc etc. All of the excluded things are featured in the exam so either do the ‘Whats New’ course aswel or take the ‘Fast Track’ course. But no matter what you will be lucky to pass the exam with just attending a course. (exam prerequisites)

Trainsignals VMware vSphere 5 Training.

If you don’t get an opportunity to do the course or even if you do they this is CBT is highly recommended. The Demos alone are a fantastic way to learn especially if you don’t have access to a lab. I am doing a full write up on this CBT so ill link to it here once I’ve completed it.

Blog posts and link:

I’m not going to link everything I used as the above links already have some good resources in them to look at and some links to other useful pages.

WHATS NEXT: VCAP DCA or DCD I think. Would love to be among the first bunch to attempt a VCDX 5 defence but that’s just aspirational at the moment.

If you read this far down any you have your VCP-510 soon then I wish you the best of luck.

Virtualisation Field Day – Round Up

TechFieldDay 1 Response »

Mar 162012

Well after a mental few weeks I have finally got the time to sit in front of the laptop and write up my VFD round up. I had planned to do a daily write up like Rodney Haywood but, like many of the other delegates, by the end of the day I was excused.

The 2 days consisted of 07:15 kick off and 19:00 ish finish. I am not so proud to say that the days were draining, especially battling the Jetlag. The conversation and tech that was on show was enough to keep me going however and it was highly stimulating throughout.

NOTE: I would just like to say a massive thanks to Steve Foskett and Matt Simmons for putting on and organising the event, they did a top job and even though Steve couldn’t make it was still a great event. I met some top guys in their field and also made one or two friends I will be keeping in touch with.

the MR Foskett shrine

Day 0:

I arrived at the hotel about midday and battled the jetlag and avoided going for a nap. All the delegates meet up in the hotel and then went on to a restaurant for a get to know you session. I knew Mike Laverick from the London VMUG and VMworld attendances so it was good to have a someone to talk to, especially as Mike seems to know everyone anyway so its good way to get introduced. Prior to flying out all the delegates were asked to bring a present for everyone that represented their home town. While everyone else brought clever and cool presents my SAFC key ring seemed a little underwhelming although it was a good way to get a little background on each of the guys.

Day 1:

Everyone was keen to get going and first up was Symantec, bit before dive into that I need to mention our mode of transportation.

As you can see we went in relative style. Smile

Symantec

We arrived at the Symantec offices first thing on Thursday and after a little breakfast were put straight to work. The day was split between Netbackup and Backup Exec. I must confess I was a little suppressed that this was all Symantec chose to cover on the day and not here application streaming or anti-virus technology, which for a virtualisation crowd may have been more apt.

Netbackup:

The Netbackup presentation also covered some of the more high level tech that fits into both products. V-Ray seemed interesting as it could give visibility into the types of data being backed up within a VM while also providing Unified protection, file & application recovery, deduplication and automated tearing. This did however remind me somewhat of the Veeam ONE ‘Solution’ stack.

To be honest there were only a few moments where I thought the product line may be superior, for a virtual environment, than some of the other on the market.

Once cool thing which caught my attention was in the Next release Netbackup will have vCD integration – Symantec will release a multi tenant restore capability for VMware vCloud environments. Also I thought that the upcoming backup performance analyser will be a useful feature.

OST – open storage technology. – so they can backup to cloud. – Netbackup records where it is in the cloud (they have control over it in the cloud).

Accelerator – uses netbackup special client – does the catalogue process on the media server rather than the client. – NBU backup takes over 1 hour. Accelerator reduces that to 50 seconds (change block tracking in the VM its self)

netbackup appliances: NetBackup 5220 & NetBackup 5020 (5220 shown in pic)

BACKUPEXEC

Backup Exec is getting a facelift. The new GUI looks very good and provides alot of information to the backup admin.

Other cool things:

Its getting a VC plugin.

The Netbackup section of the presentation took considerably longer that the backup exec which you may expect. However one thing that would become obvious (especially for those who watched the stream) was the death by powerpoint that we were subjected to. I lost count at over 70 slides so by the end of our 4 hours at Symantec my attention had defiantly wandered.

ZERTO

Its fair to say everyone was blown away with Zerto. They covered pretty much what was in their 2.0 release (which was not out yet).

So Zerto were started by the guys who build recoverpoint and then sold it to EMC, so I think there background has the right foundations.

Heres the main bits I picked up:

Zerto 2.0 – Cloud BC/DR Platform
DR as a service (private cloud to public cloud)
Zerto – across the WAN for private to public cloud
REPLICATION IS IN THE WRONG PLACE – move replication from storage to hypervisor
Moving to the virtualisation stack was the same thing happened to network etc (1kv)
VMware support only, road mapped for other hypervisors.
Shifting block by block – not snapshots (vmware or storage vendor) built-in wan compression & throttling – target has a journal based any point in time recovery – no snapshot.
Application Protection – Virtual Protection Group
consistently protecting the group of VMs
Automation – Failover, Failback, Recovery
RTO = Mins
Automated recovery – with IP re-config and custom scripts
True multisite multi-tenancy support different storage, different VMware versions (licencing), shared inf.
Zerto accessed through a plugin in VC.

Xangati

Last vendor of the day was Xangati, I already knew a little about them from the VMworld show and the VMworld labs.

cross silo, COLLECT – servers, network, storage, End Points.
Monitoring needs to be live & continuous
javaapplet for the dashboard
direct integration with View and Citrix
- I though this was very important with the likes of VXI.
end user interrogation based on the user directly

DAY 2

Purestorage

First I have to say my storage knowledge is not the best however even I could recognise that these guys knew there blocks Smile

The first thing that struck me was the level of backing

Its fair to say that they have some very smart and powerful people behind them with some fairly but purse string. So that grabbed me that people that know what they are talking about want in on Purestorage.

The did a good ‘apples to oranges’ comparison of the traditional Tiered based storage and there Flash answer. This got the delegates asking well what about ‘Apples for Apples’. Purestorage are differentiated by their “

purity operating environment”.

Ill drill into Purestorage a little more in focused post but its safe to say I liked what capabilities it could offer and the for a reasonable price point. We will see if it comes to anything in the real world as its still in Beta at the moment so they are still on the starting blocks but they could make some serious headway.

Pivot 3

So Pivot 3 offer a rebadged Dell 2U server with some cool technology that allows you to aggregate the shared storage across the local storage of up to 8 servers. It uses a virtual appliance to aggregate the storage and does some funky stuff with the RAID (essentially presents one raid array across the servers). The also have some cool way of deploying VMware View in under an hour from unpacking the box. They even brought a server in the box and had a guy building it out while the presentation went on they we all connected to the image at the end of the presentation.

What did I think about that? well I didn’t get what they were trying to achieve. Yes SANless VDI is nice and I got that part but I think that this product being so targeted at SMB and being so specific, I just struggle to see the long term value in the architecture. It will not be long until VMware develop View enough to have SANless or even Diskless VDI so I struggle with it a little.

Don’t get me wrong though I am sure it will be a good fit for some education and other customers but I see it as a short term VDI bandwagon follower that has limited long term aspirations.

DAY 3

Mike managed to persuade Vaughn Stewart to let me go along to a comedy club. It was great and here’s a pic of me and Bobcat Goldthwait.

Check out what the other delegates thought.

Delegate List

Delegates are selected by the Field Day Delegate community. For more information on our selection process, please see our page about becoming a Field Day Delegate.

Edward Haletky
The Virtualization Practice
@Texiwill

Rodney Haywood
Musings of Rodos
@Rodos

Bill Hill
Virtual Bill
@Virtual_Bill

Mike Laverick
RTFM Education
@Mike_Laverick

Dwayne Lessner
IT Blood Pressure
@Dlink7

Scott Lowe
TechRepublic
Virtualization Admin
@OtherScottLowe

Roger Lund
vRoger
vBrainstorm
@RogerLund

Robert Novak
RSTS11
@Gallifreyan

Brandon Riley
Virtual Insanity
@BrandonJRiley

Todd Scalzott
Don’t Call Me Scott
@TScalzott

Rick Schlander
Virtualization with VMware Technology
@VMRick

Chris Wahl
Wahl Network
@ChrisWahl

VMware vExpert 2012 Applications

vexpert No Responses »

Feb 162012

Well the vExpert 2011 is coming to an end and the 2012 application process is about to get under way. There was a delay in the award of the 2011 vExperts so I still feel fresh to the whole program so it seems a little odd that the applications have come around again so soon, although it makes total sense its done now and not drawn out into mid 2012.

2012 sees the program chance a little:

This year, we have created three different paths to becoming a vExpert, yet as in the years prior, there will remain a single vExpert designation. As always, the common theme for the established and the new vExpert paths will be going above and beyond your day job to help others be successful with VMware solutions.

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can also apply via the Evangelist path.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for internal evangelists and community leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have contributed to success stories, customer references, or public interviews and talks, or were active community contributors, such as VMUG leaders.

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements.

With the program growing, our goal still remains the same: to honour individuals who go above and beyond their everyday job requirements to share their technical knowledge and expertise with others; to help enable these individuals to make an even greater impact in the world; and to keep a high standard of vExpert recipients.

For me personally I have been pretty active in the community since my vExpert. I did my first chinwag with Mike Laverick and will be attending my first TechFeildDay for Virtualisation over in San Jose next week. Along with the usual Blogging, twitter, VMUGS (when i can) etc. Fingers crossed I can be involved in the 2012 program also.

VCDX Mock Defence Session

VCDX4, VCDX5 No Responses »

Feb 132012

The guys over at VSPECIALIST have come up with a great idea to help people that are planning on going down the VCDX path. They are putting together a mock VCDX defence panel to help prospective VCDX panel attendees to hone there defence and presentations skills.

The aim of the Defence Practice Event is to help candidates with the group aspects of a defence session, and to prepare candidates for the type of technical questions they may face from a panel. You may your design inside out, but can you verbalise them to someone who doesn’t know your design as well. Can you explain your choices, limitations and restrictions in your design to someone else, and can you technically defend these when questioned?

The VCDX session at VMworld last year was a real eye opener for me as they had a very small mock session with the actual defence panel. It was suppressing to see a few people who volunteered struggle so much, not with the technical aspects of the challenge but actually trying to explain there thinking aloud as they tried solve the issue they were presented with. It can often be a misconception that the only skills they are looing for are technical, a good % of what they look for in a VCDX is communication and presentations skills. After all they don’t want people to go in front of customer and be terrible at the soft skills after VMware award them the top qualification they can bestow.

I think its great these guys are willing to take time out to help the community in this way and it is a fantastic opportunity to practice for what in real life will be a gruelling experience.

Check out the full details here

Cisco UCS – Replacing a Copper Twinax SFP+ Transceiver with an Optical SFP+ Transceiver

UCS 4 Responses »

Feb 132012

I recently came across a customer that had limited space, power and cooling in there datacentre (very few who don’t right?) but wanted to put in a Vblock but to do so would need to split most of the UCS chassis across multiple racks and at opposing ends of the datahall. Traditionally, when I design and spec a UCS system I use the default ‘passive‘ Copper Twinax SFP+. In the event I need to provide cabling for Fabric Interconnects that are more that 5 meters away from the chassis then I would use ‘active‘ Copper Twinax SFP+ as these can go up to 10 meters.

But in this case the distances are over 30 meters. The alternative is go optical by using SFP+ modules (SFP-H10GB-SR) which can more than compensate for almost any datacentre distances (300m or so).

A few of you may have noticed I said this was a Vblock, you may be thinking you will not be aloud to do this with a Vblock as it brakes the default spec. While it does go against what’s in the design for a Vblock, it is a great example of how the Vblock products are actually flexible and not as rigid a people may think and exceptions can be raised when genuine requirements demand it.

Click here for more info on installing and configuring a UCS chassis and cabling it up.

UPDATE:

Thanks to a Andrew Sharrock (@AndrewSharrock) for pointing this one out. As of UCS Software release 1.4 Fabric Extender Transceivers have been supported and are an alternative to using the above. You can get up to 100m from a FET and it supports OM2, 3 and 4 cables. I have a feeling not many people have deployed this as its Google doesn’t bring many results back on this subject but its an option. I’m not sure if VCE support it within a Vblock either (VCE peeps are welcome to confirm or deny this in the comments).

From Cisco:

To replace a copper Twinax SFP+ transceiver with an optical SFP+ transceiver, follow these steps:

Step 1 Remove the copper Twinax SFP+ from the I/O module port by pulling gently on the rubber loop (see Figure 2-19). The cable and SFP+ transceiver come out as a single unit, leaving the I/O module port empty.

Step 2 Insert the optical SFP+ transceiver into the I/O module port. Make sure that it clicks firmly into place.

Step 3 Plug the fiber optic cable into the optical SFP+ transceiver (see Figure 2-20).

Figure 2-19 Removing a Twinax Copper SFP+ Transceiver

Figure 2-20 Replacing a Copper SFP+ Transceiver With an Optical SFP+ Transceiver

Virtualization Field Day 2 – Silicon Valley

TechFieldDay 1 Response »

Feb 102012

I’m honoured to have been selected to attend the Gestalt IT Virtualisation Field Day of in Silicon Valley. This is my first time to this event, so even though I have followed the Tech Field Days before, I am looking forward to getting my stuck into what will be a long but rewarding few days.

If you have not seen the Tech Field Day events before here’s the official line

Tech Field Day will return to Silicon Valley in February, 2012! This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders, allowing them to get to know one another. It is a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.

Presenter List

Presenters are currently being lined up, but here is the most up to date list:

I have some exposure to Symantec with a few of it products and I had saw the pretty amazing Xangati VDI monitoring product at VMworld. Xerto and Truebit will require a little pre-research.

Make sure you keep an eye on #TechFieldDay and follow @TechFieldDay.

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