My Journey to VCAP 5 - Part 1

I am starting this thread to highlight my preparations for VCAP-DCA5 and VCAP-DCD5 exams. I will be writing about things I've learned along the way and share any tips with all of you who is going on the same journey shortly. I think it's never about the result, it's the things we learnt along the way that really counts and helps us to be a better VMware guy :) LOL

Here's the general Plan:

1)Build vSphere 5 Home Lab --- DONE!
2)Pass VCP --- DONE!
3)Pass VCAP-DCD5 --- waiting for official exam blueprint and exam to be released
4)Pass VCAP-DCA5 --- waiting for official exam blueprint and exam to be released
5)Prepare for VCDX5

At the moment, I am gathering study materials for my VCAP-DCD 5 exam, once I have them, I will post them here to share. There are quite a lot of other good blogs out there already listing pretty much same thing which I will also include to give you a one stop shop for studying materials.

Stay Tuned!

Fix for VM crashes during Hyper-V Live Migration

Not that I am a Hyper-V expert or anything since I've been a big fan of VMware and has been doing VMware implementation since 2005, just want to put this out there as I got a chance to play with Hyper-V a little bit now just to see exactly why VMware is more stable and better than Hyper-V in so many ways, R2 or not!:

Check this link out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2636573

FIX: The guest operating system may crash when you perform a live migration of Hyper-V virtual machines in a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment and ofcourse as you may have guessed, the fix is.... .... .... ... apply this windows update!!!

oh well, if you are running Hyper-V R2 and have issue with this, here you go.

2 more updates to fix things that simply patched together to make it work "just as" some vSphere features.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2511962"0x000000D1" Stop error occurs in the Mpio.sys driver in Windows Server 2008 R2
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2460971MPIO failover fails on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2

VMware's VMkernel has been built from ground up with virtualization in mind to provide most efficient, stable and best performance features to underlying virtual machines, but I don't think I can say the same thing for Microsoft Hyper-V. The more I look at Hyper-V, the more I am convinced about VMware solutions (not that I am not convinced before :) )

Happy Virtualizing folks!

My vSphere 5 Home Lab Setup - Feb 2012

This is my first blog... ever! believe it or not. One of the reasons I decided to start blogging is to share some of my experience with everyone who is interested in Virtualization technology. Few weeks ago, I have finally decided to purchase some proper home lab hardware for a better vSphere 5 lab to prepare for my VCP5 exam. (say good bye to the Workstation 8 virtual lab on my laptop :) )

Here's a list of hardware I have in my lab:

Hardware:
3 x HP N40L Micro Server, 8GB RAM, 2xAMD Turion II 64bit 1.5GHz, 250GB SATA II, 1GbE onboard NIC ( 3 more PCIe Intel 1GbE cards on the way)
1 x 8 Ports non-managed 1GbE switch
1 x HP laptop to access and manage the lab
3 x 2GB USB sticks (to install and boot my ESXi5.0 hosts from)

Software:
ESXi5.0 installable iso - download from VMware website
vCenter Server 5 installation iso - download from VMware website
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 ISO - download trial version from Microsoft website
UNetbootin - Free Windows application to make bootable USB drives

Shared Storage:
OpenFiler version - free download from OpenFiler website

Physical Setup:
ESXi 5.0 will be installed onto the USB drive for each N40L Micro Server and booting off the USB drive. Windows domain controller/DNS/DHCP and vCenter Server 5 will be installed as 2 virtual machines. OpenFiler will be installed as a virtual machine on one of the Microserver utilizing the local hard drives to provide shared iSCSI storage.

Since each HP Microserver comes with a 250GB SATA II drive, I put all 3 x 250GB drives in one of the Micro Servers. ESXi 5.0 server will use these drives as local datastores, then virtual disks will be added to the OpenFiler VM to aggregate these virtual disks together to provide iSCSI LUNs for these 3 ESXi 5.0 hosts as shared storage to provide DRS, HA, VMotion, SVMotion features.

Originally I set up one of the micro servers as a physical NAS box using FreeNAS version 7, but there is some networking issue with that version and network keeps dropping so I kept losing connections to my VMs! In a hurry to setup my vSphere 5 lab environment, I made a decision to use OpenFiler as a VM. Just to let you know that there are many other alternative ways of setting up the shared storage.

Here's my overall lab setup steps:
1) Burn VMware-VMvisor-Installer-201111001-504890.x86_64.iso onto a DVD, boot HP Microserver with the vSphere 5 installation DVD (the USB drive is also connected to the server)
2) Follow the prompt on screen and install ESXi 5.0 onto the USB drive
3) Configure the ESXi 5.0 server with static IP, DNS, Host name, Password etc
3) Connect via a web browser to the installed ESXi 5.0 and download the vSphere client
4) Connect vSphere client to the newly installed ESXi 5.0 server and start building Domain controller VM and vCenter Server and OpenFiler VMs
5) At the same time, follow the same step 1) and 2) to build the other 2 ESXi 5.0 hosts
6) Configure vSphere Cluster settings
7) Configure OpenFiler with iSCSI targets
8) Configure software iSCSI adapters on all ESXi hosts and connect to the OpenFiler targets
9) Now I have a fully functional vSphere 5 home lab to play with.

This is a very generic view of how the lab is setup. I will be posting some detailed steps and how I configured the lab to use for specific features and what kind of tests I setup to review all the new features of the great vSphere 5.0.

Stay Tuned! More to come.