Archive for January, 2011


The 3rd Episode of the vSoup podcast was released this afternoon , bringing onboard what I hope to be the first of many Guests on the show. Julian Wood from http://wooditwork.com joins Ed, Christian and myself for a great conversation around some Desktop Virtualisation , Blade servers and more.

 

head over to the vSoup kitchen at http://vsoup.net and don’t forget the croutons !

The latest course of vSoup was published today , featuring myself and fellow community members , Ed Czerwin & Christian Mohn of vNinja.net. This time we’re looking at some security, high availability and a few other topics , listen carefully though as there are questions to be answered. Answer them right and you could be in with a chance to win a copy of the vSphere Troubleshooting Video pack form Trainsignal , kindly donated by David Davis from Trainsignal.com .

 

For all of the show links & feeds including iTunes , head over to http://vSoup.net

That the info on them needs changing ! I was happy to receive a mail this morning , notifying my that I’d passed the VCAP-DCD beta exam with a score of 416/500 , which I’m really quite happy with as I wasn’t particularly confident that I’d done so well in the exam itself.

 

The results were not without their drama as the first wave of notifications sent out at 11pm last night did not match up the mails with the reports and I received another candidates score report. I’m happy to say they passed too 🙂 Congratulations to all of the new VCAP’s announced today and even more to those who have now reached VCDX4 as a result of it!

 

My next step is to think about the next step on the ladder towards VCDX certification – the Design itself !

 

Train Signal is The Global Leader in Profiessional Computer Training

 

While the rest of us were stuffing our faces with Turkey , drinking just a little bit too much port and falling asleep in front of the TV over Christmas , David Davis from Trainsignal has been hard at work with a screen recorder to put together his latest in a very comprehensive series of vSphere videos.

Loosely following a similar outline to the VMware course on the same subject , David takes you over a bit of a recap on subject you might miss as part of your day to day work , or if you haven’t seen some of the previous videos , such as deploying & installing the vMA appliance & a Distributed switch refresher – I found the latter of these very handy as not being an Enterprise Plus customer I dont use VDS on a day to day basis.

There are a few lessons devoted to logging – finding , collecting , viewing and analyzing from a number of different sources. Log files are hardly the most fun thing in the world to look at but if you really want to know what’s going on , they are the best weapon in your arsenal.

The next major section is on networking – I though this was particularly well done as not personally coming from a packet pushing background , a few of the concepts are pretty new to me. If I’d had access to this video set (especially the PVLan Lesson! ) before I sat my VCAP-DCA exam beta , then there are certainly a couple of questions I’d have not torn my hair out in frustration at 🙂

Storage trouble shooting is next on the list, looking at general storage log analysis and diving deeper into NFS and iSCSI storage – again very handy refreshers if you don’t use those technology every day. If you are running a home lab as all budding VCAP candidates should be – there’s a great walkthrough on NFS configuration with openfiler & common issues you might get including some pretty misleading error messages !

The last part of the course is around a more general troubleshooting section – looking at Vmotion / Svmotion troubleshooting along with DRS and HA troubleshooting. Finally there is a troubleshooting kickstart which not only has some handy things to keep in mind for an exam but all those little tips and tricks that’ll make you look like a superherorockstarninja 😉 in front of your managers and workmates !

 

One last point of the Trainsignal Course delivery – not only do you get instant access online  , but the DVD set arrived 36 hours later from the US , complete with DVD’s & Mobile device friendly formats – which make it an invaluable companion on a long journey. I look forward to seeing the rest of the VCAP series , but think this would be a great resource for some post VCP upskill work.

After a few dry runs and some frantic email sessions , the first episode of vSoup is out ! vSoup is a podcast featuring myself and a couple of my fellow tweeps. I hope its informative but also informal and relevant for fellow virtualisation professionals !

 

check it out at http://vsoup.net !