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.