VCP course at QA

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Hi Sly,

I did my VMWare Infrastructure 3.1 course with them and I definitely thought it was one of the better courses I have done.

I never took the exam though as I don't use it enough (not at all now), and the course does not go into enough depth to get you through the exam.

Not going to comment on anything else.

 

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Cheers guys much appreciated. SimonD I do appreciate your point of view mate and understand what your saying but don't agree that someone with 7 years experience can't learn new things and branch out without having commercial experience. I am a big believer that you get out of your career what you put in. I have the books and home lab setup so can learn the majority of what I need to administer ESX which is what my goal is and not to setup enterprise vitalized environments.

At present I'm learning Exchange 2007 after not having much exposure to it and feel I could implement Exchange in a working environment and have enjoyed learning Exchange and enjoyed learning Poweshell which you need to know to use Exchange 2007. There is nothing wrong with learning like this if and I stress if done correctly. It's not what you learn it's how you learn it.

 

Not at all mate, I have 2 servers a Dell T105 running Windows 2008 with Hyper-V installed and an HP ML115 with ESXi installed. Am thinking about buying a server with SAS disks to do my ESX testing on.

 

What are you going to use for Shared storage so that you can play with v-motion?

 

give me a chance mate I don't even know what v-motion is. I've only just got the books. If you can use NAS then I have a spare one. If not then it will be theory.

 

Well done Slypie as I like your proactive attitude and determination and must say nice home servers there too as I have the ML115 quad core for this main reason as well.

I would suggest you get the dummies book on VMWare as I have it and also half way through it too. I have been booked in to sit the four day course from the 1st to 4th of June next month for VMware and vSphere install, implemention and troubleshooting.

I work with ESXi at work and home, installed several VM's and can say this it's pretty slick and an interesting technology too.

Best wishes and keep on keeping on as your break would come. I would let you know how my training went, but would not be sitting the exam any time soon either.

 

If your nas supports iscsi or nfs then you can use it, however it's worth mentioning that the drives will be wiped and formated with vmfs so be careful if you have any data on them.

I would also suggest you start looking at the likes of Openfiler and Freenas as well, these run on normal machines (and vmware as it happens but won't work for you to play with v-motion) as the OS (as it happens I run an Openfiler SAN with 4tb of storage for my virtualisation platforms (Hyper-V and vSphere).

 

Sound advice there, although only a little 1tb openfiler for me

 

Cheers onoski much appreciated mate. I would be really interested to know how the course goes. As for books just got this and this delivered today as I like Sybex books but will have a look into the dummies book as well

 

Cheers Simon, appreciate the pointers. Take it Openfiler is just used to host the VM's? Also your openfiler SAN does it just use SATA drives?

 

Yes it is used just to host the vm's and openfiler can use ide or sata (I haven't tried with scsi but I doubt they would be a problem either). I have 2 hardware raid cards in my san box.

 

Simon, quick question mate using openfiler to provide SAN for ESX do the VM's use the resources of the SAN i.e RAM, CPU etc or the resources of the server. I'm assuming it's the server.

 

In simple terms the openfiler will be the HDDs for you VMs and the RAM, CPU etc will come from the ESXi/EXS host (not accurate but the idea is the same)

 

Thomas, cheers for clearing that up. I Thought that was the case but thought I'd better check. What is the pro's over using SAN over say installing disks locally on the server? Do you just use it to get experience using SAN technology?

 

HA/Fault tolerance, if a ESXi/ESX host dies then you can light up another or if setup, vCenter will do it automatically.

There are so many things it allows you to do like taking hosts offline and moving its workload to another server and even optimise your setup to get the best utilisation out of your environment

 

You may want to check out this thread Slypie. Particularly the info regarding Starwind.

You can get a free trail to use it as an iSCSI target, and if the offer is still on - a full licence if you have an MCP. You will need a seperate server to set this up on though to use as a cheap and cheerful SAN though.

Some handy guides on their site IIRC for setting up clustering with failover etc.. on 2K3 and 2K8 etc...

 

Cheers Modey, much appreciated mate, emailed to see if I can get a licence for the software.

 

They can be a bit slow, so bare with them. The software is nice and easy to setup though (compared to others I have tried).

 

Still unsure why anyone would use anything other than Openfiler for a free san. It's open-source, the de facto standard and so easy to set up a child could do it. It also offers everything you're likely to need for an ESX san

 

To be fair Freenas isn't too bad either, I can't wait to see OpenMediaVault either.