Demitasse

The eagled eyed will have spotted a rash of excitement over the virtualisation twitterverse.  The VCAP5-DCD exam enters it’s beta phase this month. Current VCAP4-DCD holders who have also completed the VCP5 certification have been invited to take part.  Since I fall in that category I have an invitation, so I’ve been reading through the exam blueprint.  Usually the first rule of Beta club is don’t talk about Beta club but I didn’t notice an NDA attached to the beta exam invite.  Even so I won’t be linking the blueprint although I do have some comments.

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© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

It’s 2012 and we’re back.  Time for vBeers in Auckland.  Come and talk geek with a beer in your hand.  Looks for the vBeers sign and say hi, we don’t bite newcomers.

All the details on vBeers web site

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

One of the hardest parts of designing a virtual infrastructure for VDI is getting the storage right.  This is where the price of doing VDI can become very obvious so it’s tempting to try to cut costs.  Unfortunately not having enough performance in your VDI storage leads to unusable desktops.  Below is an example that I was involved in, the root cause of the inadequate storage wasn’t poor design so much as poor communication.  The result was the same, unusable desktops and unhappy users.

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© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

It’s Sunday evening in New Zealand and I’m looking back over a somewhat surreal week.  The whole thing began just over three weeks ago with a tweet from Calvin Zito asking for independent bloggers who might want to know more about HP Storage.  Having met and liked Calvin at VMworld 2011 I immediately asked to be considered.  The event he invited me to was in a week I was booked to teach, I’ve never been so happy when a course was cancelled.

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© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

I’m in Ft Collins Colorado for an HP Storage Tech Day.  This is my first sponsored community event and when Calvin Zito invited me I jumped at the chance to be here.  Getting to spend a couple of days surrounded by other people involved in the Tech community as a wonderful thing, throw in some access to specific tech and hands on time and you’ve got a winning formula.

I won’t go into the people, take a look over the list on Calvin’s blog post but as I have found the community are the people I like to hang out with.  One that I did want to call out was a great concept I heard at breakfast.  Derek is part of the team organising Tech on Tap, advanced technical training sessions that happen on the weekend at a Brew pub.  What could be better than a group of tech guys learning advanced tech whilst drinking craft beer!

Hopefully I’ll be able to tear myself away from the conversations in order to post some more of my experiences, now it’s time to head for the bus to the HP site.

Disclosure: HP paid my travel and accommodation expenses for me to attend Tech Day.  Thanks HP.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

If you follow virtualization blogs then you will have seen that Eric Siebert has opened voting for the top virtualization blogs.  This year I have entered both my blog and the APAC Virtualization Podcast.  Please cast your vote at vSphere Land

While you’re at vSphere Land take a moment to check out the vLaunchpad for a very condensed list of resources, a great start to a long session of discovering new information.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

I’m helping out some past students with a storage issue at a View implementation.  They need a question answered about moving between datastores when Tiered storage is in use. 

Without Tiered storage it is fairly easy to add and remove datastores from a pool, as is described in the VMware Knowledgebase article on the subject or the other Knowledgebase article also about the subject.  The two articles imply that the same is true with tiered storage, however it isn’t true until it’s tested.  So here’s my testing.

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© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

The APAC Virtualization podcast is back for 2012.  The first session is all about the C word.

Details are all on the Podcast Blog.

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

I am very pleased to announce that a series of VCAP Brownbag sessions is being started for the APAC region.

For those who haven’t come across the ProfessionalVMware BrownBag they are a series of webinars started by Cody Bunch to help people prepare for VMware certification.  At present Damian Karlson is running the VCP5 series in a time slot that suits US based attendees.  Each session is an interactive discussion of an area of the exam curriculum, helping you to keep motivated to study and achieve certification.

The VCAP Brownbags were initiated by a past student on a course in Singapore, Iwan Rahabok is an SE with VMware in Singapore and will be presenting some of the sessions along with his colleagues.

We plan to cover the VCAP5-DCD certification first and will probably then move on to the VCAP5-DCA certification.

Live sessions will run at 6pm Sydney time every Thursday and the recording will be available for download after the event.

The current schedule is:

2 February – Overview, Design methodology and Business Requirements

9 February – Security Design

16 February – Storage Design (sure to be an entertaining session)

23 February – Network Design

You can register for the sessions on GoToMeeting at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/505624097

If you’d like to lead one of the sessions please contact me (details on the about page), preparing to present is a great way to study!

© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz

Earlier I posted about the setup of my VCP5 study lab.  Today I’m going to cover the lab setup I used to study for the VCP4-DT exam. This is the Desktop certification that is all about deploying and configuring VMware View 4.x.  As you will see on the certification page you must first be a VCP4 and then pass the VCP4-DT exam.  As usual for VMware exams there’s a good blueprint listing the subject areas you will be tested on during the exam.  In the past there was a requirement to complete the VCA4-DT certification as well as VCP, this requirement has now been removed, although reportedly the exam registration process for VCP4-DT hasn’t been updated.

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© 2012, Demitasse. All rights reserved. This post first appeared on the Demitasse blog www.demitasse.co.nz