vSphere 5

My VCAP5-DCA Experience

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I hope this helps anyone preparing for their VCAP5-DCA or VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam. Preparation: I initially started by going through this guide written by Paul Grevink, working through examples in my lab environment. I’m lucky in that regard as we have a Demo Lab where we get customers in and demonstrate the technology. I look after the lab myself, so I took the opportunity to make sure there weren’t any demo’s coming up and started practicing.   I made sure I had the exam blueprint sitting next to me the whole time and made notes on it as I went along.   After around 3 weeks of solid studying (taking time out between consulting and installs) I found out you […]

Guest Post by Sam Burdett (friend and colleague of Graeme)

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I recently had some trouble upgrading the base esxi image on a vmware host running 6.0.0 so thought I would let you all know how I resolved it as I had the same trouble with other hosts running 5.5.0 Going through the usual process of uploading the iso to update manager and creating the baseline completed without any issues and so I migrated all live VM’s to the other host in the cluster, disabled HA on the host and popped it into maintenance mode. When it came to remediating the update I was however faced with the following problem: Now this is a bit of an ambiguous error, so we need to take a look at the logs to find […]

Adding new blades to a C7000 chassis

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I recently installed some HP ProLiant BL460c blades into a C7000 chassis. First task was to unbox the blades and install the mezzanine cards: The position of your card depends on which slots you’ve populated at the back. There are 8 slots at the back for your networking, whether you’re using ethernet or fibre cards. Make sure you install the mezzanine card into the corresponding slot, in my case it’s into slot 2. Note – because these are only half-height blades, they only have 2 mezzanine slots each. Full-height blades will have 3. Here’s a guide on port mapping: http://virtualkenneth.com/2012/11/26/understanding-hp-virtual-connect-flexfabric-mappings-with-vmware-vsphere/ Please note that your blades will get their iLO settings from the blade chassis Enclosure Bay IP Addressing configuration, which […]

My VCAP5-DCD Experience

April 24, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

The VCAP-DCD550 is a hard exam. I’d go as far as to say the hardest exam I’ve ever done. Basically, unless you’ve actually worked for a VMware reseller as a designer and had hands-on experience installing and maintaining the technology, it will be a very tough slog indeed. However, even with this knowledge and experience, it’s still a difficult exam to master. Part of the challenge is getting your head around all of the terminology, best practices and VMware’s way of design and implementation. It’s been widely acknowledged that the DCD510 version was easier yet longer, as multiple choice was added to the mix and I also believe you couldn’t go back to review a question once you’d clicked “Next”. […]