Bilal Ahmed, Author at

Passed VCAP5-DCD!!! v5.5 Exam Experience/Review

May 5, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

I took VCAP5-DCD 5.5 and passed with a 334!!! I have to say both VCAP exams are the only 2 I have ever done where I have had no idea whether I was in with a shot of passing once I clicked the finish button! I want to thank everyone in the Google+ DCD group, as seriously without the group and the experiences of everyone in it, I don’t think I would have passed . It is a tough exam, I have found design a tough thing to do, there are so many what ifs and it depends. I have spent long periods of time very confused…but they say confusion comes before understanding… …..and that is true! My journey to the DCD […]

vSphere Design Workshop v5.5 Review

May 2, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So after doing all that studying, I thought it was time to delve deeper into the design side of things! Coming with very little design knowledge, I decided to take the official design course. I did a lot of research and read a lot of reviews with regards to the course, as I would be paying for it myself. Point to note every course I have ever been on……I HAVE PAID FOR MYSELF. All the studying has been in my own time, the best any company has done for me is pay for my exam. So when people tell me they don’t have the time, or cant afford it, I call bullshit! It takes sacrifice, all this effort I have put […]

Resetting a lost ESXi 5.1 root password on a Dell R710

April 15, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I found out that no one new the root password to a host in one of the clusters. So I tried various things to no avail: Had a look in the documentation for it (What it was supposed to be, it wasn’t that) Checked if the keyboard layout was correct (it was) I tried the Host Profiles trick to reset the password to what you want (it didn’t work for some strange reason). It took the profile and applied it and everything, but the password persisted! Reset root using host profiles Reset root using host profile in Web Client Tried 2 Linux live cds and it turns out none of them work with Dell servers in general, due to driver […]

So I passed my VCAP5-DCA back in January 2015!

February 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

Here is a breakdown of how it went and what I did, so if anyone else is considering doing it here ya go! At the time I worked for a Managed Services/DR/BC company so we had a lot of kit sat idle at times, which was free to use for labs! I had a lab setup at work as follows: 5x DL380 g7 in 2 clusters 14TB IBM DS4700 FC SAN 8TB IBM DS3300 iSCSI SAN Some local storage in each server Windows Server 2008 which ran vCenter and the client ( I installed teamviewer on this pc so I could login from anywhere on my laptop). No AD setup. I had vmotion and iSCSI traffic in one vlan and FT […]