Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

New VMware certification?

Where’s the new VMware certification? I received an email about this “VMware Certified Design Expert” certification about two months ago? Beneath is what I received but I haven’t seen any new details since, although it clearly states “later this month”. Maybe you guys have?

A new advanced certification for design architects of enterprise deployments, VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDE), will be in beta toward the end of November. The VCDE measures the consultants ability to design, implement, document and test a VMware Infrastructure data center for the enterprise. Requirements for the VMware Certified Design Expert include:

  • VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3
  • Pass a VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise level exam and a VMware Infrastructure 3 design exam
  • Submit, present and defend a successful virtual infrastructure design plan

Additional information will be posted to the VMware certification page later this month.

RTFM 3i guide

For anyone interested in implementing 3i, Mike Laverick created another great pdf and again this is a must read: The RTFM 3i Guide.

VMware Stage Manager

VMware starts a new beta program the 21st of January, the product is called Stage Manager. Stage Manager seems to be some sort of Lab Manager spin off. But it goes way beyond what Lab Manager can do.

  • You can easily boot shadow production servers
  • Create test environments for infrastructure changes
  • Build complex pre-production environments
  • Systematically propagate complex system changes through development, testing, staging and user acceptance phases before committing systems into production
  • Get a better grip on your change, configuration and release (CCR) management processes

If you’re interested than contact your VMware partner and maybe you’ll be the one winning that “VMWorld 2008” pass! I will try to get my hands on the product and see if I can find the time to test it.

    MCSE 2003 upgrade to MCTS on Windows Server 2008

    Just did the upgrade exam to Windows Server 2008 and passed it. It was by far the easiest exam I did over the last couple of years… 55 questions divided in three sections, mainly about IIS, Active Directory and Terminal Services. If you are an MCSE on Windows 2003 look into this exam.

    Delete all snapshots

    Today I encountered an old misunderstood principle again. A customer had created several snapshots on a virtual machine. Several… well to be exact 15. All snapshots were larger than 20GB. When the VMFS volume, on which this VM was located, ran out of diskspace he decided to use the button “Delete All”, but within a couple of minutes the VMFS volume ran out of diskspace again. What happened?

    Situation:
    Snapshot 1 – 20GB
    Snapshot 2 – 10GB
    Snapshot 3 – 30GB

    When you choose “delete all” the following will happen:

    1. Snapshot 2 will grow to 40GB at most
    2. Snapshot 1 will grow to 60GB at most
    3. Snapshot 1 will be committed to the original VMDK
    4. All snapshot files are deleted

    In other words: Snapshot 3 is merged into Snapshot 2, Snapshot 2 is merged into Snapshot 1, Snapshot 1 is merged into the original flat.vmdk and afterwards all snapshot files are deleted. This means that if you want to delete all snapshots at once you will need around 130GB of free diskspace. So think twice when you press the “delete all” button.