Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

VMworld Europe 2009 sessions available

· ·

The VMworld team has worked around the clock to get the sessions up on the website as soon as humanly possible. Thanks for the hard work, I’ve missed out on most of the sessions but will most definitely start catching up by reading, listening and watching the sessions.

The General Sessions/Keynotes are free for the public, but to view any of the sessions or labs, you must have been a registered attendee of VMworld Europe 2009 or have a VMworld.com Subscription. I usually download every single PDF and use google desktop to index them, should be standard equipment of your VMware toolkit imho!

Set Disk.UseDeviceReset with powershell

· ·

Last week the well known powershell guru Alan Renouf helped me out with a script for enabling virtualized MMU. This week I needed to set Disk.UseDeviceReset to “0” on at least 60 hosts. (Check the link for more info on why!) No point in doing it all by hand when the VI Toolkit can help you out and set this parameter for the entire environment with just one line:

Get-VMHost | Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name Disk.UseDeviceReset -Value 0

I’m really starting to get excited about the VI Toolkit, thanks to guys like Alan and of course the VMworld VI Toolkit Lab I did a couple of weeks ago. With the quick reference guide that Alan created it’s very simple to come up with one-liners like the one above.

DEPRECATED See this article for more info.

VMware as a religion

· ·

As most of you know I’m a technical guy and my blogs mainly deal about technical stuff. Don’t be afraid it will stay this way. There’s no need for me to head in a different direction and I don’t think I could… at least not on the same level as Brenda aka Virtual Gipsy.

Brenda just published an amazing article called “VMware as a religion“. In this article she explains the labels/terms guru, evangelist and even VMware-ism. I suggest you head over and read the article and the other articles she wrote on her virtual trip. Keep up the great work Brenda!

Virtualization, A Beginner’s Guide

· ·

A couple of months ago I was asked to tech edit a book. I knew more people were editing the book but for some reason I didn’t know who. I just learned that Chris Wolf and Ruben Spruijt were my partners in crime, and I’m honored cause I think both are industry experts!

“Virtualization, A Beginner’s Guide” deals about every aspect of virtualization and takes the “beginner” from phase to phase. Topics range from: build, convert, use, secure and protect. This book doesn’t only deal about VMware, it discusses the three market leaders, of course including Citrix and Microsoft.

You can find the table of contents here, and there are also two chapters available freely: chapter one, chapter 6. If you’re new to virtualization, pick it up it’s definitely worth it!

VCDX Design Exam, how to prepare?

· ·

Eric Sloof just posted that a beta of the Design Exam, which is part of the VCDX Certification, is available as of now.

VMware is pleased to announce the availability of the Design Exam (beta).  I can take the exam at Pearson VUE Professional Centers in London, Frankfurt, Paris and Madrid. Only individuals who have successfully passed the Enterprise Administration Exam and have been authorized by VMware will be able to register to take this exam.  The exam is four (4) hours in length to allow time for candidates to comment on each item. My comments are invaluable in improving the overall exam.

I already did the exam a couple of months ago when it wasn’t even Beta yet(Yes, I passed the Enterprise Exam Jason, but I haven’t received my score for the Design exam yet). I used the following documents to prepare for the exams, both Design and Enterprise, but because I didn’t had much time to prepare I mainly focused on the Enterprise exam:

In my opinion the Design exam is tougher than the Enterprise exam, but I did both exams on the same day and I didn’t know what to expect from the Design exam. I would also suggest that besides reading the articles above you also dig into the different type of designs and the phases etc. Good luck!