Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

design

License server VM down, now what?

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On twitter John Troyer retweeted a question a couple of days ago which basically came down to the following: When your VM which contains the license server goes down and has been down for longer then 14 days you will not be able to actually boot it up. This is because the grace period has expired.

As a VMware PSO Consultant my recommendation is to make sure you always have a “host based” license file laying around. In a normal situation you don’t need to use it. But in a situation like this it will be very useful because you can just change the license to a host based license instead of a “license server”. This would enable you to actually boot up the License VM. When booted up you could easily revert the changes again and point to your license server again.

VCDX Design Exam, how to prepare?

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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!

Blades and HA / Cluster design

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After reading Aaron‘s excellent articles(1, 2) on Scott Lowe’s Blog I remembered a discussion I had with a couple of co-workers. The discussion was about VMware HA Cluster design in Blade Environments.

The thing that started this discussing was an HA “problem” that occurred at a customer site. This specific customer had 2 Blade chassis to avoid a single point of failure in his virtual environment. All blade servers were joined in one big cluster to get the most out of the environment in terms of Distributed Resource Scheduling.

Unfortunately for this customer at one point in time one of his blade chassis failed. In other words, power off on the chassis, all blades gone at the same time. The firs thing that comes to mind is: HA will kick in and the VM’s will be up and running within no-time.  [Read more…] about Blades and HA / Cluster design