Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

VMware

VMware Certified Design Expert

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Eric Sloof just confirmed my scoop in January with additional info on the certification:

The VMware Certified Design Engineer certification will be available later this year. The certification involved taking several courses and exams, including:

  • Courses
    Install and Configure
    DSA
    Design course (currently under development)
  • Exam
    VCP on VI3
    Enterprise Exam (currently in private beta)
    Design Exam (currently under development)

Once all of this has been completed the candidate must present a defensible design to a panel of VMware Solution Architects for consideration. As you may guess, this is a certification specifically targeted for VMware partners that will be assisting VMware in design and deployment and is only intended for a relatively small audience. That being said, the Enterprise Exam, which has a number of live lab style questions, should be available to the public in the next few months and may become part of a mid-line certification between VCP on VI3 and VCDX. That is also under consideration.

Jon C. Hall Technical Certification Developer VMware, Inc.

Tool: Checking the status of VMware Tools and updating

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Rob de Veij created a cool tool for checking the status of VMware Tools and easily upgrading to the latest version of the tools by just selecting the appropriate VM.

RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display the version of the installed VMware tools.It also shows if the tools are upgradeable. The button “Upgrade VMware Tools” starts an UpgradeTools_Task for every selected VM.


Download now

Installing VMware Tools fails with “internal error 2203”

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When updating VMware Tools the setup constantly bailed out without a decent error. So I decided to un-install the Tools and install them again. Un-installing went smooth but when installing it again I ended up with the error “internal error 2203”. After googling this error the Citrix website gave me the solution, check your tmp and temp environment variables. Indeed both variables pointed out to the CD-Rom player for some strange reason. I changed it to c:\temp and the installation of VMware Tools went smooth…

VI Powershell: Creating a PSDrive to browse your inventory

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Just stumbled upon this cool article about mounting your VI inventory as a drive via Powershell:

source – Hal Rottenberg aka halr9000:

  1. Establish a connection to your the server using the Get-VIServer command: 
    Get-VIServer -Server


    for example, 

    Get-VIServer -Server 192.168.10.10


    When prompted, provide the administrator’s username and password to authenticate access on the server.

  2. Get the root folder of the server: 
    $root = Get-Folder -NoRecursion
  3. Create a PowerShell drive named VI, based on the server root folder. You can use the built-in New-psDrive cmdlet. 
    New-PSDrive -Location $root -Name vi -PSProvider VimInventory -Root '\'


    In this release, a single backslash is the required value for the -Root parameter.

  4. Access the new drive by typing the following command: 
    cd vi:


    To list the drive content, use Get-ChildItem or its alias Dir.

  5. Navigate through your server inventory using the cd command with the full path to the host. For a fictional VI inventory it may looks like the following: 
    cd Folder01\DataCenter01\host\Web\LiveHost01

New VMware patch download section

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It took me a while before I got used to the new layout of the VMware website, especially the forums and blogs… But the new download section is definitely an improvement. Just tick the patches you need and click download. A “download manager java applet” will be launched which will download the patches into the default location. This is the only thing I would love to see improved, I should be able to change that download location before the patches are downloaded. Don’t leave the download page while downloading by the way!