VMware Iaas exam Study Notes

While preparing for my VMware Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Exam (exam code: VCPVCD510), I have compiled some Study Notes.

During my preparations, I have followed the official Exam Blue print, the notes are based on this document. The information comes from the official VMware documentation, references to blog posts and lots of screen shots from my Home lab.

The notes do not cover each objective in every aspect (that’s why I named it Study Notes instead of a Study Guide). However, I am sure it provides a lot of useful information.

Without a doubt, the best way to prepare for this exam is to download and install the bytes. Then build and break vCloud Director, vCenter Chargeback Manager and the other stuff.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Link: VCP Cloud Study Notes 20130406

Cannot Re-Deploy Edge gateway

Last week, my home lab experienced some storage problems. The result was losing at least one LUN, formatted as a VMFS file system. The file system was part of a vCloud Director (vCD) setup and home to some test VMs, and also a few edge gateways, one of them belonging to an Org VDC network.

So, it was time to see how to restore the missing Edge gateway.

The first idea was to see if the Re-deply option could solve the issue.

Figure 1 – vCloud Director Edge gateway

So, login to vCloud Director, select the Edge gateway and select Re-deploy from the available actions. Unfortunately, the result was negative. The task detail explains why, re-deploy is meant to publish the configuration to an Edge gateway, but communication with the Edge gateway is essential.

Figure 2

First part of the solution is, to login to the “VMware vShield Manager”.

• Under “View”, select Edges;
• In the left pane, select “Edge Gateways” and in the right pane, select the faulty edge gateway.
• Under “Actions”, you will also find “Redeploy Edge”, but that won’t help you.
• Instead, select “Manage”.

Figure 3 – Edges, Edge gateways

• The detail window opens, select Settings. At the bottom, under “Edge Appliances”, select the only available Edge Appliance and choose the “Delete” option (red cross).

Figure 4

• Now, choose “Add”, to recreate the Edge gateway
• Fill in the required information, and choose “Add”.
  The “Cluster/Resource Pool” is usually a System vDC resource pool. Select a Datastore, Host and Folder for placement.

Figure 5

• If everything goes well, you can follow the progress in the vCenter server, the Edge gateway will be deployed.
• Switch back to vCloud Director, select the Edge gateway and choose Re-Deploy. This time the Edge gateway will be configured and report Status OK.

That is all. I thank you for reading and as always, I welcome your comments.

Tiny Core Linux VM 32 bit!

Just a quick post. A lot has already been written about the Tiny Core Linux VM, so I won’t repeat that.

This VM is ideal for testing purposes. For instance you are building environments based on nested ESXi hosts and you want a small VM for testing HA, network connectivity and so on.

In my case, there was only one small problem. Since vSphere 5.1, my hardware does not support running 64 bit VMs on nested ESXi hosts.

The resolution is easy, in fact this version of Tiny Core Linux is 32-bit. So after importing the .OVA, just edit the configuration. On the Options tab, change the Guest OS from “Other Linux (64-bit)” to “Other Linux (32-bit)”. That’s all.

Figure 1

Credits for the people at the Tiny Core Linux project and Iwan Rahabok for creating the .OVA. You can find it here.

vCenter Chargeback Manager – Part 3

This is the third part in a series of posts on the vCenter Chargeback Manager (vCCM, from now on). Part 1 was all about the installation of vCCM. In Part 2, the basic configuration was discussed. In this part, I will explain some of the philosophy behind the product, and start creating reports.

I suppose you have installed and configured vCCM without any problems? Did you add a vCenter server and the vCenter Chargeback Manager Data Collector is running? Fine.

By the way, these posts come from my study notes while preparing for my VCP5-IaaS certification and cover at least parts of Objective 1.1 – Install vCloud Components and Section 3 – Configure and Administer vCenter Chargeback.

A word about vCenter Chargeback Manager Users, roles and permissions.
After the installation of vCCM has finished, there is only one user, in my case I named the account “admin”. This first user has the role of Super User.  This role has all the privileges. vCCM provides a mechanism called resource-based authorization. As such vCCM works with; Resource types, Users and Groups, Roles and Permissions.
For the sake of simplicity, I will continue to work with my “admin” account.

Figure 1 – Users

vCenter Chargeback Manager – Part 2

In the previous post, I have discussed the basic installation of vCenter Chargeback Manager (vCCM, from now on). In this post we will continue and show the basic configuration of the product.

I suppose you have installed vCCM without any problems and all services are running. vCCM has quite a number of services, which should  start automatically.

To log in to vCCM, you will need a supported browser, in my case IE 9 and Firefox worked well.

On the vCCM server, you launch the application from the Windows menu. From a remote workstation, provide the application URL, which was displayed after installing vCCM.

When you log in to vCCM for the first time, you will be prompted to enter a license key.

Figure 1 – License

Provide the License key and the credentials, created during the installation. When the license key has been accepted, you can log in to the application.

vCenter Chargeback Manager – Part 1

The exam blueprint for the VMware Certified Professional Cloud (VCP-Cloud) certification includes several products. Of course, vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server are the basic building blocks and vCloud Director is the most discussed product. But there is another product you need to understand; vCenter Chargeback Manager (vCCM, from now on). You need to know how to install the product; also a full section of the blueprint is dedicated to configuration and administration. You need to know how to generate Reports. But before you can generate your first report, you have been through a lot of stages.

So, I expected to find a lot of posts on this subject, but I did not. For that reason, in a series of posts, I will share my experience with the vCCM. In the first part, let’s start with the installation of vCCM.

Note: In my case, I installed vCCM for training purposes. For that reason, I did not completely follow all steps and recommendations in the official documentation. So, in case, you need to install vCCM in a real-life production environment, I recommended having a look at the vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation and Upgrade Guide.

You can find the official resources here and start a free trial for 60 days. Some useful official documents are:

• vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation and Upgrade Guide
• vCenter Chargeback Manager User’s Guide
• Best Practices and Troubleshooting Guide

vOPS Server Explorer 6.3 release

Today, Dell released the latest version of the vOPS Server Explorer, version 6.3 to be more precise. Last year, Dell acquired vKernel and with that, its flagship product vOPS Server Standard.

vOPS Server Explorer is a freeware suite, this version adds two new utilities, Storage Explorer and Change Explorer, plus adds improvements to Environment Explorer. So there are now a total of five utilities in the vOPS free VM tool.

• Environment Explorer
• vScope Explorer
• Search VM Explorer
• Storage Explorer
• Change Explorer

vOPS Server Explorer uses the same analytics and advisory engine from the paid vOPS Server Standard product, all five of these utilities provide virtual administrators with a rapid assessment of the state of their environment.

Figure 1 – Storage Explorer (provided by Dell)

Adventures in 2012

At the end of 2012, WordPress.com was so kind to prepare a 2012 annual report for my blog.

I have started this blog two years ago. While helping a friend, setting up his own WordPress.com blog, I decided to create another blog for my own purposes. My primary reason for publishing is to answer those questions, I can not find a suitable answer anywhere else. Information provided is for everyone searching for answers.

The best part of writing a blog, is to receive feedback. For that reason, I want to thank all readers who took the time to write me a message of appreciation, with questions or some extra information.

The number of page views of “Adventures in a Virtual World” increased over 100% to 99.000 views in 2012. I want to thank all my readers  for these numbers.

Wishing you all a very Happy and Healthy New Year. Thank you very much.

Best regards,

Paul

Click here to see the complete report.

VCAP5-DCA Study Guide is now available

The content of this study guide was first published as a series of posts on this blog.

The posts were written in preparation for my VCAP5-DCA exam and are based on the official VMware Blueprint. At the time I started writing; other great Study guides were available, although most of these guides were based on the VCAP4-DCA exam.

The posts had to meet the following goals:

• Based on the official Blueprint, follow the objectives as close as possible.
• Refer to the official VMware documentation as much as possible. For that reason, every Objective starts with one or more references to the VMware documentation.
• In case the official documentation is not available or not complete, provide an alternative.
• Write down the essence of every objective (the Summary part).
• If necessary, provide additional explanation, instructions, examples and references to other posts. All this without providing too much information.

I hope all this will help you in your preparation for your exam. I welcome your comments, feedback and questions.

Download Guide: VCAP5-DCA Study Guide_20121229

VCAP5-DCA Objective 8.2 – Administer vSphere using the vSphere Management Assistant

Objectives

• Install and configure vMA
• Add/Remove target servers (Note: This Objective has been updated per 21-01-2013)
• Perform updates to the vMA
• Use vmkfstools to manage VMFS datastores
• Use vmware-cmd to manage VMs
• Use esxcli to manage ESXi Host configurations
• Troubleshoot common vMA errors and conditions

Install and configure vMA

Official Documentation:
vSphere Management Assistant Guide vSphere 5.0, Chapter 2 “Getting started with the vMA”, section “Deploy vMA”.

Summary:
The vSphere Management Assistant (vMA from now on) and the documentation can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vima/

Note: multiple versions are available! You can deploy vMA 5.0 on vSphere 4.0 Update 2 or later (no vSphere 5.1) and vCenter Server 4.0 Update 2 or later. The vCenter Appliance 5.0 is also supported. After installation, you can target even ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 5 servers.

The vMA comes as a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11‐based virtual machine that includes pre-packaged software such as the vSphere command‐line interface, and the vSphere SDK for Perl. The vMA allows administrators to run scripts or agents that interact with ESXi hosts and vCenter Server systems without having to authenticate each time. The vMA comes as a virtual appliance

Under normal conditions, you will deploy the vMA in your cluster. Another way is to deploy vMA on your workstation and take it with you, with your own tools and scripts.