The majority of day two was much the same as day 1. The only new items presented that I did not know about were about the vNetwork Distributed Switches and the vMA appliance. Having briefly had a play with the VI Perl Toolkit when it came out the vMA reminded me very much of this combined with the SC commands. Since I have been playing with the Windows VIToolkit for the last couple of months this was not an appealing concept, going back to the CLI. I guess I am just not linuxy enough.

Module 5: Networking (second half)

Possible Exam Review Worthy
New vSwitch related limits – pg130-131
Network Configuration Commands – pg142
Benefits of Distributed Switches – pg157
Standard vSwitch or Distributed Switch – pg158
Study the new features\items between 3.5 and 4.0
Port Group Policies for vDS – pg182
VLAN Policies for vDS – pg188
Types of secondary VLANs – pg191
Traffic inside PVLANs will *not* be encapsulated. – pg193
Additional advanced port group properties – pg200

Module 6: Storage
Not much has changed here, except there is a runtime name which is similar to the old one but different in that the partition number at the end is no longer there, it has been replaced with a channel number which is item two in the array of four. Apparently for FC Channel is always 0, ( the channel number is controlled by the scsi controller pg219) and the channel number may be different only on iSCSI targets where there is multiple NICs (ie channels) to get to an iSCSI target.

Possible Exam Review Worthy
Using FC with ESX – pg225
ESXi does not support boot from SAN in it’s default configuration. I guess this means if an OEM vendor makes changes to the kernel adding their own drivers etc then it might be possible.
LUN support maximums have not changed from 3.5.
The Storage View maps are an addition and the fact you can double click and move an item in the mapping view is good if you like to change the way it is displayed before printing. The old map views do not have this ability at this time.
MSCS does not support iSCSI LUNs. this is a MS limitation, not a VMware one.
iSCSI addressing – pg241
Same IP Port (3260) and discovery methods for iSCSI. Not that I thought this would change. (pg246 & 247)
CHAP ON 3.5 is only ser for *all* iSCSI targets *not* availabilt to do per target like it is in 4.0
Target authenticated the host in 3.5, uni-directional only.
Can not dynamically grow LUNs and VMFS datastores – pg261
Can not grow RDMs.

Module 7: Virtual Machines
New limits – pg304
There is no stated limit in the training material or in the Config Maximums document for PCI devices like there was in 3.5. Basically it is unlimited according to the instructor.
Two new disk types available when creating a VM. LSI SAS (Win 2008 R2) and VMware paravirtual (for newer linux OSes which support paravirtualisation and Win2008R2)
The typical option when creating a VM has greatly reduced the number of options you can select, for example you do not get to choose the number of vCPUs, NICs, RAM like you could in VI3. These are assigned a default based upon the OS type selected. So looks like going forward I will always be using Custom. However I can see benefits for other users where having to think about these things would be easier not. Having too many choices for lesser experienced people can serve to confuse them in my experience.