Last day, can not say it has been overly arduous or the days that long really. Though I guess that depends on how many hours you would normally spend at work.
Module 11: High Availability and Data Protection
HA, Admission control, NIC Teaming, Host Isolation, same same.
Fault Tolerance I was first exposed to FT (vLockStep) at VMworld 2007, now it is finally finished and fully support in ESX4. Some limitations such as only 1 vCPU, and must be thick disk. No thin provisioning. There is a big list of VMs that FT does not support (pg 678). Snapshots, RDMs, sVMotion MSCS etc. The cluster requires a dedicated network for FT traffice
vCenter Heartbeat licenced? from a third party called NeverFail that provides high availability of vCenter server by replicating data to a passive vCenter server via a private heartbeat network. Can also protect the database if installed on the vCenter server. The lab was interesting, but I found the product rather clunky and not that intuitive to use. I can definitely see the advantages of such a product support you main management server but is it worth it. Only you can decide that I guess based upon your own organisations business requirements.
Data Protection back to VCB, vStorage APIs and Data Recovery. One think I thought was interesting from a strange point of view was the host back up of configuration data. This can only be done from the vicfg-cfgbackup command. Not from the VI Client. Back up of your ESX configuration is suggested to be run each time you change the configuration or upgrade your ESX host. I would have thought with Host Profiles being integrated in the VI Client surely something like this would also have been done. That and the fact a lot of effort has been put into Powershell there does not appear in the training material anyway a cmdlet, not that I have checked.
Module 12: Configuration Management
The highly acclaimed Host Profiles to ensure configuration consistency across hosts within a cluster. This is going to be great especially for support guys for configuration management and compliance checking.
Update Manager
Exam Notable (pg 762). Supported OSes: XP SP2, 2003 and 2008.
Supported DBs: MSSQL 2005 Express, MSSQL 2005, MSSQL 2008, Oracle 10g and 11g.
Disk Requirements: > 20 GB
Can create scheduled task to scan VMs for compliance, updates etc. Another good item for support.
Module 13: Installing VMware ESX and ESXi
Not much has changed here.
The Washup
I think the course moved a reasonable pace overall. I can not see where this really fits into new world order due to the release of some more specific training courses around, troubleshooting, performance management etc. I mean for me who knew most of it already in hindsight would have just been better of doing the What’s New. For new people I can see that this course might be too much to take in at once. Remember your first Install and Configure course? Mine was ESX 2.5 and VC 1.0. That was a lot to take in, not knowing anything about VMware’s enterprise products. My thoughts anyway.