{"id":176,"date":"2009-12-13T16:05:48","date_gmt":"2009-12-13T05:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/?p=176"},"modified":"2009-12-13T16:05:48","modified_gmt":"2009-12-13T05:05:48","slug":"vsphere-fasttrack-day-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/?p=176","title":{"rendered":"vSphere FastTrack Day 5"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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. <\/p>\n<h2><strong>Module 11: High Availability and Data Protection<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>HA, Admission control, NIC Teaming, Host Isolation, same same.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Fault Tolerance<\/strong> 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<\/p>\n<p><strong>vCenter Heartbeat<\/strong> licenced? from a third party called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neverfailgroup.com\/virtualization\/virtualcenter-high-availability.html\">NeverFail<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Data Protection<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Module 12: Configuration Management<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>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.<br \/>\n<strong>Update Manager<\/strong><br \/>\nExam Notable (pg 762). Supported OSes: XP SP2, 2003 and 2008.<br \/>\nSupported DBs: MSSQL 2005 Express, MSSQL 2005, MSSQL 2008, Oracle 10g and 11g.<br \/>\nDisk Requirements: &gt; 20 GB<br \/>\nCan create scheduled task to scan VMs for compliance, updates etc. Another good item for support.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Module 13: Installing VMware ESX and ESXi<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Not much has changed here.<\/p>\n<h2>The Washup<\/h2>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s enterprise products. My thoughts anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/?p=176\" class=\"more-link\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threemillion.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}