VMware

We’re currently running a little in house beta at the office of vCloud 1.5.0. The testing has been going on for a while and recently I had to do something I didn’t want to do, but had a nice learning experience for me so I thought I would share.

We have two UCS blades running in our vCloud environment giving us a nice healthy test bed to play in. For another maintenance in our VMware environment, I had to steal one of these blades to be used in another cluster to add some resources temporarily. So into the vCloud interface I go to disable the host, unprepared the host and finally remove it from the interface. No problems, everything went as expected and I could move the host into the other cluster for the maintenance.

While working on an upgrade from vSphere 4.1u1 to vSphere5.0, I ran into the following error when I got to the upgrade manager portion of the upgrade.

Error 25113.Setup failed to generate the JRE SSL keys.

If you do any sort of googling for this, you’ll find people that suggest looking for openssl.exe and renaming it temporarily. I didn’t have openssl.exe so that wasn’t going to work. Another person gave the old windows “fix” of just reboot the box. Guess what, that didn’t work either.

Got a call tonight concerning a VM that was having some issues. We had p2v’d our Virtual Center and when the new vCenter came online, apparently DRS decided to balance the heck out of things and somewhere in the process, a VM got squished and had a variety of issues.

When I was brought in, it wasn’t powering up and throwing an error concerning a lock. So here is what I tried.

Today I can add a few more letters to the old signature line. I passed the VMware Certified Professional 5 test!

Overall, I thought that the test was pretty fair. This test was rumored to test more on your real world experience with vSphere and it didn’t disappoint. I would say that the test was easier for me than the VCP4 test but I also have 2 more years of experience under my belt and had a chance to go to VMworld 2011 with some great sessions and labs that dug into the nitty gritty of 5.

VMworld 2011 Las Vegas was my first ever VMworld, and hopefully it will be one of many! Before I left, I got some advice from a co-worker who was an alumni as well as reading various articles including David Marshall’s 10 tips for VMworld 2011 newbies.

Now that I’m been there and back and with VMworld Copenhagen just around the corner, I figured it would be a good time to recap David’s rules as I thought they were a pretty good blue print for first timers.