Finally dug out of the past couple of weeks to do some writing and I have a bunch of stuff to talk about. Hoping to have several posts here in the next week or so. One of the big events that has happened over the last week is that I was selected as one of the vExperts for 2013. I’m honored to be one of the selected members for this year and truly grateful for the recognition.

With the latest and greatest VMware Tools updates, you may have noticed a change to the VMware Tools Toolbox. Mainly, the inability to do anything that you used to be able to do. Now you are simply greeted with the version, some copyright information and a status that tells you if the service is running or not. This change is outlined in the ESXi 5.1u1 notes as follows: VMware Toolbox. vSphere 5.

Recently while patching some CentOS boxes in my lab, I noticed the following error. May  5 13:48:38 puppet-agent[19924]: Could not run Puppet configuration client: Could not retrieve local facts: undefined method  `kernel_fact_value' for Facter::Util::Processor:Module This was a bit odd as one of the things that I will typically do when I see puppet or facter updates in my update list is to run the agent manually with a puppet agent -t Since that came back clean, I was a little surprised when I checked into the dashboard later in the day to see nodes failing on me.

This morning, I passed the VCP-IaaS exam making me an official VCP-Cloud. Overall, I found the test to be a nice add-on to the VCP5 test that I took back in 2011 and not as hard as I was expecting it to be. Don’t get me wrong, you have to know your stuff. But I think of all the tests that I’ve taken from VMware, this one was more in line of what you would encounter on a day-to-day basis as a vCloud Administrator which is what I think certification tests should be rather than pure memorization of the admin guides.

Recently I was spooling up a dedicate cluster of hardware for a customer in our vCloud environment. It’s a smallish cluster of 5 hosts with a dedicated pool of storage. Nothing out of the ordinary here. Created the DRS/HA Host Cluster. The storage guys had already done the various zoning and disk LUN creation so that was added to the cluster and tagged it with a User Defined Storage Capability.