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.
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.
Before VMworld, I laid out a few of my predictions of what I thought we’d see at the conference. Let’s see how I did…
vRAM is dead. The rumors were true. This was kind of a gimme but I’ll take it. So long vRAM licensing! vCloud 2.0. Got this one too though its vCloud 5.1 to line up the numbering scheme with vSphere. We have snapshots and multiple disk levels supported within the provider vDCs.
VMworld is just around the corner and for those in the server / virtualization space, its a pretty exciting time to see what the market leader is doing next. The market is getting more crowded with other hypervisors and some of them are challenging VMware more than others. Yes, even I will admit that Hyper-V is making some noise. A lot of talk within companies about Microsoft’s licensing advantage and features that are “good enough” for most workloads, its a conversation that many shops will be having when that VMware contract comes up for renewal.