Myself @JimPeluso, Matthew J. Brender @mjbrender, and Luigi Danakos @nerdblurt, have been working hard to bring a new segment to the @NEVMUG!

We have been talking for a while to determine a way to get user’s more involved with the community and we think we are on to something.

Enter the era of User Presentations. We now have several time slots available at the latest NEVMUG taking place on January 19th, 2012.

We are taking submissions for a couple weeks and are entertaining all user submissions. This means even if it is not strictly VMware related but why you went with Hyper-V or Xen over VMware and what types of analysis feel free to submit a session!

This is grassroots completely voluntary user driven approach to getting the User community more involved. You might ask yourself “Why would I use my time to present for free at a User Group?”

Well here are a few reasons:

1) You will attain experience speaking in front of a crowd

2) Your helping build a better community

3) There is nothing more exciting than telling your story, where you have been and how you got to where you are today. Taking the time to share you experience will pay dividends in the future.

4) You really get to know the Users. Bring the social back to the community.

5) You do get a free lunch

Any questions feel free to reach out to us!

Call for Papers

Starting today 30th November 2011 until21st December 2011 we will be accepting submissions to be a presenter at the 19th January 2012 Winter Warmer. The selection committee will then go through the submissions and notify the selected presenters on the 28th December 2011. The presenters then Have until 01 January 2012 to accept. The presenter will have to provide a copy of their presentation to the NEVMUG by 15th January 2012.

Key Dates*

• Submissions open: November 30th 2011
• Submissions close: December 21st 2011
• Selected presenters notified: December 28th 2011
• Presenters accept by: December 30th 2011

If this interests you please read the terms and conditions and sign up below:

Myself @JimPeluso, Matthew J. Brender @mjbrender, and Luigi Danakos @nerdblurt, have been working hard to bring a new segment to the @NEVMUG!

We have been talking for a while to determine a way to get user’s more involved with the community and we think we are on to something.

Enter the era of User Presentations. We now have several time slots available at the latest NEVMUG taking place on January 19th, 2012.

We are taking submissions for a couple weeks and are entertaining all user submissions. This means even if it is not strictly VMware related but why you went with Hyper-V or Xen over VMware and what types of anlaysis feel free to submit a session!

This is grassroots completely voluntary user driven approach to getting the User community more involved. You might ask yourself “Why would I use my time to present for free at a User Group?”

Well here are a few reasons:

1) You will attain experience speaking in front of a crowd

2) Your helping build a better community

3) There is nothing more exciting than telling your story, where you have been and how you got to where you are today. Taking the time to share you experience will pay dividends in the future.

4) You really get to know the Users. Bring the social back to the community.

5) You do get a free lunch

If this interests you please read the terms and conditions and sign up below:

A lot has changed for me and for the industry since I last posted on here. There has been a couple VMworlds, the launch of vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and View 5. There has been a change-up in the vCenter Operations line up and the launch of Horizon and MVP.

For me I’ve switched jobs. I took a position as a Server and Virtualization Analyst at a Media Corporation.

I’ve built a lab at home and plan on working towards the VCP 5 using the blueprint soon. Please keep an eye on new posts relating to these steps.

Looking forward things are going to be moving and shaking related to the New England VMware User Group. Keep an eye open for changes to the normal VMUG sessions.

Till next time,

Jim

Here is how I stepped my switches. The primary switch was upgraded first and then the subordinate was upgraded.

v5.0.5c
v5.2.1b
v5.3.0d
v5.3.1a
v6.0.1a
v6.1.2b
v6.2.2e

Hope it helps someone else out!

Jim

With a Blade Chassis you have a unique environment. In my particular environment I use a c7000 chassis with Cisco 3020′s. I’m going to concentrate on the External Switch in Bay 1 which is the main focus of this article.

When a blade server PXE boots it try’s to boot off the first onboard NIC. Which by default is mapped to Interconnect Bay 1 on the c7000. A great feature of PXE on these blade servers is you can specify a VLAN from within the built-in management tools of the blade. I thought at the time excellent I’ll set my PXE VLAN here, reboot the server to PXE get a DHCP lease and install ESXi from the UDA using a basic template.

I was able to PXE boot and it download the files need to start the ESXi install process but, then it got the TFTP Portion of the ESXi install. Guess what? I have no DHCP lease on that server now. There is no DHCP server because the traffic was now coming out of the server untagged. That was easy to diagnose thanks to the logs in ESXi. To view the logs hit Alt + F12 and you can see the details.

Now my thought initially was how can I tell the install to specify a VLAN. Well in short you can’t. The next thing to do on my list was to hit the Communities Forums. I found this post about using Native VLANs to force untagged traffic to a VLAN with DHCP in my case I’m going to use my PXE Vlan because it’s not used frequently and has DHCP already setup on it. The final config on my switch looks something like this. This is not my actually configuration but an example of how it should look.

!
interface GigabitEthernet0/16
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk native vlan 20
switchport trunk allowed vlan 20,21,22,23,24,25
switchport mode trunk
speed 1000
spanning-tree portfast trunk
end

Just to clarify. VLAN 20 would be my PXE VLAN. The other trunks are VM traffic, vMotion (because I have multiple chassis’), and Management Traffic. I turned on portfast for the trunk because I read an article which I can’t seem to find about ridiculous latency in DHCP requests if portfast was not turned on. It has to be a portfast trunk because this port is now a trunk and not an access port.

This worked for me because I use Virtual Switch Tagging (VST) for my VMs. If you are using External Switch Tagging(EST) this may not work for you. Read this article on VLAN Configurations for vSphere to get more in-depth on EST, VST and VGT.

I hope these notes help someone else out that may run into this same issue. I’m assuming this will work across multiple designs but can’t currently confirm this.

Till next time,

Jim

This week I wanted to boot my Workstation VM from USB. Workstation doesn’t natively do this, Vladan Seget @vladan has a great article how to do this at Boot from a USB within VMware Workstation just follow his instructions and off you go.

Another great tidbit is this Perl script written by @lamw over at Virtually Ghetto. I’m still working out the kinks with it but, when it’s done it will be amazing!

Have a great one!

Jim Peluso

If you do not have a VCP3 then you have to take the VCP-410 exam and either the ICM, Fast Track, or Advanced Troubleshooting courses. If you have a VCP3 then you can take the VCP-410 and the What’s new 4.1 course offered by VMware.

The above graphic is from VMware.com and outlines the path.

Now my journey to VCP started in the summer of 2009 with installing VI 3.5 and later in the year installing vSphere 4. I was addicted to the technology but knew I couldn’t pursue certification because of the cost of the course work and at that time I was working on the MCITP: Enterprise Administrator certification. During the summer months a friend @K12Virtual got me interested in the VMware Community Podcast, If you aren’t a subscriber or are not involved, get involved it’s hosted on talkshoe.com which sometimes can be flaky but it’s well worth the content. It’s hosted every Wednesday at 12:00 PST. If you miss it subscribe to it on iTunes and listen in but, the chat is really amazing.

I satisfied my need to learn more about VMware, ESX, ESX(i) by partaking in the local @NEVMUG and purchasing books. The first two books I ever bought about VMware were the vSphere Quick Start Guide, and Mastering VMware vSphere.


After reading those two books and joining Twitter I started to meet new people and understand more about VMware and vSphere. It’s amazing to have an online community like VMware’s Communities and Twitter where you can ask a question and get a multiple responses with different ideas to help you out.

Now you maybe asking yourself what does this have to do with taking the VCP exam. Well my answer is EVERYTHING. What future VCP certification users need to understand is that being a VCP is a lifestyle choice. VMware is evolving changing there is new information easily accessible written by the great bloggers. If you are interested in seeing a list of all the virtualization bloggers check out @ericsiebert ‘s listing refered to as the vLaunchpad: http://vlp.vsphere-land.com/.

Another VMware site that is a great blog aggregator is http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/planet/v12n/ which is run by @JTroyer.

I ended up taking the ICM 4.1 course in January of this past year. I took it online with @GeorgeTrujillo he’s a great instructor and more than willing to spend time after class to answer questions and talk in-depth about vSphere 4.

Something to keep in mind is the ICM 4.1 is a stepping stone towards certification and after taking the course you are not expected to be able to sit the VCP exam. You still have a lot of hands on experience you need to gain before the exam. You also should print out the VCP blueprint which is located on the mylearn.vmware.com site. The even offer a short practice exam so you can test yourself to see if you are ready for the exam.

My next step towards certification was building a lab that I can tear down and bring up so I could get used to the features I needed to learn that are covered in the blueprint. I’m a hand’s on learner and going over the blueprint material over and over again really helped me understand concepts how to break components and then how to fix them.

During this time and opportunity came up from @Cody_Bunch to attend one of his #BrownBags which are archived on his http://professionalvmware.com/ website. This was one of those instances of getting involved with the community. Thanks to Cody I was able to win a book from @ekhnaser it was his new VCP4 Exam Cram book. It’s a great book to read through a week before you take the exam.

I ended up scheduling the exam and using @forbesguthrie ‘s vReference pamphlet to go over the maximums I was having trouble remembering and refresh the parts of the blueprint I was shaky on (resource pools). http://www.vreference.com/ is his site check it out.

I went to the exam and tried to take my time with each question but, I have a tendency to rush through things like Exams. If you are like me do yourself a favor the VCP Exam needs to be read carefully it’s not something to rush through and remember to read the question and answers twice before answering it.

That’s my advice and two cents on the VCP and my journey to certification. I ended up passing the exam on my first attempt.

What’s next you may ask. Well I plan on catching up on some reading:

HA and DRS: technical Deep Dive from @DuncanYB and @FrankDenneman
VMware vSphere Design from @ScottLowe @ForbesGuthrie and @maishsk
VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment from @texiwill although I may wait for the second edition of this book.
VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security from Dave Mishchenko. It’s to bad I already bought this book because VMware will be giving it away for free.

This has been driving me crazy while building new VMs.

I found a great VMTN post0 Started by Kenny Coleman @KendrickColeman on twitter.

The bottom line is after you install VMware tools in your VM you need to assign a separate VM driver to the display. Microsoft’s newer version of the OS has a tendency to keep Microsoft drivers in place instead of using the manufacturer recommended drivers.

In this case click start type in devmgmt.msc

This will open up the Device Manager.
Click the plus sign next to display adapters.
Right click the display adapter and click “Update Driver Software”
click Browse my computer for driver software
Navigate to “c:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\drivers\wddm_video”
Make sure you check off Include subfolders.
Click next and allow the server to replace the driver and it will prompt you to reboot when finished.
Once finished reboot and you should be all set.

Till next time,

Jim

I called into HP Support to find out what was going on. To my surprise I was told that the controllers were out of sync.
I was told that I would have to re-sync my controllers to fix the issue. I’ve never heard of controllers falling out of sync, but hey I have had a few power outages before this happened and replaced 32 disks in my EVA.

Here are the details on performing a re-sync. Now a word of caution, when you are in field services mode you CAN click a button and erase the ENTIRE EVA. I’m sure you don’t want to do that but be very careful.

As a precursor remember that you are supposed to log into your Command View server first then add fieldservice to the end of the URL.

Replace the address bar at the top to read “fieldservice” instead of the usual “Login”.
Select the EVA to work on
Open the command line interface
Enter ’2a’ as your hex equivalent and ‘execute’ the command

Leave the ‘master controller’ dotted, both controllers will release their running state, and re-read everything off the disk spindles.

This is a quick “restart” and will cause queuing of commands and possible application timeouts or crashes are possible.
If possible, stop
MS SQL server
MS Exchange
Oracle database
To help relieve possible application crashes. Most OSs won’t have a problem, but applications may.

When I performed this action it did not cause SQL, VMware, or any other databases to crash during the syncing period. I did it during a lull in the day, usually lunch time.

Till next time,

Jim

The New England VMUG was January 20th at Gillette Stadium and it was amazing. I’ve never had that much fun at a VMUG. Last time I went to a VMUG it was in 2008 in Newport, RI. I learned about ESXTOP at the VMUG and it was a great experience. After that VMUG I joined twitter and started following geeks.

There is something to be said about Social Media. I knew going to the VMUG I wanted to have a tweetup with people I’ve talked to or follow on Twitter. Let me tell you that was the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

I was able to meet @NerdBlurt, @MJBrender, @Stu, @Texiwill, @MMars, @CSHarney and @VCEKen.

It was an amazing opportunity to meet each of them and discuss technology. Instead of attending any break out sessions we got a primer on security and vShield from Ed.

I suggest anyone that is involved with a VMUG, or not even just the VMUG but, anything that you are passionate about. Get on twitter and get in touch with people in and out of your area with common interests and start talking!

When the opportunity shows up for you to meet the people you converse with daily or weekly on twitter then meet them. It’s an amazing experience that you will never forget. I plan on attending as many NEVMUGs as I can.

Thanks to Chris Harney for an amazing VMUG,
and a special thank you to everyone I met IRL from twitter,

Until next time,

Jim

PS enjoy this awesome picture I took at the VMUG.