Archives for author Christian Mohn
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VMware Forum 2012 Oslo

April 26, 12 //
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Just like last year, I got up really early and caught a 06:40 am flight from Bergen to Oslo to attend the VMware Forum. A cou­ple of things have changed since the last time, one of them being the venue.

This time around it was held at Ull­e­vaal Busi­ness Class, and the venue itself worked great for a one day con­fer­ence like this, divided into three sec­tions, two for par­al­lel ses­sions and one for the exhibitor area.

One of the other changes from last year, is that I now work for a VMware Part­ner, who was also a Plat­inum Spon­sor of the event. This was my first event work­ing for a part­ner, and I even had booth duty! Talk­ing with cus­tomers in a part­ner set­ting is quote dif­fer­ent from being a cus­tomer your­self, so that was inter­est­ing in an of itself. Sadly this also meant that I missed most of the ses­sions, but I did man­age to catch the keynote by Brian Gam­mage, VMware´s Chief Mar­ket Technologist.

I even got a “1-on-1″ ses­sion with Mr. Gam­mage, accom­pa­nied with a cou­ple of my col­leagues from EVRY Con­sult­ing, which was really inter­est­ing to say the least. Lis­ten­ing to some­one extremely knowl­edge­able and vision­ary, in a small non-speaking set­ting was an eye-opener with regards to how VMware sees the future of end user com­put­ing. Sadly I can´t go into details about it, but I´m con­fi­dent that VMware has a strat­egy in the works that might just sur­prise more than a few people.

Unfor­tu­nately this “1-on-1″ ses­sion col­lided with both Joel Lindberg´s and Lee Dilworth´s ses­sions, so I didn´t catch any of those, which in real­ity was the two ses­sions I was look­ing most for­ward to before­hand. Also, what´s up with sched­ul­ing both those ses­sions against each other, that sounds like a bit of bad plan­ning from the orga­niz­ing committee.

I did how­ever get to meet both of them in the exhi­bi­tion area, even if only ever so briefly. I also met up with both Veg­ard Sag­bakken and Stein Will­helm­sen from VMware, Mike Beevor from Whip­tail and Linus Svens­son from Veeam.

All in all I think VMworld Forum 2012 in Oslo was a step in the right direc­tion com­pared to last year, but it´s still not a very tech­ni­cal event and I don’t´really think it is sup­posed to be. Per­haps my expec­ta­tions for it last year were a bit high, and this year they might just have been a bit to low.

Oh, I even spot­ted Cody Bunch´s Automat­ing vSphere with VMware vCen­ter Orches­tra­tor book in the wild!

VCDX Wannabe goes live

March 27, 12 //
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My lit­tle pet project VCDX Wannabe has now (finally) gone live. For now it´s mostly a col­lec­tion of links and resources, but that will change over time.

So, if you want to see me (and pos­si­bly a few oth­ers) either go down in flames, kick­ing and scream­ing, or suc­ceed obtain­ing the VCDX cer­ti­fi­ca­tion you now have the oppor­tu­nity to do so.

vCenter Client Download URLs

March 12, 12 //
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Since the vCen­ter Client no longer is bun­dled with an ESXi host instal­la­tion, I´ve com­piled a quick list of direct down­load URLs for a cou­ple of the clients. Remem­ber, the client is still avail­able from the vCen­ter server, if you point your browser to it.

Another way of get­ting hold of the client is from the vCen­ter ISO file down­load­able from vmware.com.

Ver­sionDown­load URL
VMware vSphere Client v4.1 Update 1VMware-viclient-all-4.1.0–345043.exe
VMware vSphere Client v4.1 Update 2VMware-viclient-all-4.1.0–491557.exe
VMware vSphere Client v5.0VMware-viclient-all-5.0.0–455964.exe

Being Neil Armstrong

February 26, 12 //
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Now there is an ambi­tious post title if there ever was one, but it seems fit­ting as the next 12 months promises to be my most ambi­tious pro­fes­sional year to date.

Like Neil, I´ve started a jour­ney that could either crash and burn, or end up with my very own per­sonal moon landing.

Those of you that fol­low my antics on Twit­ter already know what I´m talk­ing about, but I´ll spell it out once and for all:

I´ve decided to go for the VCDX cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and hope­fully com­plete it within a time­frame of about 12 months.

With my new role as a Senior Con­sul­tant for EVRY, cer­ti­fi­ca­tions all of a sud­den play a major role in my day to day work, so why not go all in and go for the top? I´ve been con­sid­er­ing this for a while, but the last few months have solid­i­fied the idea that I should just go gung-ho and aim for the stars.

So here I am, stick­ing my neck out and mak­ing this pub­lic knowl­edge. I´ll try my best to stick to the plan newly accred­ited VCDX Hugo Phan pub­lished after his defense.

In much of soci­ety, research means to inves­ti­gate some­thing you do not know or understand.

Neil Arm­strong

So there you have it, this nor­we­gian has lost his mind and (for now) lives to tell about it. Wish me luck, I am cer­tainly going to need it.

VMware Virtual Customer Labs

February 4, 12 //
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I´ve men­tioned this ear­lier, VMware hands-in labs going pub­lic in 2012, but finally it seems like some­thing is hap­pen­ing in that regard!

Scott Sauer has announced the avail­abil­ity of “VMware Vir­tual Cus­tomer Labs” (vCL) where he walks us through the setup and deliv­ery of the new vCL offering.

At the moment it´s only avail­able to “selected cus­tomers”, sup­ported by a VMware pre-sales engi­neer, and the num­ber of labs are lim­ited. It´s still a work in progress, and I´m sure great things will come out of this!

Now, how do I get access to it as a part­ner? Also, I won­der what pos­si­bil­i­ties that lies in this with regards to alter­na­tive VCP require­ments?

VCP 5 Certification Requirements Clarification

February 3, 12 //
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In a recent arti­cle, VCP 5 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion course dead­line looms over VMware pros both vNinja.net con­trib­u­tors (Chris­t­ian and Ed) are quoted in rela­tion to the VCP 5 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion upgrade dead­line of Feb­ru­ary 29th 2012.

While I can´t speak for Ed, I can clar­ify my own com­ments a bit. The fol­low­ing is a quote from VMware, taken from the arti­cle in question:

“That require­ment is in place to main­tain the integrity of the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. If peo­ple could pass the VCP 5 with­out expo­sure to and hands-on expe­ri­ence with vSphere 5, it would devalue the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion,” a VMware spokesper­son wrote in an email.

While I do see why VMware has that stance, and why they try to keep the exam “real”, my prob­lem is that there is no way for any­one to do the VCP cer­ti­fi­ca­tion with­out class­room train­ing. I don´t mind that VMware has a train­ing require­ment, and I don´t mind that you have to pay for it. What I do have a prob­lem with is that I´m required to sit a 5 day train­ing class. Why not offer an online VCP-prep course that you can com­plete in your own pace, com­plete with a pre-exam test that you can use to val­i­date your skill set? That way VMware can still require a min­i­mum of train­ing pre-exam, get paid for it, and stu­dents can do their train­ing in their own pace and when they have avail­able time for it. Seems like a win-win (bingo!) sit­u­a­tion to me?

As far as I´ve heard the VCP5 exam focuses less on min­i­mum and max­i­mum con­fig­u­ra­tion lim­its than the VCP4 which is a good thing, but at the same time I don´t think the Install, Con­fig­ure and Man­age course by itself is enough to pass the exam, so in essence VMware is already “devalu­ing” their own exam by requir­ing train­ing that does not cover the entire curriculum.

The hands-on require­ment is a good one, and I applaud it, the best way to ensure that would be to turn the VCP exam into a hands-on-lab envi­ron­ment where you get tasks to com­plete, instead of mul­ti­ple choice questions.

Dis­claimer: I have not yet tried to do the VCP 5 exam and I´m only com­ment­ing based on feed­back pro­vided by oth­ers who have.

As far as the time avail­able for exist­ing VCPs to upgrade from VCP4 to VCP5, I also believe the time­frame is too short, and to be com­pletely hon­est I don´t really see why there should be a time limit at all? After all, if you have the VCP4, you pretty much know what you´re in for with regards to the VCP5. Why rush it, and have peo­ple attempt to upgrade before they are ready? Let peo­ple do this on their own, in their own sched­ule, I don´t see how VMware ben­e­fits from enforc­ing a time­frame at all. Unless the moti­va­tion is sell­ing more train­ing, of course.

Vote for the Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs

January 24, 12 //
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vote for pedroEric Siebert has opened up the vot­ing for the top VMware & vir­tu­al­iza­tion blogs. Head on over and cast your votes!

Votes for vNinja.net and vSoup.net would be greatly appre­ci­ated, but since we´re not affil­i­ated with the Dutch vMaf­fia we promise that you will not have to wear con­crete boots or wake up to a horses head in your bed if you don´t vote for us.

We think.

Iomega IX2 and Time Machine Support

January 23, 12 //
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As Mr. Simon Sea­grave has pointed out, there is a fix avail­able to enable OSX Lion Time Machine sup­port for Iomega IX2 and IX4 NAS stor­age devices.

I decided to take this a lit­tle step fur­ther, and try to upgrade my old (and dis­con­tin­ued) Iomega IX2-200 to the new IX2-200 Cloud Edi­tion firmware.

Ini­tially this was a big fail­ure, as I seem­ingly man­aged to brick my device. It was only respond­ing to pings (so the TCP/IP stack was loaded and work­ing), but I could not bring up the web based man­age­ment tool nor con­nect via tel­net or SSH.

Thank­fully Will van Antwer­pen had inves­ti­gated the firmware upgrade to cloud edi­tion a bit more than I had, and pointed me to the Gen­eral NAS-Central Forums where I found a link to a great HowTo explain­ing the entire process: Upgrad­ing Iomega ix2-200 to Cloud Edi­tion.

As that arti­cle also men­tions, I had to do the process twice to get it to kick in and un-brick my IX2-200 and get it run­ning with the new Cloud Edi­tion firmware.

After con­fig­ur­ing the IX2 with secu­rity and set­ting up Time Machine on the Mac­book Air, Time Machine seems to be run­ning with­out problems.

<MrBurns>Excellent</MrBurns>

Creating and Using a Virtual Floppy in vSphere

January 7, 12 //
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My new col­league Olav Tvedt asked me if I could test his method of enabling Bit­locker in a VM, on VMware vSphere. Of course, I was happy to oblige.

I fol­lowed the same steps as he did in his Run­ning Bit­locker on a Vir­tual com­puter post, and it worked perfectly.

The only real dif­fer­ence between doing this in Hyper-V and on ESXi, is that the vir­tual floppy drive on ESXi by default doesn’t emu­late an empty floppy. So, in order to mount a vir­tual floppy you need to cre­ate a new floppy image. Thank­fully the vSphere Client can do this for you!

To use the vSphere Client to cre­ate a floppy image you can later mount in a VM, you need to edit a VM’s set­tings. Find the floppy drive, if the VM doesn’t have one add one, close the win­dow and return to the VM set­tings once the floppy drive has been added, and select “Cre­ate new floppy image in datastore: “.

Click on the Browse but­ton and browse to your pre­ferred loca­tion for the floppy image. Name it, and click on Ok.

Click on Ok again to close the VM set­tings win­dow and return to the vSphere Client.

There you go, an empty vir­tual floppy image that you can mount in a VM is now created.

To mount the image, find the floppy drive icon in the vSphere client and select the Con­nect to floppy image on a data­s­tore option.

Browse to the loca­tion where you cre­ated the floppy image, and select it.

Now, the VM has an empty floppy that you’ll need to for­mat before you can use it.

Fol­low Olav’s guide to encrypt the boot drive with Bit­locker, with­out the need for a TPM chip or USB device con­nected to the VM!

And yes, it works as you can see here:

So much for never need­ing a floppy disk again. Oh, and by the way, you can of course do this is VMware Work­sta­tion 8 as well.

Building The Ultimate vSphere Lab Series

January 3, 12 //
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Sammy Bogaert has posted a 12 part series called “Build­ing The Ulti­mate vSphere Lab”, which knocks the socks of my pre­vi­ous vSphere 4.x series.

In real­ity this means that my planned series for vSphere 5.x is now can­celled, as there is no need to dupli­cate Sammy’s efforts. Be sure to check the series out!

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