A while before VMworld Europe 2013 in Barcelona, I was lucky enough to be asked by John Arrasjid if I wanted to help out reviewing the new VCAP-DCD boot camp VMware Education has been working on. So far the VCAP Design Boot Camp has been tested in Spain, Singapore, and Malaysia, with over 300 participants so far.
In addition to this, a two part vBrownbag series covering the boot camp content was recorded and released:
Microsoft has launched Virtualization2, a program to educate VMware administrators on Hyper-V and the System Center suite of tools. In short, these arefree online training sessiosn on November 19th and 20th, that also comes with a voucher for their new Microsoft virtualization certification exam (74-409).
This comes in addition to their existing Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals Jump Start training course.
Eric Siebert has just announced the preliminary details for next years Top vBlog vote. This time around it is sponsored by Veeam, and there are even prizes to be won, not only the notorious fame and fortune that comes with being voted in the top percentile.
Thanks again to Eric for putting all of this together, there is a lot of work involved and the community really values the effort.
Yeah, I admit it. I want OS X Mavericks, and I want it now.
Unfortunately, it´s not available yet from Software Update. So instead of manually checking every 5 minutes or so, I decided to create a small bash script that does it for me.
It´s very, very simple, but I think it does the job:
First off, pop into Terminal and get root access:
h0bbel::h0bair { ~ }-> sudo su -
For the first time since 2010 I will actually be physically attending VMworld Europe! I fly over from the very cold, rainy and generally very autumny Norway to sunny Barcelona on Sunday the 13th.
Based on my past experience from VMworld in Copenhagen, I have decided to go easy on the session scheduling and not fill my calendar to the brim.
Sure, the sessions provide insane amounts of useful content, but for me the main reason to attend VMworld is to physically meet up and talk to a lot of the people I usually spend a lot of time communicating with. The social aspect, also called the hallway track, is to me the most valuable aspect of attending. After all, the sessions are recorded and available post-conference anyway.
Rant alert #
[@Acronis](https://twitter.com/Acronis) sorry, not happening.— Christian Mohn (@h0bbel) October 8, 2013
In and of itself, this tweet is fair enough, even if borderline spam. My reaction to it however, tells a different story. _I admit it, it´s a bit harsh and straight to the point, but something has to have triggered such a response, right? _Rewind back to VMworld US, and Acronis posted this:
[@sbeloussov](https://twitter.com/sbeloussov) [@veeam](https://twitter.com/veeam) [@VMworld](https://twitter.com/VMworld) fortunately we don't need to make our customers drunk to persuade them to buy our soft..— acronis (@Acronis) August 27, 2013
With the new vSphere 5.5 release, the VMware vCenter Appliance (vCSA) has grown up to be a viable alternative to the traditional Microsoft Windows based vCenter deployment scenario. The new vCSA version supports up to 100 hosts and 3000 (with an external Oracle database the values change to 1000/10000) virtual machines, a big improvement from 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines in the previous version.
Sadly, the only external database option available for vCSA 5.5 is Oracle, which means there is still no external Microsoft SQL Server support. For those clients who don´t have an existing Oracle infrastructure, this might be a problem especially with regards to backup of the vCSA database.
In VMware KB Upgrading vCenter Server Appliance 5.0.x/5.1 to 5.5 (2058441) the procedure for upgrading an existing 5.0/5.1 vSphere vCenter Server Appliance is outlined, walking you through the steps required including deploying a new 5.5 vCSA and transferring the data from the old instance to the new one. Straight forward procedure, but there is one small caveat in this process.
One important thing to remember, and something I don´t feel that the knowledge-base article highlights well enough is that the new v5.5 appliance should not be configured in any way when deployed.
Can you combine vSphere Host Cache and vFlash on a single SSD?
5.5 ESXi featured Host Cache vCenter vFlash Virtualization VMware vSphere
One of the new features in vSphere 5.5 is the vSphere vFlash that enables you to use a SSD/Flash device as a read cache for your storage. Duncan Epping has a series of posts on vSphere Flash Cache that is well worth a read.
vSphere vFlash caches your read IOs, but at the same time you can use it as a swap device if you run into memory contention issues. The vSphere vFlash Host Cache is similar to the older Host Cache feature, but if you are upgrading from an older version of ESXi there is a couple of things that needs to be done to be able to use this feature. 
While deploying a fresh vCenter Server 5.5 Appliance, I ran into an issue getting it configured.
When the appliance is deployed, the first time you log in you get presented with the configuration wizard. The wizard clearly states that if you want to set a static ip, or hostname, you should cancel the wizard, do the network configuration and then re-run the wizard after the fact.
Well, that´s what I did, and it resulted in the following error when trying to create the embedded database:
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