Like many others I was a VCP 4 and needed to upgrade to VCP 5 by Feb 29th to avoid a pricey class and possible ribbing from my peers. I was well aware of this deadline since mid December, however, I procrastinated on studying and was mostly flinging myself around the globe doing implementations and having an all around good time. When Feb 1st came I was sitting on a flight from Saigon to Frankfurt and that is when panic struck.
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 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!
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.
Eric 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.
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.
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.
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!
Yes, this is YAEotYP, so if you’ve already read tons of them I apologize. 2011 - My personal view #2011 has been a steamroller of a year.The vSoup Virtualization Podcast got aired the first time, and we’ve recorded and published 19 full episodes in the inaugural year. I was awarded the vExpert title for the first time, and even got invited to Tech Field Day #6 in Boston. In addition to this, I wrote a white paper for Veeam, was included in the Server Virtualization Advisory Board, joined Rick Vanover for a Veeam Community Podcast, and appeared in two video interviews.
One of the last projects I’ve been involved with at Seatrans, is to automate the installation and configuration of vSphere ESXi 5 hosts for deployment on vessels. I’ve talked a bit about this before, both on vSoup and in Setting Up Automated ESXi Deployments where I outlined my PXE and PowerCLI based installation and configuration scheme. Not much has changed since then, except updating the PXE server to offer ESXi 5, instead of ESXi 4 and a lot of work has been put into the scripting, including a front-end GUI for the PowerCLI script itself.
About the author
Christian Mohn works as a Chief Technologist SDDC for Proact in Norway.
See his About page for more details, or find him on Twitter.
Sponsors
