vSphere Design Pocket Book - Grab your free e-copy now!

A few days back I wrote about the vSphere Design Pocket Book being available for a pre-order in this article - Pocket Size Magic for Designing your vSphere Infrastructure. Pre-order your copy now!!

The book is now available for download and you can get a free e-copy through this link - Register and Download vSphere Design Pocket Book.

So go ahead, download your copy and find out how you can design your vSphere environment efficiently using the words of wisdom.

To read more about the release, refer to the following article written by Frank Denneman (The mastermind behind this community book) - Free ebook version of the vSphere Design Pocketbook is available now

Special thanks to PernixData for sponsoring this book. Follow them on Twitter to know more about what they have to offer.

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VMware Certified Associate - Your Gateway to learn about the disruptive world of VMware!

This blog post is for those who are looking for an entry point in the world of Virtualization. As technologists most of us know that Server Virtualization is not a new concept. The approach of creating logical partitions of physical hardware to create virtual compute units has been around since Mainframe days.

VMware however changed the game by bringing Virtualization to x86 servers which are considered to as commodity servers today. This was the most disruptive change which happened to the data center landscape. Today we all know that VMware is a leader in x86 Virtualization and with its latest announcements at VMworld 2013, VMware clearly lays down the path on Virtualization of the other critical components of the data center such as Storage and Network. This concept of bringing Virtualization to all the layers of data-center was named as Software Defined Datacenter by VMware. This term soon became an industry standard  and now there are several market research companies working towards forecasting the market opportunity for SDDC which runs into billions of dollars in the coming decade.

Coming back to where I opened this article. We as IT professionals, students and technology enthusiasts should look to participate and benefit from this next wave of technology disruption. This is a great opportunity and one should invest time and efforts to learn the technology and prepare ourselves to to be a part of this paradigm shift.

I was lucky to be introduced to VMware technology 6 years back. In the past 6 years, I have met numerous individuals who want a start point to learn this technology and make a career out of it. Today if I look back at the success of VMware and look forward at its vision, it is easy to predict that investing time in VMware technology would give massive returns. If you are not on this express train already, then let's see how you can jump on and begin your journey.

Before VMworld 2013, the only way to get started with VMware was by self study, VMware Install, Configure and Manage Classroom Training and then a VMware Certification such as VCP-DV (VMware Certified Professional - Datacenter Virtualization. 

The biggest issue with this approach was that in order to get the VMware VCP certification, you need to attend the official VCP Training. Although this training is completely worth every penny spent, this might be a substantial amount of money for a beginner. VMware has been innovative not only with its solutions, but with the learning paths and certifications as well. VMware at VMworld 2013 announced some exciting changes in their learning paths and certifications which will make it inexpensive for beginners to step in the world of VMware. Without further ado lets see how you can get started:-

STEP 1 - Read this article and all the links embedded :-) This will give you a 10,000 feet overview of the great opportunity in front of you.

STEP 2 - Create a free e-learning account with by visiting VMware MyLearn Portal

STEP 3 - Register & attend VMware Data Center Virtualization Fundamentals training for free. This is a self paced training and you can register for this using the My Learn Account created in step 2.

STEP 4 - If you want to get your hands dirty (recommended), then create a home lab on your laptop with evaluation licenses which are good for 60 days. To make it easier for you, there are a number of forums on the internet which can tell you how do you make this lab. Here is one such website which has automated the entire process for creating the home lab - LabGuides.com

STEP 5 - Now comes the interesting part of getting certified. Although a certificate not always represents one's expertise on that subject, I believe it is a good way to keep yourself updated and engulfed with the basics of a technology. VMware has now make this affordable for beginners with the introduction of the VCA-DCV certification. 

As quoted by VMware - "With the VCA-Data Center Virtualization certification, you’ll have greater credibility when discussing data center virtualization, the business challenges that vSphere is designed to address, and how virtualizing the data center with vSphere addresses those challenges. You'll be able to define data center virtualization and provide use case scenarios of how vSphere and data center virtualization can provide cost and operational benefits."

The great news is that the certificate cost as quoted by PearsonVue is just $95.00. Here is the path which is laid down by VMware for VCA-DCV:

To know more about this exam refer to the following link.

The LAST STEP would be to take the first step in this amazing world. So go ahead, start right now and invest in your future. 

You are welcome to share your comments, thoughts, opinions and ideas which might help others to take their first step and be successful. Also, feel free to reach out if you have any questions and I would be happy to help!!

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"Dependency Missing" error while installing HP EVA Storage Replication Adapter!

Just a quick note about one of my recent experience while deploying SRM 5.1 at a customer's site. After setting up the vCenter and SRM server, I went ahead and tried installing the HP EVA SRA which was downloaded and kept by the customer.

For those who are not aware of what is a SRA and how it helps in configuration of SRM, please read the following document. You can also find the pre-requisites for installing the SRA on this page.

So as always, I read the pre-requisites and started with the installation. As soon as I started, I encountered the following error.

HP EVA Storage Replication Adapter

Dependency Missing

"VMware SRM is not installed. Please install SRM before installing HP EVA Storage Replication Adapter"

Believe me SRM was installed and the service was running. I tried this a number of times but failed miserably. The SRA version which I was trying to install was:-

Name: HP_EVA_SRA_5.00.01.zip 

Release Date: 2012-06-06

After trying all the options, I went ahead and downloaded the SRA myself. The issue was right there. The version available for 5.1 was different:-

Name: HP_EVA_SRA_5.01.00.zip 

Release Date: 2012-09-10

Well then I noticed that SRAs for every minor release is different. The worst part is that you do not get any errors pertaining to the version of the SRA but a weird message that the SRM is not installed. I learnt my lesson the hard way. Hope this helps you from falling in the illusion created by that error message.

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Pocket Size Magic for Designing your vSphere Infrastructure. Pre-order your copy now!!

A few weeks back PernixData (A flash virtualization OEM) came up with a project to author a community book which speaks about the most important vSphere Design Considerations. PernixData has recently launched there flagship product named PernixData FVP which will act as a Flash Storage for VMware Infrastructure. The idea behind this book was to get the best brains in the industry to share the vSphere Best Practices which should be considered while designing a VMware Infrastructure. Each design consideration mentioned in this book is “Tweet-Sized”, i.e. just 140 characters around the following areas of the vSphere Platform:-

-           Host design

-          Cluster design

-          vCenter design

-          Networking and Security design

-          Storage design

I participated in this community book and I am glad to inform that some of my suggested “Design Considerations” are selected and included in this book. The book is already published and will be distributed at VMworld2013 by PernixData.

Availability of the book at VMworld

If you would like a hard-copy of the book (and to meet some of the contributors), you can get this from the PernixData Booth (#2011). It will be exclusively available there from 4 pm to 5 pm every day.

Not at VMworld?

If you cannot make it to the VMworld 2013 or PernixData Booth, you can pre-order an electronic copy of the vSphere Design book here.

Want to know who all contributed?

Refer to the following post by Frank Denneman  - Announcing the vSphere Design Pocketbook Contributors

Group your vCenter Operations Manager Custom Dashboards with 3 simple steps.

Just wanted to share a quick tip with my readers and users of vCenter Operations Manager. If you have been working on vCenter Operations Advanced and Enterprise Editions, you must be well versed with vCOps Custom Dashboards. In this article I will give you a quick tip to Group Custom Dashboards for ease of management and access.

I have written about Custom Dashboards before and you can find them under the vCenter Operations Manager section of my blog if you want to read more about this.

Alright, so let's say that you have a number of custom dashboards created for various purposes, such as:-

Performance

Utilization

NOC

Troubleshooting

Capacity Management etc.

You have an easy option by which you can create a drop-down which would list all the dashboard under the specific category. So if you have a dashboard created for Datastore Usage and you want to categorize it under the UTILIZATION head in custom dashboards, you just need to follow the steps below:-

1- Launch the Datastore Usage custom dashboard and click on EDIT.

2- In the dashboard name section add a prefix (Utilization/) in front of the Datastore Usage  as that it reads like UTILIZATION/Datastore Usage

3- Click on OK to save the changes

Now, you would see a Utilization Menu under Dashboards Tab in Custom UI and it will list Datastore Usage dashboard under it. Ain't it simple? Here are a few screenshots which helps you visualize the same and then use this tip.

I edited the Datastore Usage % dashboard and added Utilization/ in the Tab Name section as highlighted below in orange.

Now you can see in the screenshot below that I have a new Menu option under Dashboards Tab. I have a number of them listed and highlighted in orange.

Hope this helps you keep your Custom Dashboards arranged and grouped.

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