Born on the 12th of July...

Something BIG is happening at VMware Towers on the 12th of July - I wonder what it could be...??

Until then, all I can do is quote things that VMware say in public, so here goes:

"Please join VMware executives Paul Maritz, CEO and Steve Herrod, CTO on July 12th for the unveiling of the next major step forward in cloud infrastructure. The live webcast will be followed by additional online sessions where you can learn more about the industry’s most trusted virtualization and cloud infrastructure products and services."

So, if you fancy joining the webcast on July 12th, here's the link: VMware webcast

Free VMware vCloud Director webinar on June 3rd

I'm hosting/presenting a webinar tomorrow titled An Introduction to building a private cloud with VMware vCloud Director. It's free to register/attend, I'll be covering the most important elements of how to utilise vCloud Director and vSphere to create your own private cloud.

Here's the registration link:
https://globalknowledgeevents.webex.com/globalknowledgeevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=841075472

The session starts at 13:00 UK time, and lasts for 1 hour.

Free ESXi Training

Most people who work with VMware vSphere products and technologies are aware of the ESX and ESXi bare-metal hypervisor options available - after all it was the 3.5 release of the software that first gave customers the choice of deploying either or both. Later this year sees the release of vSphere 5, and from that time forward we will be living in an ESX-less world - I wrote a post about this back in February 2010: ESX v ESXi

In the middle of 2010, VMware Education released a 2-day instructor-led training course complete with hands-on labs to aid customers who had vSphere deployments centred around ESX to help them start to make the move towards ESXi: vSphere: Transition to ESXi

VMware Education are now taking the ESX-less message further out to their customer base with the release of a free 4-hour self-paced elearning - essentially it's a cut-down version of the full instructor-led course above. The course has no hands-on labs, and as you would expect from elearning versus instructor-led training there's no instructor to ask questions of: vSphere: Transition to ESXi Essentials

New Course - vSphere: Advanced Fast Track

VMware have decided to create an advanced-level extended-hours course for vSphere 4 - vSphere: Advanced Fast Track. This course will combine together the vSphere: Troubleshooting course (4 days) with the vSphere: Manage for Performance course (3 days) into a single 5-day extended-hours course.

This new combined course will offer excellent preparation for the VCAP4-DCA exam, and will include a voucher for the exam as part of the course fee. The course is expected to be available within the next couple of months, the content is still being finalised at the moment, and pricing has yet to be determined.

This course is going to be perfect for anyone who's attended the vSphere: Install Configure Manage, vSphere: What's New, or the old vSphere: Fast Track course, and also for those who attend the new vSphere: Automation Fast Track - it gives students from any of those courses an excellent follow-on course as well as helping prepare for the VCAP4-DCA exam.

New Course - vSphere: Automation Fast Track

Until the end of 2010, one of the courses we offered to our customers was a vSphere: Fast Track - which combined together roughly 7 days of various vSphere 4.0 courses into a single extended-hour training course.

VMware updated the core vSphere: Install Configure Manage course for the 4.1 release and grew it out to 5 days at the same time, pulling in quite a lot of material that previously formed the old Fast Track.

I can now confirm that VMware plan to release a new Automation Fast Track course, which will run as a 5-day extended-hours course. This course will combine together all the material from the current Install Configure Manage course (5 days) with the Automation with vSphere PowerCLI course (2 days) - so 7 days worth of training in 5 days.

So what else can I tell you about this new course? Well some of the details are still emerging, but I can say that the course will include a voucher for the VCP4 exam. The release date has still not been confirmed, but I would expect it to be within the next couple of months, course pricing has also yet to be set.

Free "What's New in vSphere 4.1" e-learning

The vSphere: Install Configure Manage course was recently updated for the vSphere 4.1 release, see the course outline and my earlier blog post on that. Other vSphere courses such as the Troubleshooting and Manage for Performance courses were designed around the vSphere 4.0 release, and have yet to be updated.

VMware have created an e-learning course titled What's New in vSphere 4.1, and sell it as part of their All-Access subscription - it is also made available to VMware partners.

The part of this that's of interest to me in particular is that VMware have also now decided to make the e-learning available at no charge to those students who attend any one of the following instructor-led courses:

vSphere: What's New
vSphere: Troubleshooting
vSphere: Manage for Performance

If you have completed any of the above courses since July 28th, VMware will email you a token (a free voucher) that can be used against the e-learning course. The token has to be used within 90 days of being issued, and the course subscription then lasts for 365 days.

The course includes an overview of new 4.1 features including:

- ESXi enhancements/changes
- Support for Active Directory authentication
- vCLI enhancements
- vCenter Server enhancement/changes
- Host Profiles enhancements
- Increased cluster maximums
- New DRS affinitiy rules
- vMotion enhancements vSphere 4.1 installation and upgrade options
- An introduction to storage I/O controll and VAAI
- An introduction to Network I/O control
- Information about ESX/ESXi memory compression

Update - September 29th 2010
I can confirm that only the courses highlighted above qualify for this offer. Those attending the vSphere: Fast Track course could have attended the new vSphere: Install Configure Manage course which is already based on 4.1.

vSphere 4.1 is released

Well after a fair bit of hype online over the last few days (ie. somebody out there violating the VMware NDA they signed), VMware have now released the 4.1 version of vSphere. The binaries are available for download too, so we can all now get our hands on the latest versions of ESX, ESXi, and the various vCenter components.

Apparently there are over 150 new features, I'm sure the release notes will offer a good amount of detail on those, here's a link to the new What's New in VMware vSphere 4.1 page.

I've been on the private beta for 4.1 for some time now, so I've been aware of many of these new features for a while. With my new vExpert status, I was lucky enough to join an exclusive webcast last week, to give myself and the other vExperts a chance to get a more formal head start in learning more about some of the new features.

A few facts about vSphere 4.1:
VMotion will now be known as vMotion, and Storage VMotion will now be known as Storage vMotion
ESXi free is now known as vSphere Hypervisor
The paid license versions of ESX/ESXi are now defined as Hypervisor architectures
New license bundles for Essentials and Essentials Plus, the latter to include vMotion for the first time
ESX will be deprecated in 2011, when vSphere 5 will be released
vCenter Server 4.1 is only available as a 64-bit application, giving significantly greater scalbility

Here's some notes about the most significant features/changes in vSphere 4.1:

ESXi
ESXi is now defined as best practice for deployment over ESX
ESXi now supports scripted installation, boot from SAN, and easier CLI options for troubleshooting

Network I/O Control
Set per port group or port, only available on the vNetwork Distributed Switch
Designed for 10GigE, where a host is likely to only have 2 NICs in total
New version of the Cisco Nexus 1000v has a "fair wait queuing" feature

Load-based NIC teaming
New configuration option to complement existing teaming choices

Storage I/O Control
Prioritized use of storage, across hosts, set per VM
Kicks in once latency is over 35ms
FC/iSCSI only for now, support for NFS is coming

Storage performance reporting
More granular, and new NFS measurements

Array integration API
Allows cloning and migration functions to be carried out directly at the storage layer
API-based operations are between 5 and 20 times quicker than non-API
EMC, HP, Dell, NetApp, HDS are initial partners for the API

Memory compression
Designed for over-commit situations, 1000x faster than swap
Makes memory over-commit more viable as an option

DRS host affinity
Group of VMs set to run against set of defined hosts
Hard rules, never breached by DRS
Preferential rules, DRS attempts to maintain defined rules

HA diagnostics and healthcheck
GUI improvements on host/cluster status
HA/DRS have better integration on VM placement
Application API, making it possible for HA to detect application-level problems inside a VM
HA/DRS cluster sizes aligned better

vMotion speed and scale
4 concurrent migrations with 1GigE, 8 concurrent with 10GigE
Migrations 5x faster than 4.0 with 10GigE
Enhanced vMotion Compatibility enhancements

Active Directory integration (host-level)
vSphere Client options to configure ESX/ESXi to authenticate against Active Directory

More VMs, more hosts
3000 VMs per cluster
1000 hosts per vCenter
10000 VMs per vCenter

I can also confirm that the new 5-day vSphere: Install Configure Manage course will be based on the 4.1 vSphere release.

New course in development - vSphere: Manage and Design for Security

VMware are currently developing a new specialist course title vSphere: Manage and Design for Security, the course will be available later in the summer, and will cover all the best practices for secure design, deployment and operations of a vSphere environment. The course objectives are:

• Identify vulnerabilities in the current design of a vSphere environment and recommend corrective actions
• Harden vSphere components as described in the security hardening guides for vSphere 4
• Use VMware® vShield Zones to provide firewall protection to virtual machines and monitor virtual machine network traffic
• Recommend configuration and change management policies, processes, and systems

This is planned to be a 2-day course with roughly 40% of the time spent doing hands-on labs. I'll post a fuller overview of the course closer to the release date, once VMware have finalised the course objectives and content.

Update on July 5th - corrected the course name in the title and body.

New course in development - vSphere: Automation with vSphere PowerCLI

This summer VMware will be releasing a new course vSphere: Automation with vSphere PowerCLI, the course will give administrators an introduction to the vSphere PowerCLI and show them how to use it to perform a variety of different tasks in a vSphere environment:

• Automate VMware® ESX™ configuration
• Automate the provisioning of virtual machines
• Automate changes to virtual machine configuration
• Automate cluster operations
• Automate reporting

vSphere PowerCLI is an extension to Microsoft PowerShell, and contains over 100 VMware-specific commands (or cmd-lets in the language of PowerShell) - the course is currently in development and is due to be 2 days long with roughly 60% of the time spent doing hands-on labs with PowerCLI.

I'll post a more thorough outline of the course closer to the release date, once the content and structure has been finalised.

Update on July 5th - corrected the course name in the title and body text

VMware webinar on Xtra and advanced-level training and certification

I'm just putting the finishing touches to my latest webinar for Global Knowledge UK, this time the topics covered will be our VMware Xtra "value-added training" offering, and also the latest information on the new advanced-level vSphere training and certifications.

The webinar starts at 11:00am BST (GMT+1) on Friday 14th May, and will be a 45-minute session followed by Q&A. To register follow this link.

During the webinar I will be giving an insight into our VMware Xtra program, a project I have been heavily involved in over the last couple of months, I'll talk about what VMware Xtra is today, where it came from, and also about our plans for the future in that area.

I'm also going to be discussing the imminent launch of the new advanced-level certifications for vSphere 4, and giving an outline of how some of the official higher-level training courses that we offer will help you to prepare to achieve these new certifications.

Update - May 14th
Well the webinar took place today, thanks to all those who joined me for the session. VMware did allow me to say a couple of additional things about their plans for the new vSphere certifications:

1. The official announcement on the three new certifications will be in the next two weeks, before the end of May.
2. The new exams for the new certifications will be lab-based with simulations.
3. The new exams will draw on content from all the advanced-level vSphere courses - as such the topics in the exams will cover Security, Automation, Troubleshooting and Performance.

Get more from your VMware training with VMware Xtra!

Over the last few weeks I've been heavily involved in a project for Global Knowledge UK, and today I'm proud to be able to announce the launch of VMware Xtra, a unique collection of value-add online resources designed to enhance the end-to-end learning experience for anyone wishing to increase their knowledge around key VMware products such as vSphere 4.

http://www.globalknowledge.co.uk/vmwarextra

There are resources for those who are still deciding which is the right VMware course for them or their employees, resources aimed at those who have booked on one of our courses and want to prepare themselves in advance for their course, and resources for those who have attended a course and want to take their learning further.

We believe that attending a VMware training course with Global Knowledge UK should simply be the middle part of a complete learning experience. The resources we have made available today are unique, and designed to maximize the value of attending a Global Knowledge UK VMware course. You will only receive such a complete learning experience by booking your VMware training with us!

This is just the start of our "value-added" journey too, we will be adding lots more additional material for the variety of VMware courses we offer in the coming weeks. We have lots of ideas for the extra material we would like to add, based on internal discussions as well as feedback from our customers, if there's anything else you'd like to see please feel free to email me.

I'm really excited to have been so heavily involved in a project like this, and know that the time and effort we have invested in the Xtra program so far will make a real difference to our customers.

Note: You will need Adobe Acrobat 9 or Acrobat Reader 9 installed to view some of the content at VMware Xtra.

VMware training labs at Global Knowledge

There's an awful lot of time, money, and effort goes into building and running a VMware training lab, and this article is going to give you an insight into how we do things at Global Knowledge.


All VMware Authorized Training Centers (VATCs) like Global Knowledge have the option of either renting training kits/racks/equipment from VMware (known as the VMWare VDC), or using their own training kit. A lot of smaller VATCs, and VMware themselves use the VMware VDC, but at Global Knowledge we see real benefits in hosting and running our own equipment. It gives us ownership coupled with responsbility for providing equipment capable of running the labs used across all courses, and due to the volume of VMware training we do, it gives a more cost-effective way of doing things.

Running your own labs is a complex challenge - VMware dictate a minimum set of equipment and specification for any VATC using their own kit, we have to host it, provide connectivity, build it for any particular course that we might be running, and maintain and support it when things don't quite go to plan. As well as being better for a larger VATC financially, it also gives that VATC the opportunity to build out a lab that exceeds the required specification, and also to provide all the associated documentation for both instructors and most importantly of all, our delegates - they are our customers after all, and the hands-on element of any course is very important.

The actual equipment used depends on which particular course is being run, we have a flexible configuration that enables us to be able to run any official VMware course on any of our lab kits. The graphic below shows the equipment that we use at Global Knowledge when running a vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage course:

I was directly responsible for designing and running the training labs at my previous employer, another UK VATC, and always received excellent comments from both external instructors and course delegates about the very high quality of our labs. I perform a similar role for Global Knowledge - although we have a dedicated lab team I am heavily involved in the design of the labs, and producing the all-important supporting documentation. We pride ourselves at Global Knowledge on having equipment which is above the required specification, is reliable, has the backing of a lab support team, and our supporting documentation is second to none in the UK market.

vSphere course suitability for VCP4 exam

If you're a regular reader of my blog, or you just have an interest in the VCP4 certification from VMware, you will be aware that attending at least one official training course on vSphere is part of the process an individual needs to follow to gain VCP4.

As outlined an another post here recently, there are a number of qualifying courses, and the course an individual could attend depends on past course completion or certification on previous versions of the software.

Something else I'm often asked by my students, and by current and prospective Global Knowledge UK customers, is "So which course matches the exam the best?" - so I've decided to give you my view on the suitability of each of the qualifying courses in terms of how closely their content matches the topics that get tested on in the exam.

vSphere 4: What’s New is only suitable for those that have knowledge of VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) to VCP3 level. It offers a broad grounding in many of the new features of vSphere 4, and is geared towards updating an individual’s skills and knowledge rather than preparing them specifically for the VCP4 exam.

vSphere 4: Install Configure Manage course is suitable for all individuals, and the course content is a close match to the topics covered in the exam - it should be noted that the VCP4 exam does cover some topics that are not covered in the course.

vSphere 4: Fast Track covers all of the Install Configure Manage content, so is equally beneficial to those wishing to get trained on the topic areas covered in the VCP4 exam. This course also covers some additional command-line material and labs which do not form part of the exam objectives.

vSphere 4: Troubleshooting also qualifies for the VCP4 certification, but bears no relation to the exam content. VMware accept this course as qualification for those that already have an enormous amount of experience with VI3 and vSphere 4 where the other courses above would not be suitable.

Note that in all cases, I would advise that plenty of additional study is necessary in order to be fully prepared for the VCP4 exam. Take a look at my VCP Study and VCP Exam Preparation Workshop pages for the resources I would recommend.

November 10th 2010:
Updated post to reflect the new 5-day vSphere: Install Configure Manage course, and to advise on additional study.

vSphere Curriculum - Feb 2010

Regular readers will be aware that I always announce new VMware training courses as and when I'm allowed to, I have access to the education and certification roadmaps so I always have advance notification of what's coming and roughly when, but as I'm a good boy I only post what VMware tell me I can! I can say that this is going to be a busy year for me, lots of new courses to master and deliver, and some new certifications too...

I created a graphic recently for my Think Virtually site that show's the vSphere curriculum that's either currently available, or will be in the next few weeks. It also gives people the opportunity to map out their own training path, and to show how the follow-on courses fit together:

We've got even more new courses coming in the next few months, for example a Security course for vSphere, and another on Automation - and it goes without saying that I will be announcing more details on those when I can, along with the various new certification paths. Watch this space....

ESX v ESXi

Many of you will be aware that in terms of enterprise-level virtualization software from VMware, we currently have the set of products titled "vSphere 4", the foundation building block of which is ESX 4 and ESXi 4.

ESX dates back to 2001 when it was first launched as a 1.0 product, before it became part of VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and now vSphere 4. ESXi didn't arrive until 2007, as a 3.5 version, and was initially only available as "ESX Embedded" inside servers made by the likes of HP and Dell. It didn't take long for VMware to also offer this new embedded hypervisor as an installable product, and at the same time it was renamed to become ESXi.

So these days, customers have the option of installing and using either ESX or ESXi, or even a combination of the two, and as such a question I'm asked all the time by customers is "Which one should we use?" Before you read on, if you're wondering what the actual differences between them are, click here.

My answer back in 2007 was always that ESX was generally the better choice as ESXi was more difficult to manage and troubleshoot, it's integration with 3rd-party products was poor, but looking back that's because ESX was familiar to me and the wider market, and ESXi was new and different and 3rd-party vendors had yet to release products that could interface with ESXi.

Since then, there have been huge numbers of blog articles and whitepapers on ESXi management and troubleshooting, and the major 3rd-party vendors now have similar or identical support for both ESX and ESXi, as such when I am asked the same question today my response is quite different.

To me, the key factor these days is whether I depend on the Service Console in ESX, or whether I have a script or 3rd-party product that does. If I was deploying vSphere today, in most cases I'd use ESXi over ESX, in spite of ESXi still not being quite the same beast to handle as ESX.

So why has my answer changed? It's not just because of the positive and negative points raised above, it's more due to the rich set of programming interfaces and APIs that are common to both ESX and ESXi (particularly the vSphere CLI and vSphere PowerCLI), and the fact that VMware will be retiring ESX by the time we get to vSphere 5. Organizations that have established VI3/vSphere 4 as the basis for their virtualization layer will have to get used to life without the Service Console, so if you can get by without it today in terms of scripting/troubleshooting and 3rd-party product support then you are helping yourself in the longer term.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering why I created this post today, I just became aware of a new set of pages that appeared on VMware's website recently: ESX to ESXi Upgrade Center. Interesting reading....

It's all gone green!

I've just received my latest batch of instructor manuals from VMware, and they're green! They've been changed from the older blue covers to bring them in-line with the VMware web site and all the literature they produce in terms of course outlines.

Here's my new vSphere: Troubleshooting and View 4: Install Configure Manage manuals:

This would seem to be the way forward for official VMware courseware from now on.

Scott Drummonds behind new vSphere performance course

I've just discovered today that Scott Drummonds from the Performance Marketing team at VMware is the man to thank for the new vSphere: Manage for Performance course which is released shortly. Scott created a new post on his Pivot Point site referring to the course, I've been aware of the course for a while now - I posted this blog entry about it 2 weeks ago (the first time I was allowed to discuss it in public), and it's already listed on my Think Virtually web site (under Training > vSphere Courses) and on the Global Knowledge VMware page (code VSMP).

Scott says that he approached the Education Services team at VMware to design and develop this new course. His day job is around troubleshooting performance issues for VMware customers, and he also works with other members of his team in producing various performance benchmarks and analysis as found on the VMware VROOM! blog, and regularly presents at VMWorld and other events worldwide.

I was already looking forward to delivering this new course, I'm looking forward to it even more now I know that Scott is heavily involved along with other members in his team, I think it gives the course great credibility. I'm attending a VCI-only version of the course in early-March, ready for the full release of the course. Global Knowledge UK already have a number of scheduled dates for this course around the UK.

New course: vSphere: Skills for Operators

VMware are about to release the vSphere 4 version of the Skills for Operators course, the course outline has already been added to their Education pages and will be added shortly to the VMware page on the Global Knowledge UK site.

Like the equivalent VI3 course, this is a 2-day course which takes the day-to-day tasks from the fuller Install, Configure, Manage course to allow staff in IT Operations the ability to manage VMs on vSphere 4. On the course you'll learn how to create, deploy, modify, monitor and migrate VMs.

The course should be available from March 2010.

New vSphere Curriculum page added to Think Virtually

I've been working on a graphical representation of the current official vSphere curriculum, to try and show course pre-requisites and help people plan their vSphere training program.

I've added it as a page on my Think Virtually web site, here's the direct link.

I'll be keeping it up-to-date as further courses are released in the next few months.

I deliver all of the courses for Global Knowledge in the UK.

New vSphere scalability and performance courses

VMware have published details of two more vSphere training courses on their Education site.

VMware vSphere: Manage for Performance
This is an advanced 3-day instructor-led course that assumes students have vSphere skills and knowledge to VCP4 level prior to attendance. The course covers all aspects of performance in a virtualized environment, it covers the various performance optimization methods and techniques used within vSphere, along with providing you with the skills/knowledge required to identify and rectify performance problems in all resource areas. Like most VMware courses, it's a 50/50 split between lecture and labs. Here's the full course outline.

VMware vSphere: Manage Scalability
This is a 1-day course that follows-on from the standard Install Configure Manage course, it covers various different aspects of vSphere that are all related to scalability. The specific elements covered are Thin Provisioning, Host Profiles, Distributed Resource Scheduler with Distributed Power Management, vCenter Linked Mode as well as ESX scripted installations. This content also forms part of the Fast Track course. Here's the full course outline.