The Road to the VCP5-DCV

Hello Everyone!

I am currently on my study path to gain the VCP5-DCV credential. I thought I would finally take the time to document one of my certification processes on Tech Exams as the forum has always been of great help to me. Its definitely time I gave back.

I have approximately 5 years of experience in the IT world. I currently hold active certifications from Brocade, Cisco, CompTIA, CWNP, Juniper, Mikrotik, and Rackspace. I have recently moved into a position that relies heavily on a vCenter environment. Thus, it is time that I stand up some VMware knowledge!

I have been going through the VCA series and have the VCA-DV.

I began day 1 of the VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage Classroom course today.

More to follow after the end of day 1!

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Comments

googol

Good luck and I definitely recommend the Mastering vSphere book if you do not have it already.

Essendon

You'll do just fine, use the Mastering book like googol said and put in a lot of lab time. Good luck!

Corndork2

Well the first day is done. The first day was relatively simple. ESXi installation, vCenter installation, Active Directory joins, etc. Really just the basic server setup. I have a lab at home so this part wasn't too bad as most of it I had done before.

Day 2 is all Virtual Networking and SAN Technologies! This should be fun!

Corndork2

Just bought Mastering vSphere 5, and The Official VCP5 Certification Guide from Amazon.com. Paid about 80.00 overall through Amazon Prime.

Corndork2

It just hit me that I should put in some info on my Lab Environment at home.

I do the majority of my labbing on:

2x Dell 2950 (2x 3.0 Ghz Quad Core Xeon, 32GB RAM, Intel Quad Gigabit NIC's, 4GB Fibrechannel HBA, and 6x 300GB 15K SAS Drives) One running ESXi 5.1, the other running ESXi 5.5
1x Dell 1950 (2x 3.0Ghz Dual Core Xeon, 16GB RAM, Intel Quad Gigabit NIC, 4GB Fibrechannel HBA, 4x 146GB 10k SAS) running Ubuntu 12.04LTS
1x Qlogic SAN 1400 Fibrechannel Switch (this needs replaced...bad)
1x Cisco 3560 Layer 3 Switch
1x Cisco 2811 Router
1x WTI RSM8-R4 Networked PDU and Console Server

I will hopefully be adding an EMC Clarion SAN in the near future.

tprice5

Digging the lab setup.

Have you noticed a spike in your energy bill?

Company paying for your course?

Corndork2

tprice5 wrote: »

Digging the lab setup.

Have you noticed a spike in your energy bill?

Company paying for your course?

My lab has actually gotten smaller. I used to have a lot of networking stuff in it when I was doing CCNA / JNCIA-JUNOS. I did have a 42U APC Rack at one time with a bunch of gear. I'll have to post pictures of it later.

My power bill hasn't risen much with the three servers in it. I upgraded all of the boxes to the latest firmware. After doing so I threw a watt meter on the outlet servicing my rack and nothing else. I'm pulling about 750-850 watts consistently. These servers also put out a considerable amount of heat. However, mine are in my basement, which is always cold, so the heat is welcome. In fact, I think one of the major reasons I haven't noticed it in my bill is because I don't run my space heater down there near as much

I recently moved to a new company. Im in the financial industry now working for an old friend of mine, whom I have worked for previously. He had about 10k in vouchers, gift certificates, and credits from Skyline training. So, myself and one other person split the credit. I am able to take the VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage Classroom, and my colleague is doing Avaya/Cisco voice stuff.

Corndork2

I thought Id post a few pictures of my various lab set ups. To start, here's a shot of my old routing and switching rack. It's mostly Cisco, with some Juniper

Lab-1.jpg

Lab-2.jpg

Corndork2

Almost finished with Day 2 of the class. Today was all Virtual Networking and Storage. Most of it was pretty familiar being as I am coming from a networking background. The Fibrechannel and LUN Lab was super helpful though.

We are finishing up the day with an introduction to VSA.

JeanM

I am curious about the 4GB Fibrechannel HBA config,can you provide more details on that?

And, talk about going full on overkill on your old cisco lab,that's CCIE material there lol!

Corndork2

JeanM wrote: »

I am curious about the 4GB Fibrechannel HBA config,can you provide more details on that?

And, talk about going full on overkill on your old cisco lab,that's CCIE material there lol!

Haha, my Cisco lab was a little extensive. I was working at a small service provider at the time that had 400+ sites, with 30+ switches on each. So, I had easy access to old hardware for free/cheap and needed the practice working on that scale.

My Fibrechannel HBA config is rediculously simple. Really I should add two more HBA's to each host for multipath and redundancy. The Fibrechannel setup is just the HBA's in the two hosts connected to either a Brocade 200E, Brocade 3250, or Qlogic SAN 1400. I have all three of those switches, and have been playing with which one to keep. I'm leaning to the 200E.

I will be adding a EMC Clarion CX Series SAN within the next month. So, right now I just have the Fibrechannel HBA's and switch. SAN soon to follow!

Crikey

You've got more equipment than some companies I've worked with.

Corndork2

Crikey wrote: »

You've got more equipment than some companies I've worked with.

Ive been fortunate enough to work with companies that allow me to acquire decomissioned equipment, or have brokered equipment recycling and resales deals for other companies through my personal consulting firm. I'd be broke if I had to buy everything on eBay.

Corndork2

Day 3 is going well. We are working primarly on vMotion today. The morning was spent on theory of vMotion, Enhanced vMotion, and Storage vMotion. I am in the middle of a lab on all three of those topics now.

While I wait for my lab partner to finish his vMotion port I thought I'd post a small cell phone camera shot of the VM lab servers. I'll do more documentation on the lab when I get home from the week of training.

VM-Lab.jpg

kj0

Excellent Thread. I"m glad you are enjoying each bit of the course. I thought about doing one of these 5 day courses a while ago, but I just didn't have the money to cover it. I'm fortunate enough to have made it into the summer Stanley course starting mid January.

I like your writing style.

Keep up the good work, and good luck.

Corndork2

Day 4. This morning has all been on Access Control. We just went over the modules in the VMware class guides on the subject, and are now adding access roles and custom roles to ESXi hosts. I am beginning the first lab on it now. In this lab we join the host to an Active Directory Domain, then search for applicable usernames as defined in the lab book and assign roles to them. We will then begin creating custom roles for these same users.

More to follow!

Corndork2

The Access Control Lab went very well. We first assigned basic roles to users and expiremented with them. We then created custom roles and tested the functionality of those roles. For example, we created a custom role that had privlidges to create VM's but could not delete them. So, one lab partner would create VM's while the other would delete them with an Admin level account.

Next up is Resource Pools and High Availibility / Fault Tolerance. I am super excited to get into these.

Corndork2

We just finished an excellent resource pool and monitoring lab.

In that lab we made a few VM's, made associated resource pools, and bound VM's to CPU affinity to cause contention. We then caused high CPU loads and adjusted priorities to see how VMware delegated resourced to virtual machines. This was crazy cool. These kinds of features are clearly why one would buy VMware instead of going with Hyper-V or KVM or any other lower cost option.

Up next is more monitoring. We're going to go through alarms, then undertake a similar lab

Essendon

I am all for VMware too, but this article might sway a few managers towards Hyper-v. VMware or Microsoft? Comparing vSphere 5.5 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V At-A-Glance - KeithMayer.com - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Corndork2

Essendon wrote: »

I am all for VMware too, but this article might sway a few managers towards Hyper-v. VMware or Microsoft? Comparing vSphere 5.5 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V At-A-Glance - KeithMayer.com - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

This is definitely interesting! Theres a MSFT guy at work that loves Hyper-V and App-V.

However, this wont stop me from VMware certification! My books are in, and I am back home from the training session. I also just scored another Dell 2950 host to add to the lab. Nice!

datacomboss

MS is and will always be a company of fluff and bulsh.