I’ll be working on getting a screen cast of the demo up in the next week or so. Too many other things distracting me at this moment.

I’m going to be doing a presentation in the coming days for the local linux user group (CIALUG) on Puppet from Puppet Labs.

Free pizza and some swag will be thrown around.

The event is 100% free and should hopefully get you acquainted with all the cool stuff you can automate. Signup for your free ticket!

But how do you track something like getting more sleep?

Here is where Mercury App comes in. I’ve been using this product for over a year now and have mainly been tracking things like my weight and job satisfaction. Adding to it Sleep time, not only how I feel about the sleep I got but actually tracking the number of hours should give me a good overall graph at the end of the year of how well I did in getting that 7+ average that I’m looking for.

So if you have a goal that you are working on the for the new year, start tracking your progress. You’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. Because the only one stopping you is YOU!

If you’re going to go to the time to make goals, you might as well make them public. So in the keeping with my tradition of past years, here are my 2012 Goals:

• I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a while now. Late nights programming or just messing around on the internet have been the norm for years for me. My average time to bed is 12-12:30. Not an issue if you can sleep until 8. But I get up at 6-6:30 if not earlier based on the little bosses schedule. My goal, move the bed time up an hour and get 7-8 hours of sleep per night. Goal #1: Sleep More!
• This goal has been around for a couple of years in various forms. But even as I work more to make my goals happen, I need to make sure that the time spent with my wife and child are still 100% committed. That time between 5-8 right now is worth more than any paycheck you can give me. Goal #2: Time for family is a huge one.
• A goal that I’m pretty disappointed that I didn’t complete last year is my code shipping goal. With the amount of work that was put in, I should have been able to get this one done. But other things kept coming up and many many delays happened. This year will be different, action plans are in place! Goal #3: Ship Code.
• Fitness of coarse had to make the list. Last year, I set out to run 3 5K races in the year. I accomplished this goal on July 4th and didn’t run another race after that. I still ran, but it wasn’t with the same drive. I could do a simple mile instead of 2-3 and that was ok. But I’d like to keep more drive there to keep me going. On each of my races, I dropped my time. I’m hoping to do the same with this years goal but it will be tough. This years goal is to keep up the running and racing and do 5 5K races in 2012. Goal #4: 5×5.
• Yes, I’m a huge believer in goals being public. But this last one is going to be kept under wraps for a while. National security is involved and I don’t want it to get messy for you my dear readers. Goal #5: Top Secret

So there you have it. My 2012 goals. Obviously, a lot of work needs to happen to make these become a reality. Some goals I’m sure will be tough to do, but that’s the point of these right.

Let’s get to work!

• Goal #1: Continue to work less. – SUCCESS! I consider this one more about family time than anything else. Family time has a high value to me and to be honest, I get pretty cranky when work interferes with that time. From 5-8 at night, I’m pretty much off limits unless its something involving my family. So while I’ve put in more hours on the side business this year at night and on weekends, the little boss gets my attention while he is awake. So I consider this one a success!
• Goal #2: Drink more water – FAIL. I’d like to blame this purely on my little on and the lack of sleep that I get, but in reality, he’s fallen into a nice pattern of sleep and this is really due to the side business keeping me up at night.
• Goal #3: Ship Code – FAIL. Sure I’ve written a lot of code this year and I have gotten several new web sites out the door. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to write and ship on of my iPhone app ideas. I’ve made a lot of progress on it, but haven’t gotten it out the door.
• Goal #4: Write a new blog article every week – SUCCESS! OK, maybe I should take partial credit on this one. The frequency hasn’t been exactly 1 post per week. But my average is there! As of this article, I have posted 56 articles in 2011. I’d like to have more posts but we’re making progress.
• Goal #5: Run in 3 5k races – SUCCESS. I destroyed this one accomplishing this goal by middle of the year. I want to have a fitness goal for 2012 again and it will probably be along these same lines, but I want to stretch it out and make it last the whole year long.

3 out of 5. 60%. This is not acceptable. Making progress from the 50% I hit in 2010, but we still have a long ways to go.

Puppetlabs has stepped up to offer sponsorship of the event so besides my insightful talk, there will be pizza and t-shirts that will be handed out while supplies last or whatever game we come up with to give them away. I have a whole box of them so hopefully many of you are sporting the latest in puppet wear before the night is through.

So put it in your calendar now to join me for Pizza and Puppet on January 18th at 7PM in the LightEdge corporate headquarters.

When I was brought in, it wasn’t powering up and throwing an error concerning a lock. So here is what I tried.

1. Remove the VM from inventory and re-add it. Based on past support calls with VMware, this trick seems to be a tried and true ‘do this first’ method of debugging a VM. I’m not going to go into great detail on why this might work, but needless to say, I’m dealing with a file system lock and re-adding it really does nothing for me here. In theory, it might remove the lock, but unfortunately method failed.
2. Snapshot shuffle. This is where you take a snapshot of the VM and then attempt to do a Delete All in the snapshot manager. The VM was acting as though it had a snapshot on the system and wasn’t letting it go. By doing a delete all, VMware will look for other snapshots and remove them if they are in the chain, even if they are not showing up in the snapshot manager. This method also failed.
3. vmkfstools for the win. I’m a unix admin so getting in the shell doesn’t bother me. For others, you might be a bit afraid by this. But I ssh’d into the host, found my VM directory and did a check on each of the VMDK files using vmkfstools. Each came back clean so then I moved onto the breaking of the lock file also with vmkfstools. The command technically stated that it didn’t complete successfully but I found that it did indeed work and I was able to power on the VM. Mission accomplished! Here is a run down of the commands used in this method:

   
To check a VMDK:
vmkfstools -x check virtualMachine.vmdk

   To remove a lock:
   vmkfstools -B virtualMachine.vmdk

   To list all vmkfstools options:
vmkfstools -h
-or-
man vmkfstools


Hopefully you don’t run into this issue anytime soon, but if you do, try a few of these methods and see where you end up. If all else fails, build a new VM and restore from backup. Or…call VMware support, they’re really good at this sort of thing.

The one big change for the Gala this year was the acceptance of credit cards. Luke had taken cash, check, and Dwolla in the years past though really, it was just check and cash. I was a bit disappointed, but not completely shocked, that no one used Dwolla, sorry guys. Adding credit this year was a huge step forward and I was quite pleased with the results.

First and foremost, if you’re not aware of what Square is, check out their web site and it will quickly become obvious. With a little reader, they turn your phone into a credit card scanning station. Slick!

The main difference between Square and your traditional credit card machine is in order to take credit cards, you need a merchant account and gateway service to send the secure transactions to have money moved into your account from the customers credit card issuing bank. These are fairly easy to setup but there are fees involved and they typically want you to charge a certain number of transactions. With Square, there is no commitment. They simply take a little more off the top in order to provide a convenience of being able to take credit cards as often or little as you need. Perfect for those farmers markets, concert merchandise stands, and Garage Galas.

So what’s the catch?

If I had to say anything about the service, it would be this. Swiping the cards the first couple of times takes some practice. And Square realizes this so if you have several misses in a row, they will pop up a tutorial to give you some tips and allow you to practice. This helped get us up and rolling and I think it also helps loosen up the scanner a bit so it works better.

After my practice session, I was rocking and rolling. Typically swipes were 1 or 2 swipes max. And if that fails, you can always type in the number.

Customer Experience

Most customers thought it was really cool that we could take credit cards this way. They were very happy with how slick it was. Enter the amount, swipe the card, have them sign the phone and either email a receipt or we had paper receipts with the various payments we were taking.

The one bad thing about this experience is that customers aren’t used to signing their name with their finger. One customer actually called it “creepy”. For next year, I think its worth purchasing one of the stylist that works with the iPhone and remove that from the equation.

Conclusion

The ease of taking the cards and the relatively low overhead costs make this a solid product. I’d recommend anyone that is a small business owner that doesn’t have a credit card system today to look into this product. Its ridiculously easy!

If you’d like to help support this blog, be sure to pick up the Square app by clicking on the button below.

Overall, I thought that the test was pretty fair. This test was rumored to test more on your real world experience with vSphere and it didn’t disappoint. I would say that the test was easier for me than the VCP4 test but I also have 2 more years of experience under my belt and had a chance to go to VMworld 2011 with some great sessions and labs that dug into the nitty gritty of 5.

I will fully admit that I’m not the greatest of test takers and these things stress me out way more than they should. But if you have your stuff down cold, you’ll be alright and I felt my preparation allowed me to walk in there fairly confident that I could pass the test without issue. With that, I thought I would offer up some tips that helped me prepare for the test without giving away actual questions.

1. Read the blue print I know this sounds crazy, reading what is exactly going to be on the test, but it does help you figure out what you need to study. VMware puts out a LOT of material and being able to focus on certain things (though it will still be a lot) will help you out. Once you have the blue print, start breaking it down. Grab the resources that VMware provides and start absorbing as much as possible. I found that if there is a note or a best practice in one of their guides. Think of a question of what happens if you configure XYZ and don’t follow the best practice. Because then you’re thinking along the lines of the test writers.
2. Books! If I had to recommend one book above and beyond all others, I think going with Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere 5 would be my hands down recommendation. Since I had some experience with vSphere, I didn’t read this book cover to cover. But I dug deep in all the new sections and I’m glad that I did. You can pick up the book at Amazon by clicking the book image.
   
3. Lab Something I think is widely known is that the VCP5 test is much more geared on real world experience. And this doesn’t come easy. There are a lot of things that you may do in your day to day VMware admin job that will never be on the test. And there are things that you may have done months or even years ago that you have forgotten about that are suddenly re-appearing on the test. Questions along the lines of screens that you look at day in and day out that you never give a second thought to. All of a sudden, you have to name the parts of that screen to show that you know your stuff. Not that easy when you don’t care to really memorize everything on that particular screen. My recommendation is to lab stuff up and play with all the stuff that you may not play with. Play with the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance, play with the vSphere Storage Appliance, HA, DRS, FT. If its on the blue print, you should have it in your lab at some point in your preparation.
4. Cram Sheets There are many resources out there on the web. One that I found useful was Cosonok’s Cram Sheets (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) Now, I don’t think that his cram sheet was 100% correct, but it did help review things before the test and for those quick 5 minutes of reviewing material. Part 1 is the general overview of everything you would need to know about vSphere, Part 2 is made up of the configuration maximums, and part 3 is more of a summary of how it went for him and some more resources.
5. Sleep I studied pretty hard for the test over my Thanksgiving break. I know, great timing right? One thing I made sure to do on my last night of studying was to get a good nights sleep. Either you know your stuff at that point or you don’t. Get a good nights sleep and tackle the test like the badass you are!

So there you you have it. This is what I did to prepare and pass the VCP-510 exam.

Good luck!