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!

Now, how do I get access to it as a partner? Also, I wonder what possibilities that lies in this with regards to alternative VCP requirements?

Christian Mohn

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. If people could pass the VCP 5 without exposure to and hands-on experience with vSphere 5, it would devalue the certification,” a VMware spokesperson wrote in an email.

While I do see why VMware has that stance, and why they try to keep the exam “real”, my problem is that there is no way for anyone to do the VCP certification without classroom training. I don´t mind that VMware has a training requirement, and I don´t mind that you have to pay for it. What I do have a problem with is that I´m required to sit a 5 day training class. Why not offer an online VCP-prep course that you can complete in your own pace, complete with a pre-exam test that you can use to validate your skill set? That way VMware can still require a minimum of training pre-exam, get paid for it, and students can do their training in their own pace and when they have available time for it. Seems like a win-win (bingo!) situation to me?

As far as I´ve heard the VCP5 exam focuses less on minimum and maximum configuration limits than the VCP4 which is a good thing, but at the same time I don´t think the Install, Configure and Manage course by itself is enough to pass the exam, so in essence VMware is already “devaluing” their own exam by requiring training that does not cover the entire curriculum.

The hands-on requirement is a good one, and I applaud it, the best way to ensure that would be to turn the VCP exam into a hands-on-lab environment where you get tasks to complete, instead of multiple choice questions.

Disclaimer: I have not yet tried to do the VCP 5 exam and I´m only commenting based on feedback provided by others who have.

As far as the time available for existing VCPs to upgrade from VCP4 to VCP5, I also believe the timeframe is too short, and to be completely honest I don´t really see why there should be a time limit at all? After all, if you have the VCP4, you pretty much know what you´re in for with regards to the VCP5. Why rush it, and have people attempt to upgrade before they are ready? Let people do this on their own, in their own schedule, I don´t see how VMware benefits from enforcing a timeframe at all. Unless the motivation is selling more training, of course.

Christian Mohn

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.

Christian Mohn

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.

Thankfully Will van Antwerpen had investigated the firmware upgrade to cloud edition a bit more than I had, and pointed me to the General NAS-Central Forums where I found a link to a great HowTo explaining the entire process: Upgrading Iomega ix2-200 to Cloud Edition.

As that article also mentions, I had to do the process twice to get it to kick in and un-brick my IX2-200 and get it running with the new Cloud Edition firmware.

After configuring the IX2 with security and setting up Time Machine on the Macbook Air, Time Machine seems to be running without problems.

<MrBurns>Excellent</MrBurns>

Christian Mohn

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. So, in order to mount a virtual floppy you need to create a new floppy image. Thankfully the vSphere Client can do this for you!

To use the vSphere Client to create a floppy image you can later mount in a VM, you need to edit a VM’s settings. Find the floppy drive, if the VM doesn’t have one add one, close the window and return to the VM settings once the floppy drive has been added, and select “Create new floppy image in datastore: “.

Click on the Browse button and browse to your preferred location for the floppy image. Name it, and click on Ok.

Click on Ok again to close the VM settings window and return to the vSphere Client.

There you go, an empty virtual floppy image that you can mount in a VM is now created.

To mount the image, find the floppy drive icon in the vSphere client and select the Connect to floppy image on a datastore option.

Browse to the location where you created the floppy image, and select it.

Now, the VM has an empty floppy that you’ll need to format before you can use it.

Follow Olav’s guide to encrypt the boot drive with Bitlocker, without the need for a TPM chip or USB device connected to the VM!

And yes, it works as you can see here:

So much for never needing a floppy disk again. Oh, and by the way, you can of course do this is VMware Workstation 8 as well.

Christian Mohn

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!

Christian Mohn

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 with Mike Laverick about the #VMTNSubscriptionMovement and one where Eric Sloof ambushed me with a camera while visiting Bergen.

Lots of exiting projects were started in 2011, including my PowerCLI based automation project for vessel installations, migrating from standalone ESX hosts to blade servers (HP c7000 + Virtual Connect/Flex10) in addition to the normal day to day operations and after 8 years at Seatrans AS, I handed in my papers, moving on to a new role for EDB ErgoGroup.

2011 vNinja.net Statistics

2011 was the first year this site existed, so I can’t really compare the traffic it has received with 2010, but based on the few months it existed in 2010 the traffic increase has been enormous.

2011 Facts

• Busiest Day: September 15th
• Busiest Month: September
• Top 5 articles:
• Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview in VMware Workstation 8
• VMware Workstation 8 — What’s new?
• Using USB Pass-through in vSphere 4.1
• VMware vSphere Lab: Virtual Edition — Part 1
• Installing and configuring VMware vCenter Operations
• Top Referrers: (not counting Search Engines/Twitter)
• Planet v12n
• VMware Communities
• ESX Virtualization
• About.me
• vm4.ru

And that’s it for 2011. Personally 2012 looks even more promising, and hopefully my exposure to more diverse environments should be reflected back on the site as I’m certain it will spur more posts and more interesting discussions. See you in 2012, I think we’re in for a cracker.

Christian Mohn

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. The end “product” is now in place for mass deployments for internal use.

The following video shows how the PXE based installation works, as well as a run through the now GUI based configuration tool aptly called Seatrans Hypervisor Installation Tool.

The video jumps a bit between two VMs, one running Windows Server 2008 R2, that runs the DHCP/PXE services and the PowerCLI script, and one that gets ESXi installed and configured:

This goes to show that you can create your own, specialized and portable deployment solution without requiring elaborate network configurations or reconfiguring of existing infrastructure.

Note: I will not be providing downloadable versions of the final script at this time. The reason for this is quite simple, it’s very specific and tailored for a non-generic environment. If I can manage to find the time, I’ll post a generic version later but in order for anyone else to utilize the PowerCLI scripts I’ve created, a lot of work is required.

Christian Mohn

While using ThinApp to create a standalone version of TweetDeck 0.38.2, since the newly announced 1.0 version looks, acts and feels like a 0.1 version, I posed the following question on Twitter:

“Hrm, what other apps should i #ThinApp while I’m at it?”.

Kevin Kelling immediately responded with “Doom”.

Naturally, I decided to give it a go. A quick download of ZDoom later, and a quick run through the ThinApp Setup Capture later, the following was born (view in full screen for better viewing):

Thus, DaaS (Doom as a Service) is born as a concept.

Christian Mohn

As the title says, it’s been one of my more “public” weeks ever. Besides my “normal” vSoup engagement, this week I’ve also been involved with Mike Laverick’s VMTN Subscription Movement Miniwags to voice some of my views about the #VMTNSubscriptionMovement.

Fair warning: This is video, and please to remember that during recording Movember was nearing its final phase.
VMTN Subscription Movement Miniwags – Christian Mohn

Secondly, I was a guest on the Veeam Community Podcast Episode 45 – vSphere 5 Storage Potpourri.

Third, and last, SearchServerVirtualization posted VMware vSphere Storage Appliance: Devil’s in the details which also includes some commentary from yours truly regarding the VSA.

Christian Mohn