VCP5 Study Resources

Having passed the VCP5 exam last week, I thought I would write the obligatory study resources blog post. So below are the resources I found most useful in preparing for the exam:

1) TrainSignal VMware vSphere 5 Training

I’ve previously used the TrainSignal VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package to begin preparations for the VCAP-DCA exam so was well accustomed with the style of the TrainSignal videos. Since I was in the position of needing to upgrade my VCP from 4 to 5 before February 29th 2012 to avoid needing to fulfill a class requirement again, I found this to be a great resource to quickly get up to speed on some of the new features in vSphere 5 and also provide a refresher for some of the topics that have been in the exam since the VCP 3 days. The topics covered are listed below; the great thing about the modular style nature of these videos is that you can easily focus in on particular topics of interest and skip over others if you want to. I was tempted to skip a few of the chapters I thought I knew everything about, however I stuck with them and not only had a good refresher of those topics, but also picked up a few things I didn’t know.

Lesson 1 – Getting Started with VMware vSphere 5 Training Course
Lesson 2 – Lab Setup
Lesson 3 – Course Scenario
Lesson 4 – Overview of VMware vSphere 5
Lesson 5 – Installing VMware ESXi 5
Lesson 6 – Installing vCenter 5
Lesson 7 – Installing vCenter 5 as a Linux Appliance (vCSA)
Lesson 8 – Using the vSphere 5 Web Client
Lesson 9 – What’s New in vSphere 5
Lesson 10 – Navigating vSphere Using the vSphere Client
Lesson 11 – vCenter 5 – Configuring Your New Virtual Infrastructure
Lesson 12 – Creating and Modifying Virtual Guest Machines
Lesson 13 – Installing and Configuring VMware Tools
Lesson 14 – Understanding and Using Tasks, Events, and Alarms
Lesson 15 – Virtual Storage 101 and Storage Terminology
Lesson 16 – vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA)
Lesson 17 – Creating a Free iSCSI SAN with OpenFiler
Lesson 18 – Administering VMware ESXi Server Security
Lesson 19 – vSphere Virtual Networking
Lesson 20 – Using the vSphere Distributed Virtual Switch (dvswitch)
Lesson 21 – Moving Virtual Machines with vMotion
Lesson 22 – Moving Virtual Storage with svMotion
Lesson 23 – Performance Optimization with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
Lesson 24 – Implementing High Availability with VMware HA (VMHA)
Lesson 25 – Super High Availability with VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)
Lesson 26 – Upgrading from VMware vSphere 4 to vSphere 5
Lesson 27 – vSphere Command Line Interface (CLI) Options
Lesson 28 – vSphere Auto Deploy
Lesson 29 – Storage DRS
Lesson 30 – Policy-driven Storage
Lesson 31 – Understanding the New vSphere 5 vRAM Pooled Pricing
Lesson 32 – Network I/O Control (NIOC)
Lesson 33 – Storage I/O Control (SIOC)
Lesson 34 – ESXi Firewall
Lesson 35 – VMware Data Recovery (VDR) 2
Lesson 36 – Administering vSphere Using an iPad

Both David Davis and Elias Khnaser have excellent presenting styles, in their clear explanations and enthusiasm for the topic – which I am particularly grateful for having watched most of them on the early commute into work. While not directly aimed at the VCP exam, the videos provide a good breadth of coverage of most of the exam topics. As with the other series they are available online streamed from the website as soon as you make the purchase, but also shipped to you on a DVD in formats suitable for PC, iPhone iPad etc.

2) VCP5 Exam Blueprint

Reading the VCP5 Exam Blueprint document is essential to ensure that you have covered all of the bases. I worked through the document and ticked off each objective as I went. Most of my work is with the larger Enterprise deployments of vSphere, so this is a good way to ensure that you have not missed anything that might be more commonly used in say SMB deployments.

3) VCP5 Exam Blueprint Study Guide PDF

While working through the official blueprint document I discovered this Study Guide PDF which Jason Langer and Josh Coen have put together. They have put a lot of work into this document which typically contains a paragraph or two on each objective with highlight points and links to pages in vSphere documentation pdfs for further research. Given the limited time I had to prepare for the exam, this was great for quickly covering all of the objectives and I really appreciated the effort they had made in putting it together.

4) VCP 5 Brownbags

The Professional Vmware site is well known for running 1 hour brownbag sessions for VMware topics, including the VCAP exams. Recently they have started them for VCP5 too and although currently there are only a few, they are well worth checking out.

5)  vSphere 5.o Clustering DeepDive

I bought this book by Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping when it came out last year because I wanted know about new vSphere 5 features, however it is also worth reading as preparation for this exam. While the book goes into far more technical depth than required for the VCP, it was still useful for an early appreciation of these topics.

6) Practice Questions

It’s good to at least get a feel of the kind of questions you will be asked in the exam. Both the VMware VCP site with a mock exam and Simon Long’s blog are a great resource for this.

7) Hands-on experience with real world vSphere experience

Most important of all was hands-on experience of vSphere. There were many questions I knew the answer to that were not through the result of self-study, but either I had configured them at work or experienced the issue and had resolved it. You can emulate a fair amount of this if you have access to say a home-lab, but you can’t beat experience and unfortunately there is only one way to get that.

I was pleased to see that the exam was heading more in this direction. When I took the VCP 3.5 in 2008 the Minimum and Maximums document was a core part of my study process, in fact I took the exam while my family were away for a few days, so my house resembled something out of Prison Break with different pages of the Min / Max guide on the walls! I didn’t do that this time and while a good knowledge of the fundamental minimum and maximums is still required on the blueprint, the days of having to memorise every single one in the guide just to pass the exam appear to be over which is a good thing.

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Basic VMware Cluster Capacity Check with PowerCLI

I recently needed to provide a high level capacity overview per VMware cluster looking at some metrics of interest that were being used as a guide to the capacity state of a cluster. Note: these are by no means definitive or the ones you should be using in your environment, but for these purposes they met the requirements. The metrics I looked at per cluster were the ratio of vCPUs to pCPUs, the amount of Effective, Allocated and average Active Memory and the amount of Free Diskspace.

A couple of things to note:

1.The section below on datastore freespace filters out the local datastore which contains the name of the host.

$VMHost = $Cluster | Get-VMHost | Select-Object -Last 1
$HostName = ($VMHost.name -split ".", 0, "simplematch")[0]
$ClusterFreeDiskspaceGB = ($VMHost | Get-Datastore | Where-Object {$_.Name -notmatch $HostName} | Measure-Object -Property FreeSpaceGB -Sum).Sum

2. I’ve recently changed the way I create custom objects to output reports with. For a long time I have used the cheat way of Select-Object , partly because of performance and partly because you can’t control the order of properties in New-Object. These are being addressed in PowerShell v3 (see here and here) so I thought it was about time to make the switch. This means for the time being that when working with the output you need to pipe it to Select-Object to control the order of the output, e.g.

Get-Cluster | Get-ClusterCapacityCheck | Select-Object Cluster,ClusterCPUCores,ClusterAllocatedvCPUs,ClustervCPUpCPURatio,ClusterEffectiveMemoryGB,

ClusterAllocatedMemoryGB,ClusterActiveMemoryPercentage,ClusterFreeDiskspaceGB

function Get-ClusterCapacityCheck {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
Retrieves basic capacity info for VMware clusters

.DESCRIPTION
Retrieves basic capacity info for VMware clusters

.PARAMETER  ClusterName
Name of the computer to test the services for

.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> Get-ClusterCapacityCheck -ClusterName Cluster01

.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> Get-Cluster | Get-ClusterCapacityCheck

.NOTES
Author: Jonathan Medd
Date: 18/01/2012
#>

[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Name of the cluster to test",
ValueFromPipeline=$True,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[System.String]
$ClusterName
)

begin {
$Finish = (Get-Date -Hour 0 -Minute 0 -Second 0)
$Start = $Finish.AddDays(-1).AddSeconds(1)

New-VIProperty -Name FreeSpaceGB -ObjectType Datastore -Value {
param($ds)
[Math]::Round($ds.FreeSpaceMb/1KB,0)
} -Force

}

process {

$Cluster = Get-Cluster $ClusterName

$ClusterCPUCores = $Cluster.ExtensionData.Summary.NumCpuCores
$ClusterEffectiveMemoryGB = [math]::round(($Cluster.ExtensionData.Summary.EffectiveMemory / 1KB),0)

$ClusterVMs = $Cluster | Get-VM

$ClusterAllocatedvCPUs = ($ClusterVMs | Measure-Object -Property NumCPu -Sum).Sum
$ClusterAllocatedMemoryGB = [math]::round(($ClusterVMs | Measure-Object -Property MemoryMB -Sum).Sum / 1KB)

$ClustervCPUpCPURatio = [math]::round($ClusterAllocatedvCPUs / $ClusterCPUCores,2)
$ClusterActiveMemoryPercentage = [math]::round(($Cluster | Get-Stat -Stat mem.usage.average -Start $Start -Finish $Finish | Measure-Object -Property Value -Average).Average,0)

$VMHost = $Cluster | Get-VMHost | Select-Object -Last 1
$ClusterFreeDiskspaceGB = ($VMHost | Get-Datastore | Where-Object {$_.Extensiondata.Summary.MultipleHostAccess -eq $True} | Measure-Object -Property FreeSpaceGB -Sum).Sum

New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
Cluster = $Cluster.Name
ClusterCPUCores = $ClusterCPUCores
ClusterAllocatedvCPUs = $ClusterAllocatedvCPUs
ClustervCPUpCPURatio = $ClustervCPUpCPURatio
ClusterEffectiveMemoryGB = $ClusterEffectiveMemoryGB
ClusterAllocatedMemoryGB = $ClusterAllocatedMemoryGB
ClusterActiveMemoryPercentage = $ClusterActiveMemoryPercentage
ClusterFreeDiskspaceGB = $ClusterFreeDiskspaceGB
}
}
}

Configuring HP EVA Recommended Settings for ESXi via PowerCLI

The HP Enterprise Virtual Array Family with VMware vSphere 4.0 , 4.1 AND 5.0 Configuration Best Practises Guide, available here, contains many recommendations for ESXi configuration. There are a number of recommended settings in this document to enhance the storage performance, a subset of which I have picked as appropriate for the environment and then needed to configure them on all ESXi hosts.

They can be implemented via PowerCLI and the below script demonstrates how these different types of settings can be configured. The most interesting one for me was setting the default Path Selection Policy to VMW_PSP_RR. The guide recommends you use the following command from the ESXi console:

esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp -satp VMW_SATP_ALUA -psp VMW_PSP_RR

With the introduction of the Get-ESXCLI cmdlet we can now carry out the equivalent from PowerCLI. Get-EsxCLI requires a direct connection to the ESXi host rather than from vCenter, so all the settings in this script are configured via a direct connection to the ESXi host

Warning: Before carrying out any of these types of changes make sure you talk to your Storage Adminstrator to confirm what is appropriate for your own environment. Other array vendors offer different recommendations so be sure to check their documentation for similar settings.

<#
.SYNOPSIS
Implement HP Recommended Settings for EVA SAN

.DESCRIPTION
Implement HP Recommended Settings for EVA SAN

.PARAMETER  HostName
Name of the ESXi host to configure the settings on

.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> ./Set-HPEVAESXiConfig.ps1 -Hostname ESX01

.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> Get-Content ESXServers.txt | ./Set-HPEVAESXiConfig.ps1

.NOTES
Author: Jonathan Medd
Date: 21/12/2011
#>

[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage="Name of the ESXi host to configure the settings on",
ValueFromPipeline=$True,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$True)]
[Alias('IPAddress','Server','ComputerName')]
[System.String]
$HostName
)

begin {

Write-Host "Please enter credentials to connect to the ESXi hosts" -ForegroundColor:Yellow
$Credential = Get-Credential
$UserName = $Credential.GetNetworkCredential().UserName
$Password = $Credential.GetNetworkCredential().Password
}

process {

Connect-VIServer $Hostname -User $Username -Password $Password | Out-Null

Write-Host "Setting Disk.DiskMaxIOSize Advanced Option"
Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -VMHost $Hostname -Name Disk.DiskMaxIOSize -Value 128 | Out-Null

Write-Host "Changing any LUNs with MultipathPolicy set to MostRecentlyUsed to be RoundRobin instead"
Get-ScsiLun -VmHost $Hostname -LunType "disk" | Where-Object {$_.MultipathPolicy –eq "MostRecentlyUsed"} | Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy "RoundRobin" | Out-Null

Write-Host "Setting the default PSP to be VMW_PSP_RR"
$esxCli = Get-EsxCli –Server $Hostname
$esxCli.nmp.satp.setdefaultpsp("VMW_PSP_RR", "VMW_SATP_ALUA")

Write-Host "Disconnecting from Host"
$DefaultVIServer | Disconnect-VIServer -Confirm:$false
}

London VMUG – 26th January 2012

The next London VMUG will take place on 26th January 2012. The agenda is below and as usual there is a fantastic line up of well known members of the community to give you some knowledge from their real world experiences. I’m planning to attend so hope to see you there

UK VMUG Nov 2011 Review

A few weeks ago I attended the first ever UK based VMUG at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. Put together by the same folks who arrange the London VMUG events, it was a great day out and obviously a lot of hard work had been put in by Jane, Alaric, Simon , Stuart and Martyn. I know they had put the best part of 6 months into arranging it, so a lot of effort. By staging the event in the Midlands and involving other VMUGs from the UK, including the North of England, Scotland and Ireland there were over 300 attendees.

I travelled up the night before and just about made it in time for a pre-show vCurry being held at the Museum. This gave a good chance to catch up with various tweeps, since I figured (and I think it panned out) that people wouldn’t hang around too long after the main event the next day, like they normally do at the London VUMG, with longer journeys home.

There were also more sponsors than the London events and with involvement from the Official VMUG organisation there was even a posh looking programme to accompany the day’s events. How things have come one since I attended my first London VMUG about 3 years ago!

The event centered around the main area below with the keynotes from the stage at the front and vendors around the outside. This was accompanied by breakout sessions in rooms off to the sides. The only downside of the day was the lack of WIFI or 3G access since we were a couple of floors down, but thanks to the distribution of some BT OpenZone cards it was possible to stay reasonably well connected.

I had volunteered to assist Alan Renouf with a PowerCLI lab he had put together, which took place at the back of the main room.

We turned this into a drop by area for questions about PowerCLI and PowerShell as well. While the lab proved pretty popular, the best part was taking people’s questions and showing them how PowerCLI and PowerShell might help them out in their jobs. It was quite surprising to find that there were many questions such as ‘What are they?’, ‘What can I do with them?’ and ‘How much do they cost?’ – and a lot assuming I was a VMware employee! A lot of these conversations spurned off into Alan sitting them down, demonstrating some coding and often writing a script for them to take away.

I managed to get away to a couple of the sessions and in particular enjoyed Julian Wood’s session on upgrading to vSphere 5, which was really well attended. One of the other most intriguing parts of the day was a mock VCDX panel organised by Simon Gallager. This was an opportunity for people to practise defending a vSphere design (with a lot of onlookers for extra pressure!). You’ll notice that Duncan Epping was helping with this so the volunteers were grilled, but also received excellent feedback. The PowerCLI drop by area was positioned right next to this while it was going on and I know a number of people found the experience really useful when I talked to them as they walked away from it.

I really enjoyed the day as a Community Booth Babe and now know how draining it is being on a stand all day (you can probably tell from my dishevelled look below!). The best thing for me was answering people’s PowerCLI and PowerShell questions, really kept me on my toes. The highlight being one guy who was driving into work every Saturday, carrying out a few tasks inside a VM, powering it off, taking a clone, powering it back on and then driving home – I showed  him how he could schedule this with a script and get his Saturday back

Hopefully the team will arrange another UK centered VMUG next year after the success of this one. In the meantime, details have just been published of the next London VMUG on January 26th. I highly recommend you attend this.

To round things off I made my way home in very ecological style with a lift from an ex-colleague and and his awesome company vehicle

TrainSignal VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package – Review

I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of TrainSignal’s VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package and here are my thoughts on the experience. I’m disclosing the fact upfront that it was a review copy and I hope you will trust that my opinons are genuine.

I had previously used TrainSignal’s Exchange 2010 package to quickly get up to speed on a project I was working on at the time which had proven to be a great resource. My thoughts have recently turned to pursuing the VMware VCAP certification programme since I think this will soon prove to be a useful factor, amongst other items, to distinguish yourself from other virtualisation professionals in the market place and also would be a great learning exercise. I’ve decided to wait for version 5 of the VCAP programme, but in them meantime thought that putting in some groundwork with material available for version 4 would be a good start.

The TrainSignal VCAP package is made up of four individual courses:

• vSphere Troubleshooting
• vSphere Performance Monitoring
• vSphere Security Design
• vSphere PowerCLI

all of which can be obtained individually, but have been bundled up into this package. As with their other training courses, the product ships as a set of DVDs, but also contains formats for watching on your media device, e.g. iPad, AND online access to stream via a web browser. I had access to the online version for this review and have so far successfully managed to stream the entire Troubleshooting and Performance courses plus a third of the Security Design course while commuting on the train. So a thumbs up to my 3 Mifi connection and TrainSignal’s web hosting! (The occasional interruption and restart though would mean that the full package with the iPad versions would have made things a fair bit easier)

David Davis provides the content for the Troubleshooting and Performance Monitoring courses and his enthusiastic start to each module “Hello and welcome to TrainSignal!” really helps things get started (especially when I begin watching most of these at 6.30am on the train). I learnt an absolute ton of information while watching these two courses and it has really helped me not only study for the exam, but improve as a virtualisation professional. The videos are a mix of slides and demonstrations and a great way to get into the topics. I can highly recommend then following up with the published course notes and working on them in your test / home lab environment. There are many modules in each course and plenty of real world examples to stop things from getting dry.

I’ve recently started the Security Design course, initally presented by Jason Nash, and am finding this one equally useful so far. I wasn’t quite sure what this course would have in store for me, but there is plenty of technical content to go alongside learning about security design principles for virtual environments. For instance I have just finished the module with an indepth look at vNetworking, in particular the VDS and the Cisco Nexus 1000V which contains not only the reasons why you might use each one, but also how to configure them.

I have no doubt that the PowerCLI course with Hal Rottenberg will be equally as good, but as that is probably my strongest area with vSphere, I’m leaving that one till the end of the four to view.

Having previously completed a lot of self study from IT books, I now first of all look at the TrainSignal series instead if I need to learn a new topic and going on an instructor based course is not practical. Reviewing this VCAP series has really firmed up that opinion for me and I look forward to a package for v5 shipping whenever those exams become available.

I’m confident that any or all of these courses would make a great Christmas gift for the virtualisation geek that you know and love

What’s New In PowerCLI 5.0 – Slides from UK PowerShell UserGroup

As promised, here are my slides from this evening’s UK PowerShell UserGroup – What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0.

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What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0 – UK PowerShell User Group 22nd November

A quick post to let you know that I shall be presenting for an online meeting of the UK PowerShell User Group on the topic of ‘What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0′ at 21.00 GMT on Tuesday November 22nd.

Details on how to join in are available from Richard Siddaway’s website.

Hope you can join us.

VMworld Europe 2011 Wrap Up And Why You Should Attend Next Time

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend VMworld Europe 2011 in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, so here’s a wrap up post of my experiences there. I wasn’t sure until pretty much the last minute whether I would be able to go or not since my change in employment status was happening around the same time. Thankfully it worked out and my new employer allowed a few days off early in the contract to be able to attend the event.

Consequently I wasn’t as well planned for the event as I had been last year and my session choices were pretty much last minute, rather than planned well in advance . The event officially runs Tuesday – Thursday (unless you attend the partner event on the Monday), however last year the labs opened on the Monday afternoon. I had planned this time to get out there in time to take advantage of this, but unfortunately work commitments prevented this. Given the amount of other content to get through in the rest of the week, I can highly recommend arriving in time to take advantage of this additional lab time and I would certainly plan to do that myself next time. Working through a few labs on the Monday, particularly when it is quieter than the rest of the week, would see you well ahead.

So instead I arrived at the Bella Center very early on Tuesday morning to avoid the registration queues and started to have a wander around. The first thing I stumbled across was the PowerCLI book that I helped to co-author, up in lights in a prominent position in the book store. This was a nice surprise as I had not expected that.

Then it was straight into some sessions. It did feel slightly odd to start off in sessions before the main keynote kickoff, but I think many conferences work like that now. My good friends Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens had one of the first sessions of the conference, so I went along to support them. I didn’t really need to though since the session was easily full up – Managing VMware ESXi with VMware vSphere PowerCLI was a very popular session.

We were also treated to another visit from PowerCLIMan and were able to quash the rumours of those who think it is Alan Renouf behind the mask.

PowerCLI-Man “The Return” from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.

I then went exploring and admittedly it did take me a while to get my bearings since VMware had taken more of the venue this year and moved a lot of things around. Similar to when you go to the supermarket and without thinking wander to the aisle where you expect to find an item only to find what you are looking for is not there! (I think this is what happens when you start to get old!)

One addition I did really like was a massive screen showing tweets and updates from the event in the main hall. The first time I walked past it I noticed some tweets from community people I know and it was quite fun to enjoy their (and others) tweets appear up there.

In particular, well done to Gregg Robertson for getting his ‘Steps are the VMworld band’ tweets up there!

Also appearing on the big screen were VMworld TV, so it was quite cool to just hang out there sometimes and watch it. Low and behold while I did so I saw a couple of dodgy looking characters appear!

Tuesday afternoon saw the first keynote. Armed with my Blogger button fixed to my entry pass, myself and a number of other familiar faces from the London VMUG were ushered into the press section at the front. It was pretty empty at the time, so the prospect of filling up the empty seats with this motley rabble probably seemed like a good idea!

So we had a pretty good view down at the front. The theme of the whole conference was ‘Your Cloud, Own it’ ….aka Your Cloud, You’re Worth It, and this obviously was being pushed at the keynote.

At VMworld Europe 2010 there were around 6000 attendees, we were informed early on in the keynote that this year had broken through the 7000 mark. I think that’s pretty impressive and definitely the reason why they had taken the extra space at the Bella Center, because it did seem a little cramped last year.

The main part of this keynote was delivered by Dr Herrod and while it was mostly a repeat of the Las Vegas event keynote, I still found it quite interesting to see how VMware are positioning themselves as more than just a virtualisation vendor.

A big part of this is Horizon. This encompasses a number of projects, but the main theme seems to be giving users access to their applications wherever they are, on whatever device and using them in a smarter way.

I’ve heard a fair bit about Horizon Mobile, but it now seems like a release is not too far away and it looks like quite a product. Initially for Android devices, you would be able to take your personal phone into the office and your firm give you an image of their corporate device to run independently on your own phone. This could mean an alternative to attempting to merge work apps onto your own phone, or what I have always done and carry two phones around.

With that over we headed over to the place to be, the Veeam party where Ricky El-Qasem seemed to be enjoying himself far too much as a doorman!

On the Wednesday I spent a lot of time in the labs, unfortunately missing a couple of sessions, but wanting to get through some having missed out on the Monday. Generally, I did not have to queue, but on the occasions I did, typically it was only a short wait. A handy electronic board displays your place in the queue.

The labs themselves are a great opportunity to spend some time working through topics that maybe you don’t normally have the time or access to work on. There were around 250 seats and I think 25 – 26 labs to pick from. The most useful one I found was the SRM lab. Not a product I’ve had an opportunity to work on before, but excellent to get hands-on experience with.

The shear scale of the labs at VMworld is quite staggering. I didn’t catch the final figures, but they were projecting around 8000 labs taken. When you consider that each lab will be made up of multiple VMs and there could be up to 250 being run simultaneously, it’s pretty impressive. A big screen in front of you showed live stats on these labs.

The labs ran out of three datacenters, one in Europe and two in the US, and provide a great showcase for VMware to demonstrate how to run applications in the Cloud using their own products.

Speaking of labs, possibly the best session I went to during the conference was with Clair Roberts, VMworld Labs User Automation and Workflow Architecture. Clair is one of the main brains behind the design and running of the labs and gave some great stories from behind the scenes. This included the story of how they performed quite poorly on the first day in the US last year because of small mistake in his code, the challenges he had in resolving that and how they had moved on since last year. He also told of how a couple of years ago a fork lift had driven into a rack of kit when the labs were hosted on the VMworld site and gave them some real issues!

A big change this year was the pre-provisioning of labs, i.e. they looked at patterns of lab use and tried to predict future demand so that when you sit down and pick a lab there is already one spun up for you.

He also gave us a quick live view of vCenter running the lab. I captured some of this below, which unfortunately did not quite come out as well as I hoped, but the demands on vCenter are pretty heavy to say the least. The number of tasks appearing in the Recent Tasks view in vCenter was literally streaming down the screen like something from the Matrix.

During the entire event I spent a lot of time in the Bloggers Lounge. This is an area set up by John Troyer and co, and provides those from the community an area to chill out, meet other bloggers and an opportunity to write some blog posts. As you will see below, there was also a mini-recording studio where a number of recordings were made both officially and community related. Below are the vSoup guys Chris Dearden and Ed Czerwin interviewing Ed Grigson , so a great opportunity for anybody to record a podcast or get involved with one. This was one of the best places to spend time during the conference as you get to meet other members of the community who you may only have engaged with online previously.

If you haven’t attended VMworld before and either work with or have an interest in virtualisation then I highly recommend you got to either the US or Europe VMworld next year. If you do make plans to go then I also recommend that between now and then you engage with the community, either through the forums, blogs or on Twitter so that by the time you get to the conference there will be people to meet up with. Here’s my top five reasons on why you should go in 2012:

• Brilliant opportunity to network with peers from the community
• The hands on labs are a fantastic learning opportunity with a wide variety of topics to choose from
• A large selection of sessions on all kinds of topics to attend
• The opportunity to meet 1-1 with a product expert and grill them with any questions you have
• It’s in San Francisco for the US or Barcelona for Europe – both very cool places!

I’ll leave you with a summary video from VMworld TV – VMworld Europe Wrap . Check it out at 3.05 where I make a very brief appearance, blink and you’ll miss it. As usual, I was too busy tweeting to be doing any real work!

I’ll leave it to a few London VMUGers to round it off with their own unique take on Denmark.

PowerCLI Drop In Area at the UK National VMUG November 3rd

There are a lot of great reasons to sign up for the UK National VMUG on November 3rd 2011, full details are below.

One reason to highlight is that during the day, Alan Renouf and I will be staffing the PowerCLI Drop In Area. We’re currently finalising the details, but this will likely consist of pre-prepared PowerCLI lab content for you to work through and also an opportunity to ask PowerCLI or PowerShell questions. We’ll be there throughout the day so there should be plenty of time for us to help you out with them.

Sign up here

Look forward to seeing you there

——————————————————————————————————————————————————-

This event will feature:

• Wednesday night pre-event networking reception beginning at 7:00 p.m. at National Motorcycle Museum – hosted by Veeam Software
• Keynote with Joe Baguley – VMware Chief Cloud Technologist
• Exhibitor area with:
  • VMware partners
  • PowerCLI Drop In Area
  • Expert Bar

Meeting Agenda