Archive for January, 2009

Hi,

As a fellow VCP I felt an opinion on Point 6 on this blogpost was needed… http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro , hey my blog views are down this month so I might get away with slagging it off (although I wont be going that far).

I took my Install & Configure VCP course after doing what I enjoy with new technology, learning the product in my own time and learning how it works at my own pace with a VMTN Subscription (god i remember the first P2V and how amazed I was it worked!). When reviewing the Exam track the first thought on the exam having the prerequisite to attend the course was that it was a rip off but then after that split second I felt like I was about to become part of an Elite band.

The fact is that forcing people to actually go to a training school and attend the course before taking the exam will ensure that a better breed of clued up students attending is created to then ensure technical end design and architecture is defined by what is learnt. For someone like VMware this is of paramount, it can’t rely on people learning ESX out of a book and then going into an exam centre to qualify and put it on there CV and then go and start designing Virtual Infrastructure. VMware have VAR program which has the people qualified to do this but guess what there not cheap….not the price of an exam thats for sure and they have minimal amount of resource internally.

Granted you’d be stupid to employ someone with no practical experience to back up a qualification, but hey I’m sure people employ people for other skills on there CV initially and then assign them on the project of Virtualisation later.

To me the exam is a bonus to be honest, in the UK I don’t think that taking exams after they attend a funded course is enforced as much by countries like the US and India. Although SI’s and Consultancies here have to do this here to ensure they are able to keep reseller certification etc.

So to summarise the 2 Grand in the grand scheme of things is a small price to pay for someone to pass and qualify in what is probably an elite group of 30-40 K VCP’s worldwide and to obtain some great networking with peers while on the course and quality time from a great instructor who is an elite band of VCI’s likely in the single digit thousands as well.

Well holidays are nearly over, i have had a chance to play with a view Virtual Storage Appliances, one being a EMC Cellera simulator http://www.emc.com/products/family/celerra-family.htm which is all setup, i just need to configure and finish off with some LUN creations etc.

Next one to play with is a VSA built by the SUN FISHworks team http://wikis.sun.com/display/FishWorks/Fishworks, this is a bizzare name for a team, although I am sure the teams i’ve run/work in have been named worse over the years. The actual official name is the “SUN Unified storage systems” http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/.

The basis of the SUN USS is that they offer NFS/CIFs and iSCSI protocol connectivity in a commodity SUN physical server running there new Open source OS OpenSolaris under the hood.

Nothing particularly new on the HW concept, however the underlying filesystem utilise ZFS, this provides a larger amount of benefits such as decouplement of the underlying HW to the ZFS volume, this provides benefits such as adding more disk to the pool dynamically, greater scalability for size of volumes (some could say unlimited) and great snapshot benefits etc. Not sure what can be done on disk removal though…

On the GUI side, the USS has great diagnostic facilities available, with Solaris being under the hood the use of Dtrace is available to perform enhanced debug on the storage device and volumes and also the other IO which affects storage.

This opens up a lot of opportunity if this adoption works for SUN, a lot of people have Solaris with Veritas Volume manager which they are just itching to get rid of (hope my account manager doesn’t read this), they are making this an Open standard which is great for smaller shops. The USS can i presume run on any Solaris Tin, now just think of this running with a high end M Series…

So early days of playing and reading up so excuse the vagueness, I Will top up sometime through the week on this in more detail if SUN are still in business

The VSA is easily downloadable from SUN http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/resources.jsp and installed on my MAC with VMware fusion, it run’s “OK” on the standard 1GB of RAM, I will probably piss about with more RAM on my main PC when I get a chance. And as my subject title says it take about 4 Minutes to configure!!!!

Happy playing