Last week I attended the Louisville VMUG and listened in on some talks by Dell and my good friends from Veeam. As I listened to the Dell SE, he was asking some questions that I was surprised to hear. My goal is to get a better understanding of where most people in the industry are and where we all want to be "someday".

He started asking the simple question of "does everyone run some sort of centralized storage?" and of course everyone answered yes. The he asked to see a show of hands of iSCSI vs FC vs FCoE. Nearly 80% of the room raised their hand for iSCSI storage connections while the other 20% were split for FC or FCoE. He seemed to really find his target audience. I believe most people were in the SMB space which makes perfect sense. Yet, the room seemed to be sort of bored. We've all been to VMUGs and heard the same pitches instead of talking about core technology or thinking beyond technology and the end result. I started thinking to myself, perhaps everyone here doesn't know the benefits or understand the process of running a converged fabric and leading up to a converged infrastructure.

About 2 weeks ago I was on Cody Bunch's VCAP-DCA brownbag podcast. We discussed my home lab and how I have everything configured. As being a part of the show, I was given a 50% off voucher for my VCAP-DCA exam. The day after the podcast I scheduled my VCAP-DCA exam and that's where I started losing my mind.

Does anyone remember The Office episode where Dwight thinks it's Friday? That's basically what happened to me. I scheduled my exam for March 31st, and for some reason I had it stuck in my head that March 31st was a Friday. I woke up on Friday morning at 7:15am ready to take my 8am exam, looked at my morning facebook feed and I saw someone saying "Happy April Fools Day". I thought to myself, huh? I double checked my phone and sure enough, it was April 1st. My test was scheduled for Thursday. I called Pearson Vue and they basically told me I was SOL. Sorry, no refunds. Great, there goes $200.

I assured myself I was ready for the exam, so at 8:00am I went on the Pearson Vue site and registered again for the VCAP exam for Monday April 4th... or so I thought....

Last week I took part in the VMware vCloud Director: Architecting the VMware Cloud class. I've talked to a bunch of people that took the same class at PEX and had the same thoughts and feelings. The class was great.

The class is 3 days long and 2 days are spent on concepts and 2 labs. The third and final day is a WHOLE lab of planning out a vCD instance from top to bottom. There is really a lot to think about when you are constructing a vCD instance. You have to have a firm grasp of the overall architecture such as vDCs, datastore policys, server architecture, and networking which is the toughest section to understand. If you can understand how networking works in vCD, everything else is easy.

One of my fellow VCE colleagues, Chris Davis, made the below image which gives a very good high level overview of vCD architecture for vDCs (virtual data centers). Before going into the class and moving on past the architectural overview, make sure you understand everything that is happening in the graphic below.

2 weeks ago I caught some heat for my post vCenter Operations And The Hype. Thank you to all the readers who submitted comments on going deeper into explanation.

As time progressed and I got my hands on more material, I found vCenter Operations to be more than just another monitoring tool. The real meat of the product is the trending capabilities it can offer. Being able to continually monitor the health of your virtual machines through intense algorithms is completely changing the game. Welcome two more contenders to the game, VKernel Performance Anaylzer and Xangati Health Engine.

Over the past two weeks I got some sneak peeks into these new products. As VKernel's Bryan Semple says, these new products aren't considered to be YAM (Yet Another Monitoring) tools. These new products integrate some very smart algorithms to analyze your environment over a period of time. These two new products are biting on the heels of vCenter Operations and may even have them beat in different areas.

Last night, I was invited by Cody Bunch (@cody_bunch) from ProfessionalVMware.com to exhibit my home lab for a series of VCAP related questions. Cody has a series of brown bag podcasts for VCP and VCAP study sessions.

A few weeks ago, Cody posted this article VCAP DCA Voucher Give Away – Round 2, Live Lab and I put my name in the drawing. I was the lucky chosen one (the only one  ) to exhibit my live lab in front of a few audience members. I had to prove the following:

The Lab

Scenario:

Your company has purchased 3 servers and an iSCSI SAN as an additional production cluster. As administrator you must complete the following tasks:

• Configure the hosts for availability and resource distribution
• Enable future growth for the hosts
• Enable power savings
• Ensure the configuration of all hosts is consistent and auditable
• Configure iSCSI to support production work loads
• In addition to iSCSI, you must also support an HA Web network segment

The VMworld 2011 Call for Papers is now live! If you have a VMworld.com account (it's free), you can watch the Top 4 rated sessions from VMworld 2010. I was surprised and shocked when David Davis showed me that we were ranked #3 on the top rated sessions. Thank you to everyone that took the time to submit your thoughts and opinions.

Without further ado sign in to your VMworld.com account, click on Top Rated Sessions From VMworld 2010, and click on MA8339 which featured David Davis and I talking about the Top 10 Free tools. If you are already signed in to your VMworld account, then just click here.

Yesterday, a bunch of the vExperts got a briefing on the release of vCenter Operations. I'm a known fan boy for VMware, but this product is probably on the bottom of my list. Please note that I have not had the time to test this product yet, this is just an opinion of mine from yesterday's briefing.

Take a read at Eric Sloof's article vCenter Operations – Your Future Performance Dashboard so you can get an understanding of what it has to offer. Done yet? OK, let's continue.

vCenter Operations has a few things going for it. Remember, that this wasn't a completely in-house product from the ground up. This was an acquisition of Integrien and has bits and pieces of Ionix thrown in. First, the deployment method. VMware is really starting to kick the tires on the Appliance model and this is the first product released that shows it in the wild (you will see more to come). Unlike other competitors, there is no windows based install so you're not burning up a license and the integrated database makes it good for small to medium sized deployments.

opvizor has been released in RC and is currently accessible as a free SaaS solution. According to this press release, "opvizor identifies issues in virtualized environments before they can lead to loss of performance or support cases...opvizor is now offering a broad spectrum of functions – such as for instance reports, dashboard and the support of an unlimited number of hosts. In addition, early issue detection has been expanded broadly. opvizor can be downloaded free of charge from www.opvizor.com for real-life testing in your own VMware environment."