Over the past few months, I've been working on a project with Chris Colotti and Sumner Burkhart of VMware along with Jeramiah Dooley and Sony Francis of VCE on a collaboration effort to design a best practice for running VMware vCloud Director on a Vblock.

It all began when I took the class VMware vCloud: Architecting the VMware Cloud and I had this urge to create a design so Vblocks could be deployed in a standard fashion so you could easily have vCD up and running on a Vblock in little time. There were many design considerations to take into account because the Vblock has many components and each of which has it's own constraints. I remember reading a blog from Chris Colotti called vCloud on Vblock – Findings from the field, so I got in touch with him via twitter to see if he would want to collaborate on such an effort. Once he was on board, Jeramiah and Sony reached out to me internally to see if they could join in. We decided it was best to draft up something that addresses everything we see today on current Vblock models along with vCloud Director 1.0.X and associated technology. This paper doesn't address the recently announced vCloud Director 1.5 components but most will remain unchanged except 1 or 2 sections depending upon changes in related technologies in the upcoming months.

This document is a joint effort between five people and doesn't reflect the supportability from our employers. This document is merely a reference architecture for running vCloud Director on a Vblock and it's associated technologies such as VNX, Fast Cache, Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), Cisco Nexus 1000v, vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS), vShield Edge, and more.

It was almost 1 year ago today that I published my VCAP4-DCA Landing Page. Back on July 16th, I finally got around to taking my VCAP4-DCA exam after the struggle with my VCAP Madness and accidentally passing the VCAP4-DCD.

It took exactly 9 business days to get the email from the certification team, and they do a good job with scaring the crap out of you. The email reads as such:

Hello,

Thank you for participating in the VMware Certified Advanced Professional program.  Please find your VCAP4-DCA score report attached.

Kind Regards,
The VMware Technical Certification Team

Wow! How scary is that? They make you open an attachment to see if you passed! Loading the PDF is the most nervous 3 seconds of your life, but it's worth the wait when you see that word "PASS". Whew...

Next week on July 28th, make sure you make the trip to Indianapolis IN for the 4th annual VMware User Group Demo Days! This is a fantastic event that truly feels like a mini VMworld.

This is no ordinary VMUG. There will be some great sessions with some great speakers as well: David Davis, Scott Lowe, Mike Laverick, and Vaughn Stewart to name a few! There are also going to be hands on labs, food, and more! I do have to say thank you to Frank Seal, an organizer for this event, who asked me to be a speaker as well a few months back.

When I first started testing vSphere 5 in my home lab, I began from scratch. One of the steps that was relatively familiar was binding VMKernal adapters to the physical NICs for iSCSI use.

If you have NICs that have iSCSI offload capabilities without having to use the Software iSCSI Adapter, then you are used to using a command similar to this:

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhba34

You can watch more on it here How to configure iSCSI Port Binding on vSphere 4