EnterpriseAdmins.org

I recently completed the requirements for the VMware Certified Professional 5 certification. Achieving certifications isn’t a priority for my current employer (a VMware customer) and as such it had been over 10 years since I last attempted an IT certification. I passed the exam on the first attempt but the questions were a lot harder than I had anticipated. I wanted to point out a couple of very solid resources I used to study for the exam.

First, I watched the 7 part brownbag series on the VCP 5 exam. You can find these episodes here: http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/. Each one is between 1 and 2 hours long, so put them on your iPad and kick back when you have a chance. This was my first experience watching the brownbags — but it won’t be my last. These are very solid technical presentations and I highly recommend subscribing to in iTunes.

Next, I read through the VCP blueprint from VMware MyLearn. It lists all of the content that could appear on the exam. It is a very short paper, but worth a look. I printed a copy and was going to use it as a check list to figure out what I needed to study…until I found something better.

Finally, I found and used the study guide created by Josh Coen and Jason Langer. It is a 130 page PDF document that is organized by objective just like the VCP blueprint. You can find it here: http://www.virtuallanger.com/vcp5/. This is better than the blueprint as it includes content about each objective and references the associated supporting document you should review.

Here is a bit of free advice. When you study for the exam, don’t discount anything you see in the blueprint. I remember thinking…Oh, nobody would ever use this feature so I don’t need to know it for the exam. That is simply not true. If the feature exists — and more specifically exists on the blueprint — you’ll want to know the material for the exam. Additionally, and this will sound fairly straight forward, be sure to study those things you do NOT know. If you only use vSphere Distributed Switches be sure and study the limitations and use cases of standard switches. If you only use NAS storage be sure to study block storage. Knowing these things will greatly help in passing the exam. Good luck!

In one vSphere environment I support we do not use templates to deploy virtual machines. Instead, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit is used. This allows both physical and virtual servers to be created using the same process and improves overall standardization of the customers network.

After several dozen Windows 2008 R2 servers had been deployed, we realized that a BDEDrive partition had been created on the boot partition. This partition was in the way and prevented the C: drive from being extended. Here are steps to resolve this issue on existing servers

At a command prompt run:

bcdboot c:\windows /s c:

After the command completes, right click the c: partition in Disk Management and set it as active. Reboot the server, delete the BDEdrive partition and extend the C: drive…

More importantly, this issue needed addressed on future builds to allow more flexible growth of the C: drive (without the required reboot from above). After a quick Google, I found this article: social.technet.microsoft.com… that describes adding the following text:

DoNotCreateExtraPartition=YES

to the CustomSettings.ini file. As described in the article, the cAsE of the DoNotCreateExtraPartition=YES attribute is important. After our deployment configuration management team added this attribute the BDEdrive partition stopped appearing on new builds.

In an earlier post Directory partition has not been backed up [DC=virtualcenter,DC=vmware,DC=int] I suggested a method to backup the VMwareVCMSDS ADAM database. As Joern posted in a comment, this solution could fill up your D: drive. The following code should help cleanup the ESXiBackup folder and only keep one month worth of history. You can append this to the previous script or schedule it as a separate task.

You’ll want to remove the “-whatif” once you see that the above script is what you want to do

I had a need the other day to restore a deleted OU from a Windows 2003 Active Directory.  This used to be such a big deal; requiring the AD, Server and Backup guys all working together.  Authoritative restores are such a pain in the rear, but Active Administrator by Scriptlogic has made this a non-issue.  We can pick an OU from one of the scheduled backups and re-animate the object with ease.  It almost makes you want to delete stuff just so you can restore it.

The product is a little pricey, but it only takes one or two restores for it to pay for itself.  I would highly recommend this product to anyone responsible for managing active directory.

Here is a link to a case study I was interviewed for several months ago:

http://www.scriptlogic.com/CaseStudies/Download/state-of-indiana-case-study.pdf

Good morning,

If you are reading this, you’ve obviously found my new blog.  I’ve created this site to discuss random topics in virtualization and systems administration.  Over the next couple of days I plan on consolidating a few failed attempts at creating such a site into this new structure.

If you have any comments or suggestions please feel free to post them.

Thanks,
Brian Wuchner