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New VMware Certifications Announced at VMworld 2012

August 27, 2012 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

With the release of VMware’s new Cloud Suite, and increased focus on true cloud building, VMware’s Education division has announced changes to their VMware Certification program, including new certification tracks and exams. We learned in today’s VMworld General Session that the total number of VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) is now over 125,000. The announced changes will help to differentiate skill levels and specialties for VMware professionals. The new certification structure should help to test individuals in line with their job role (Architect, Engineer Administrator, Developer, & Governance/Operator) and solution focus (Cloud, Datacenter Virtualization, End User Computing, & Cloud Application Platform).

Here’s what the new certification roadmap look like:

The complete list of current and pending VMware certifications under this new program is as follows:

Cloud:

VCP-Cloud
VCP-IaaS
VCAP-Cloud Infrastructure Administrator
VCAP-Cloud Infrastructure Design
VCAP-Cloud Governance
VCDX-Cloud

Datacenter Virtualization

VCP5-Datacenter Virtualization
VCAP-Datacenter Administration
VCAP-Datacenter Design
VCDX-Datacenter Virtualization

End User Computing

VCP-Desktop
VCAP-Desktop Administration
VCAP-Desktop Design
VCDX-Desktop

Cloud Application Platform

Spring Professional
Web Application Developer
Enterprise Integration Specialist

I think the new certification strategy is good overall, but I don’t relish the thought of more tests to take. Visit the VMware Certification site to learn more.

You Get A Cloud, and You Get a Cloud, and You Get a Cloud

August 27, 2012 by Josh Townsend 1 Comment

It’s like Oprah has visited VMworld today, proclaiming “You Get a Cloud, and You Get a Cloud, and You Get a Cloud!”

Look at your vSphere 5 box. If it says ‘Enterprise Plus Edition’ you get a key — to the cloud. That’s right – if you own VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus edition, you now have VMware vCloud Director. For free. As I predicted in Reading the Tea Leaves Before VMworld 2012 Part 2, VMware has introduced a new pricing/packaging scheme called the vCloud Suite, which combines vSphere 5.1, vCloud 5.1, and vCloud Networking and Security into a new package called the vCloud Suite Standard. And, if you own vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus today, you are automatically entitled to this upgrade at no charge. You will need to claim the upgrade on https://my.vmware.com licensing portal before December 15th, or you lose your upgrade. Pretty awesome, eh?

There are also a couple other editions of vCloud Suite coming your way: Advanced and Enterprise. Below is a chart of how the pricing and packaging breaks down.

Bundle:	vCloud Suite Standard	vCloud Suite Advanced	vCloud Suite Enterprise
SW Included:	vSphere Ent PlusvCloud DirectorvCloud Networking & Security (vCNS) Standard, including VXLAN	vCloud Suite Standard +vCOPSvCenter Config MgrAdvanced vCNS	vCloud Suite Advanced +Site Recovery ManagerChargebackInfrastructure NavigatorvFabric App Director
Est. Price Per CPU	$5,000	$7,500	$11,500
Notes	Enterprise Plus Customers under SNS will be entitled to this version if owned by 8/27. This promotion ends on 12/15.

You can now get to the business of building your own cloud, with all the tools you need for success, in some very customer friendly new packages! Thanks, VMware!

No More vRAM Entitlement Licensing!

August 27, 2012 by Josh Townsend 1 Comment

Just announced at VMworld 2012 – VMware has stopped the unpopular ‘vRAM Entitlement’ licensing that restricted customers to provisioning virtual machines with a virtual memory beyond a licensed limit. The vRAM Entitlements were introduced with vSphere 5 and drew wide criticism despite the fact that few customers were actually impacted by the soft memory caps once N+1 hosts and other design architecture best practices were considered. Rather, I’d like to think that the vRAM Entitlement licensing may have actually been helpful in getting customers to right-size their VM’s and rationalize standard sizing for templates. A right-sized VM makes for a much more efficient cloud – less replication traffic, less vMotion traffic, less vSwap on disk, and more efficient Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) calculations. Rationalized standard sizing also helps prepare IT and their business users for consumption-based environments – in their private software defined datacenter run on vCloud Director, in public clouds, or in hybrid public/private clouds. But what the heck, throw all technical considerations and caution to the wind, go forth and over-provision. But if you take that approach, you still might have to look at buying VMware vCenter Operations to monitor and alert on your virtual datacenter.

Kudos to VMware for be willing to reverse their licensing change. In the end, this is good for customers [and us consultants who will clean up after your over-provisioned mess ;-)].

Official VCP5 Certification Guide & Building a Virtual Datacenter Books Now Available

August 24, 2012 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

VMware Press this week released two new books. The first is The Official VCP5 Certification Guide by Bill Ferguson. The book is designed to help professionals prepare for the VMware VCP510 exam, covering all of the topics on the VMware VCP510 exam blueprint, including:

Understanding how virtualization can best be integrated into today’s real-world IT environments
Recognizing what to change, and what to leave alone
Planning, installing, configuring, and upgrading vCenter Server and VMware ESXi Planning and configuring vSphere networking and storage
Deploying and Administering Virtual Machines and vApps
Establishing and Maintaining Service Levels
Performing basic troubleshooting
Monitoring vSphere implementations
Managing vCenter Server alarms
Preparing for the future of VMware virtualization

Beyond simple reading materials on the subjects above, The Official VCP5 Certification Guide provides the common staples of an industry certification book, namely:

Assess your knowledge with chapter-opening quizzes
Review key concepts with exam preparation tasks
Practice with realistic exam questions on the DVD

I probably won’t add this one to my bookshelf as I am already VCP3, 4 and 5, but I think it would be a very valuable resource for anyone not already certified.

The second book just released by VMware Press is VMware vSphere 5® Building a Virtual Datacenter by Eric Maillé and René-François Mennecier. With the increased talk lately of the ‘Software Defined Datacenter’, this title is very time-appropriate. According to the book’s description, “VMware vSphere® 5: Building a Virtual Datacenter brings together all the practical knowledge you need to evaluate, plan, implement, and manage vSphere 5 in your datacenter environment.”

The book covers the following topics:

Assessing the potential benefits of datacenter virtualization in your environment
Organizing and managing a smooth migration to the virtualized datacenter
Anticipating specific challenges and risks associated with datacenter virtualization
Making tradeoffs to optimize stability, elasticity, scalability, and cost
Choosing the best installation/configuration options for your environment
Effectively linking vSphere 5 virtualization to existing datacenter elements
Driving more value from vSphere 5’s powerful new datacenter features
Providing storage to efficiently support your hosted VMs, now and in the future
Managing limited memory and other server constraints
Leveraging new options for service continuity and high availability
Using backup architecture as a lever to reduce costs

This is a good book for anyone starting on a vSphere 5 project, as it covers details on budgeting, scheduling, and planning; choosing the right architecture; and integrating vSphere with existing datacenter elements, including servers, storage, clusters, network infrastructure, and business continuity plans. I’ll most likely add this one to my bookshelf once I clear my current backlog of reading.

Grab both books from Amazon now, or pick them up at VMworld next week!
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VMware Releases Workstation 9 and Fusion 5

August 23, 2012 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

Today, VMware released the latest version of their VMware Workstation product – version 9. VMware Workstation was the first VMware product that I used (some 13 years ago) and has continued to be a product I rely on to do my work. I’ve been using the Technology Preview versions of Workstation 9 for months and am impressed with its speed, stability, and features. Using VMware Workstation Tech Preview 9 on my laptop, I run a full VMware View environment, complete with firewall, load balancer, OpenFiler storage appliance, vCenter, a couple nested vSphere 5 ESXi servers, View Composer and View Connection server; as well as a few other VM’s for ThinApp packaging, Orchestrator, and Windows 8. Workstation has allowed me to have a fairly complex networking configuration, with storage, network, management, and guest networks all isolated.

The new version of workstation adds the following new features:

Windows 8 Support (I got a Windows 8 VM up and running using Workstation’s Easy Install feature in less than 5 minutes)
Web-based interface that allows access to running VM’s from any web browser. This opens up some options for co-op training, demos, etc.
Restricted Virtual Machines – Create a runtime password and an administrative password to control who can run and modify settings on a VM.
Drop & Drag VM’s to and from VMware vSphere. Think of this as your own little hybrid cloud connector. Develop images on Workstation, ship them to vSphere when ready for production.
Enhanced 3D Graphics to support Windows Metro, and other graphically intensive apps like AutoCAD.
USB 3.0 Support for attaching USB devices to virtual machines.
Nested Virtualization, making better use of Intel VT-x/EPT and AMD-V/RVI to support 64-bit guest OS’s in nested ESXi VM’s.
Hyper-V is supported as a guest operating system (with nested VM’s)
Disk Cleanup to reclaim wasted disk space (important if you are running short of SSD space like I am).

Check out the release notes for more info: https://www.vmware.com/support/ws90/doc/workstation-90-release-notes.html

VMware also released VMware Fusion 5 for you Mac OSX users. See here for more info: https://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/fusion/professional.html. Fusion 5 includes a new ‘Professional’ business edition that includes some pretty cool options for pushing Windows VM’s out to all your Fusion enabled Mac users. This helps to ensure a consistent user experience and up-to-date Windows image for your multi-platform end users.

The upgrades to Workstation 9 and Fusion 5 are definitely worth the money! Buy the upgrade here, or reach out to me at Clearpath if you need to place a bulk order or renew your Support and Subscription (SNS) on existing VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion licenses for your business.