I was on the VMware forums on Wednesday and one of the biggest names in Software Defined Networking at VMware made a posting about a offering VMware was giving away in regards to training for VMware’s Software-Defined Networking for the datacenter and for vCloud, the software behind what makes the ‘cloud’ a reality for MSP industry who are “in-deep” as they say, so I was like sure why not I’ll make a post about my career and see what happens… I feel that for the MSP world to really work, there needs to be a shift from private clouds to…
3/27/17 Well after a few months of studying and failing the exam the end of December I wanted to pass it this time, so I blew away my home-lab like 5 times and did it in 4 different ways to make sure I knew the content. Took the exam on March 25th and passed the exam with a score of 383. Now onto the road towards the following exams: VCP6-NV VCP6-DTM CompTIA CSA+ MCSE: 2012 VCP6-CMA VCAP? – one of them…. to-be-determined!
Updated: 2/8/17 So over the weekend I was labbing as per normal and I’ve been running into contention issues with my network and I think my tested and true Cisco 3750G’s are finally meeting their makers. The bonded Quad 1G connections over a vDS are starting to show slowness. I am kind of hammering the crap out of the lab. It gets very slow when I set DRS/SDRS to fully automatic and the whole backup storage goes to a crawl once those 1G links are saturated. So I think I’m upgrading the Dell R610’s to 10G for ISCSI and LAN…
What is vExpert you might be asking yourself, and it’s a very valid question. It’s an offering from VMware to people that follow the VMware community and are supportive of the products they provide. It’s also for people that speak of VMware products at events, in blogs, on forums, and in social media. Now you all are probably like kool so it’s a neat looking title, but it’s so much more than that, namely speaking VMware provides licensing for their VMware products for the entire year of the title. This licensing if you bought it would cost 10’s of thousands…
Took the CompTIA Storage + exam on Saturday and passed, it was a pretty straightforward exam, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The study prep for it was also nice to learn, learned a number of things that will follow me through in my datacenter and system administration roles. Will use the knowledge from it to make effective datacenter decision moving forward, and I will have ap lan on my shelf for the book for reference. Study Material Used: Pluralsight: Nigel Poulon. CBT Nuggets: Jeremy Storage Networking book by Nigel Poulon. Onward to the Cisco CCNA:R&S (ICDN2) pursuit to finish…
Reading an article online today about a fix to an issue involving Windows Server 2008 R2 and it’s write performance to a Back-End SAN it made me curious. Since in a VMware world, especially, your always looking for way to improve back-end performance for SQL and other write intensive servers/applications and bleed as much perofrmance as possible. After applying this hotfix perofrmance improved for Writes as-well as on reads. Hopefully this hotfix helps other as it has helped me. 🙂 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2769701
So the last few days I’ve been using Veeam’s Backup program for backing up VM’s at work to give the tool a try and I really like it. Last week I got the VMware vExpert Award and I found out I can have Veeam Backup and Replication v8 for 1 year for my home-lab and I’ve been giving it a try. I like it quite a bit thus far and I might very well push for it at my work so we can have outstanding backups!!!!! Here is a link to a video on the product: What’s new in v8…
So I’m adding pain to misery to my certification madness. Since CompTIA announced that on Jan. 15th 2015 they will be discontinuing Storage + and I’ve always wanted it I’ve added the Storage + exam prep to my Cisco ICDN2 study time as-well. So since I’m a man of goals and pushing my knowledge, I’ve schedule the exam for the 19th of September. I’ve finished Nigel’s book on the subject and now I’m doing Pluralsight and CBT Nuggets video review leading up to the exam. Adding pain to insult and doing Project + on the following weekend. …
I got the VMware vExper 2015 award for being an active member of the VMware community. Looking forward to offer whatever I can to people that have questions as always with a helpful and kind personality.
Nuff said….
6/3/15 So I’m going to do something new for my blog and that is to at-least make monthly updates to my progression for the month. This month has been busy I’ve been studying like a banshie for the CCNA exam while at the same time work on a project at work. I’ve schedule my exam for the 29th of June, now that the massive work-project, explained below, is done and I’ve been re-focusing on my studies. On a non-technical note I completed a 22 mile hike around Bear Mountain, CT on the weekend of 16th of May and that was…
2/8/15 Once again being a very active member of the www.techexams.net community I have discovered VMUG. VMUG is a user-based group that focuses on the areas of VMware and it’s solutions. I joined the network and 3 weeks ago I purchased the VMUG Advantage subscription and to my amazement this year VMware is offering the following software for home-lab users: Included products are: VMware vCenter Server™ 5 Standalone for vSphere 5 VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ Enterprise Plus VMware vCloud Suite® Standard VMware vRealize™ Operations Insight™ VMware vRealize Operations™ 6 Enterprise VMware vRealize Log Insight™ VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon®…
Whelp it was a long study but after 5 months of study I’ve completed the VCP5-DCV course study and passed the exam on January 5th 2015. Since taking the ICM class at Stanly College in Locust NC back in October of 2014 I was basically living in my home-lab 5 hours a night during the week and about 10 hours on weekends and working with VMware 5.5 on a daily basis on the job at customer locations. I was actually kind of shocked by getting into the ICM class back in September and kind of pissed, I was literally 3…
Welcome! I figured since I like posting my labs and all I figured I’d make a blog for my VMware/Cisco/Microsoft Pursuit. – Right now the blog is being updated as I move along in my studies. This is a work in progress. I’ll be adding content along the way. -Trevor