Get vSphere Clustering Deepdive for ¢99

Since Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman are celebrating the 45k distribution mark of their popular vSphere Clustering Deepdive book, they are giving it away for .99 cents in Amazon in Kindle format for next 72 hours. Don't wait, get yours now if you don't have a copy yet!

Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Part 5 - Verify new Storage in vCloud

This is the last of the 5 part series Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Guides. In this guide, we will verify our new Storage in vCloud Director.

Verify new Storage in vCloud

• Point your browser at your vCloud Director and login

Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Part 4 - Configure Storage in vSphere for vCloud

This is part 4 of the 5 part series Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Guides. In this guide, we will go over setting User-Defined Storage Capabilities. These must match our LUN Tiering policies on the storage array. In future posts we'll look at using vSphere Storage APIs Storage Awareness (VASA) to hopefully automate this step.

Set User-Defined Storage Capabilities

• Login to vCenter and navigate to the Datastores and Cluster view

Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Part 3 - Set Tiering Policies

This is part 3 of the 5 part series Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Guides. In this guide, we will go over setting FAST Tiering Policies for our newly created LUNs.

Set Tiering Policies

• Point your browser at the URL/IP of one of  your VNX Storage Processors or a Control Station
• Login with Unisphere as sysadmin or AD/LDAP credentials if you have that configured

Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Part 2 - Provision Storage

This is part 2 of the 5 part series Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Guides. This one is the "big kahuna" where I will break down all the steps required to add new LUNs to an existing UIM/P Service. (In future posts, I will also talk about Provision Cisco UCS blades and how to build a new UIM/P Service Offering.)

Provision Storage using UIM/P

• Point a Web browser at  the UIM/P URL (ex: https://uim-p.corp.com) and login with the default sysadmin account. (BTW, I recommend you change your password or integrating UIM/P with an identity source such as AD, OpenLDAP, TACACS+, RADIUS, etc. (There will be a future post about this as well.)

Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Part 1 - Check Free Space and LUN Sizing

This is part 1 of the 5 part series Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Guides. We will cover a couple of methods for checking available array space and sizing your LUNs.


Do we have Free Space?

The first task you need to accomplish before allocating any storage is to check if you have enough available space. I see many rookie mistakes when people just start allocating storage, deploying VMs, or adding new VMDKs without checking if they have enough free space first, and then run into problems. This has become less of an issue with thin provisioned storage arrays and Storage DRS, but you still need to watch your subscription rate closely. Ultimately, you should use a reporting tool to stay on top of your storage utilization or just check your storage element manager. I have created a custom dashboard in VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps) utilizing EMC Storage Analytics (ESA) adapter and some super metrics to provide in-depth overview of storage statistics. There will be a blog post about this in the future. But for now, let's just look in Unisphere to make sure we can create more LUNs.

Allocating vCloud Storage with UIM/P Guides

As mentioned before in my previous blog post on Enabling UIM/P Mock Mode for Testing, 
Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning (UIM/P) is an EMC tool VCE bundles with new Vblocks. It cuts your time to market by enabling automated bulk provisioning of hardware compute, storage and networking resources in the Vblock. Bottom line is UIM/P reduces your OPEX.

Enable UIM/P Mock Mode for Testing

Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning (UIM/P) is an EMC tool VCE bundles with new Vblocks. It cuts your time to market by enabling bulk provisioning of compute, storage and networking hardware resources in the Vblock.

UIM/P Mock Mode allows use of the tool to practice various configuration settings and provisioning without affecting the production environment. This is very useful for training or when you would like to try a new config. Here's how to set it up:

How to pass VCAP5-DCD when you are new to design?

If you mostly have VMware support and operations experience but want to jump ship into design like me, here are some tips on how to get up to speed with design. Studying for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 - Datacenter Design (VCAP5-DCD) is a great starting point and prepares you for the infrastructure designer/architect mindset.

Since VMware last updated the official VCAP5-DCD blueprint back in March 2014 (ver. 3.0), some things have changed and a number of links in the blueprint take you to marketing pages instead of the white papers, etc. Here is an outline of the VCAP5-DCD topics covered in the official VMware exam blueprint but with updated and direct resources.

Also, make sure to check out some of the resources conveniently compiled at the bottom of this page and highly recommended by many of the existing VCAP5-DCD certification holders. These include books, exam experiences, and study notes.