New VMWare Certifications! VCAP and VCDX4!
Earlier today I attended a brown bag session organized by Cody Bunch with Jon Hall, technical certification developer at VMWare to discuss the new VMWare certifications.
There are two new certifications (and a VCDX4 is on the horizon!) that have been inserted above VCP:
- VCAP4-DCA (Datacenter Administrator) - Planning and administration side of vSphere, more for the systems administrator. The exam opens July 12th and will be offered at VMWorld. The blueprint isn't available yet, and is marked as "coming soon." Unlike the VCP, this exam will be 100% lab. Because the exam is more lab based, initially there will not be an immediate pass/fail. Expect to shell out $400 for this exam.
- VCAP4-DCD (Datacenter Design) - Design methods/principles, more of an architect type of certification. Not a whole lot discussion around this exam, it's still pretty far out (August). This exam will be multiple choice, but Jon Hall assured us that it would be more involved than the VCP. No word on the cost for this exam.
- VCDX4 (Design Expert) - VMWare has updated the certification website with a certification path (you can find it here) for the VCDX4. The Enterprise Exam is gone and you will be required to get both the DCA and DCD certifications. This means that for any VCDX4 hopeful, you will need to wait until at least August. Thankfully, Jon mentioned that there will be more opportunities for the design defense this year over last.
Exams will still be done by Pearson View.
Partners, there is no requirement at this time, but you may start being more involved in the VCDX design defense panels.
For more information, see VMWare's myLearn web portal.
I hope that answers a lot of your questions and piques your curiosity. I'll post a link to the brownbag recording when it becomes available.
Thank you Jon and Cody for putting on an informative brown bag and I look forward to more!
PowerCLI – Windows VM Partition Alignment
In an effort to keep my blog from becoming an wasteland, I bring you a modified version of a script I found here that enumerates virtual machines and then does a WMI call against each one to determine if the partition is aligned.
The original version only does it for one value (65536) - this one does it for both 65536 and 32768.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | $myCol = @() $vms = get-vm | where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn" -and ` $_.Guest.OSFullName -match "Microsoft Windows*" } | Sort Name foreach($vm in $vms){ $wmi = get-wmiobject -class "Win32_DiskPartition" ` -namespace "root\CIMV2" -ComputerName $vm foreach ($objItem in $wmi){ $Details = "" | Select-Object VMName, Partition, Status if ($objItem.StartingOffset -eq "65536"){ $Details.VMName = $objItem.SystemName $Details.Partition = $objItem.Name $Details.Status = "Partition aligned" } elseif ($objItem.StartingOffset -eq "32768"){ $Details.VMName = $objItem.SystemName $Details.Partition = $objItem.Name $Details.Status = "Partition aligned" } else{ $Details.VMName = $objItem.SystemName $Details.Partition = $objItem.Name $Details.Status = "Partition NOT aligned" } $myCol += $Details } } $myCol | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation "C:\Temp\PartitionAlignment.csv" |
There are several things you will need to know about this script prior to running it:
- This requires PowerCLI (from vmware.com).
- Because this script uses WMI, it will use the credentials of the user you are logged in as. You can use something like this if you need to specify credentials.
- If you want to add additional offsets, simply copy the elseif statement and paste it below the } for 32768.
Hope it helps!
HP ESX Management agents won’t uninstall.
Earlier this week I was attempting to upgrade the HP agents on my ESX servers and on one host, for no particularly good reason I was getting a really weird error:
This script will now attempt to uninstall the HP Insight Manager Agents.
Do you wish to continue? (y/n) y
Uninstalling HP Insight Manager Agents bulletin (hp-classic-mgmt-solution-825.10.1344)
Removing (hp-classic-mgmt-solution-825.10.1344)
This script will now attempt to uninstall the HP Insight Manager Agents.
Do you wish to continue? (y/n) y
[hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825] bulletin found.
Uninstalling ... [hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825] bulletin
Removing {hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825} ...
Encountered error NoMatchError:
The error data is:
Id - hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825
Message - 1 of 6 Vibs in this bulletin have been superseded. Please try
removing the newest bulletin for this component instead.
Errno - 13
Description - No matching bulletin or VIB was found in the metadata.
Unable to remove {hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825}. esxupdate status {13}
[ FAILED ]
Exit 0
No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to go away. I tried removing the RPMs and that wouldn't work. I also tried to remove the bulletin's manually, but I couldn't - it yielded the exact same error as above (turns out the HP utility does anyway is make a call to esxupdate).
A bulletin is essentially a rollup of packages (RPM's in this case) which VMWare calls a VIB or vSphere Installation Bundle. In this particular instance, a single VIB was stopping the process and needed to be removed manually. How though?
I was totally stumped, so I placed a call to VMWare support, and they showed me this nifty UNDOCUMENTED command to list the VIBs:
[root@vistsfo1 831]# esxupdate --vib-view query | grep hp
rpm_hp-smh-templates_8.2.5-51@noarch installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.211124-07:00
rpm_hp-snmp-agents_8.2.5-50.vmware4x@x86_64 installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.141505-07:00
cross_hpilo_400.1.1.1.1VMW-00001 retired 2009-07-13T10:07:01.275159-07:00
rpm_vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-hpsa_400.3.6.14.27vmw-1.0.7.193498@x86_64 retired 2009-09-26T22:04:40.219785-07:00
rpm_vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-hpsa_400.3.6.14.28vmw-2vmw.1.9.208167@x86_64 installed 2009-11-27T10:40:13.064463-08:00
rpm_hpsmh_3.0.1-73@x86_64 installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.490639-07:00
rpm_hp-health_8.2.5-50.vmware4x@x86_64 installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.224935-07:00
rpm_hp-agents-config_8.2.5-24@noarch installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.148444-07:00
Great! Now, to remove the offending package. In my case I knew it was the right VIB because it was there were only 2 non driver related VIBs installed.
[root@vistsfo1 831]# esxupdate remove -b rpm_hp-snmp-agents_8.2.5-50.vmware4x@x86_64
So now onto the interesting part. The --vib-view command is a hidden command for esxupdate. It's not in the man page, so how could anyone know about this handy flag without calling VMWare? Well, hindsight brings up and interesting method... open esxupdate on your ESX server. On line 146 (ESX 4U1) you can see this:
# Hidden options
parser.add_option('--HA', action='store_true', help=optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP)
parser.add_option('--vib-view', action='store_true', dest='vibview',
help=optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP)
parser.add_option('--maintenancemode', action='store_true',
help=optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP)
I suppose I could have just looked that the script to find that out!
Hopefully this will help, I saw a few posts out there about it.
vSphere U1, 1 down, 1 to go.
Good news first - in my previous blog post I had mentioned that there was a serious bug with updating to ESX 4 U1 and HP SIM agents. This has been resolved, U1 has been re-released and people should not have this issue any more (I have not tested this myself). That KB article has been updated and is available here.
The bad news is that there is now a bug with U1 and vCenter if it manages ESXi hosts.
It does not seem nearly as drastic as the previous issue I blogged about, but you should be aware of it. For now, it seems that you can avoid running into it by not adding, removing and then readding an ESXi host to vCenter.
Stay tuned for my next post (possibly a series?) about backups.
vSphere Update 1 and HP SIM agents
Phew - I'm glad I waited a little bit before installing vSphere update 1!
Turns out there's a nasty bug that will PSOD (purple screen of death) your vSphere hosts when updating if you are running HP SIM agents.
You can find the information here.
The document says that you should stop the HP agents on your host before updating. I can verify that this worked for me. I can also verify that not doing this will cause a PSOD - a colleague of mine had it happen.
This is exactly why I always wait at least a week after any major update... to see if it made the news.