VCAP-DCD Exam PASSED!

Months of reading numerous VMware books, endless PDFs, hours of practicing with nothing short of determination! 

The Tri-Force is complete

VCP + VCAP-DCA + VCAP-DCD

Next...
VCDX
Clouds
UCS

Deploying Extremely Latency-Sensitive Applications with VMware vSphere 5.5

Performance demands of latency-sensitive applications have long been thought to be incompatible with virtualization. Such applications as distributed in-memory data management, stock trading, and highperformance computing (HPC) demand very low latency or jitter, typically of the order of up to tens of microseconds. Although virtualization brings the benefits of simplifying IT management and saving costs, the benefits come with an inherent overhead due to abstracting physical hardware and resources and sharing them. 

Virtualization overhead may incur increased processing time and its variability. VMware vSphere® ensures that this overhead induced by virtualization is minimized so that it is not noticeable for a wide range of applications including most business critical applications such as database systems, Web applications, and messaging systems. vSphere also supports well applications with millisecond-level latency constraints such as VoIP streaming applications. 

However, certain applications that are extremely latency-sensitive would still be affected by the overhead due to strict latency requirements. In order to support virtual machines with strict latency requirements, vSphere 5.5 introduces a new per-VM feature called Latency Sensitivity. Among other optimizations, this feature allows virtual machines to exclusively own physical cores, thus avoiding overhead related to CPU scheduling and contention. Combined with a passthrough functionality, which bypasses the network virtualization layer, applications can achieve near-native performance in both response time and jitter.

LINK

Comparing VMware vSphere App HA with Symantec ApplicationHA

Comparing VMware vSphere App HA with Symantec ApplicationHA

So before I jump into this post I want to put this disclaimer out there just to be clear.
The following post is a reflection on the views of myself and not that of Symantec Corp.
The reason why I wanted to create this post was that I was reading a whole stack of posts from other bloggers who were mentioning certain things that were just not true, comments such as App HA can protect Oracle, SAP or any application & App HA has been around since 5.0 are a couple of comments I have read on other sites and are just are not true. So what I wanted to do was to produce an honest account of both technologies and highlight gaps and strengths in both solution.
So here we go…..

LINK

VMware 10GE QoS Design Deep Dive with Cisco UCS, Nexus

VMware 10GE QoS Design Deep Dive with Cisco UCS, Nexus

LINK

Cisco UCS Best Practices

Cisco UCS Manager Configuration Common Practices

LINK

vSphere 5.5 Install Pt. 3: Upgrading vCenter

LINK

Setting up Software FCoE on vSphere 5

One of the features added in vSphere 5 was a software FCoE initiator. This is a feature that has gotten relatively little attention, other than a brief mention here and there. I’m not entirely sure why the software FCoE initiator in vSphere 5 hasn’t gotten more attention, but this past week I had the opportunity to work with the software FCoE initiator in a bit more detail. In this post I’m going to describe in a bit more detail how to set up the software FCoE initiator; in future posts, I hope to be able to provide some performance and troubleshooting information.

LINK

Installing and Configuring vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager

Installing and Configuring vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager - HYPER-V Plugin for Vcenter

LINK

ProfessionalVMware - vBrownBag

By ProfessionalVMware

To listen to an audio podcast, mouse over the title and click Play. Open iTunes to download and subscribe to podcasts.

Description

vBrownBags are a series of online webinars held using GotoMeeting and covering various VMware & VMware Certification topics. These vBrownBags are held live at various dates and times around the globe and each covers a different bit of VMware related specialization

LINK

vSphere Distributed Switch Configuration for iSCSI MPIO SAN using multiple subnets

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Cisco UCS:

Description: [FSM:FAILED] communication service configurationhttp://www.kozeniauskas.com/itblog/2013/01/12/ucs-f999616-fsmfailed-communication-service-configurationfsmsamdmecommsvcepupdatesvcep/

How to find SQL Server Service Accounts

LINK

Two ways to find out the sql service account in SQL server 2008 R2
By using SQL server Configuration manager
1.   Connect to SQL server Configuration manager
2.   Check out the services node
Here you will find all the sql services, ort no and there credential.
3.   To modify the same right click on the services à click on properties à go to logon tab à here you can see the existing account information and can be modified by providing new login account.

By using Transact SQL statement in SQL Server
We need to install SP1 for the Transact SQL statement. In SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 and later, we can find the SQL Server service account using T-SQL, without using extended stored procedures.

After SP1 for SQL Server 2008 R2, there is a new DMV that allows you to query for the service accounts used for the various SQL Server services. You can also use the sys.dm_server_registry DMV to find the information, although this is not as clean.
sys.dm_server_services, sys.dm_server_registry
Query
Select servicename FROM sys.dm_server_services
Where status = 1 –> to find out Stopped services
Below are the values which indicates the current status of the services
1 Stopped
2 Other (start pending)
3 Other (stop pending)
4 Running
5 Other (continue pending)
6 Other (pause pending)
7 Paused

SELECT key_name, value_name, value_data

FROM sys.dm_server_registry
WHERE key_name LIKE N’%SQLAgent%’


After executing above query, it will display the SQL SERVER AGENT registry key value.Here we can filter the output based on key_name, register_key

VCAP-DCD Study Resources

• I’m sure you can find more sessions you like but those are my “top 20” VMworld sessions for the DCD prep:

  • Virtualizing SAP : Design and Performance Management Guideline
  • Network Administrators Guide to Deploy Software FCoE and iSCSI Adapters Using VMware Distributed Switches on 10Gb Ethernet
  • Performance New Features and Best Practices for vSphere
  • Avoiding the 19 Biggest HA & DRS Configuration Mistakes – 2012 Edition
  • vSphere Performance Best Practices
  • Virtualizing Highly Available SQL Servers
  • Virtualizing MS Exchange 2010 at General Mills – Architecture Details and Lessons Learned
  • vSphere 5 Storage Best Practices
  • Virtualizing SharePoint Best Practices
  • Understanding Storage In Virtual Environments
  • Virtualizing Exchange Best Practices
  • Virtualizing SQL 2012 : Doing It Right
  • Tracking Down Storage Performance Issues: A Customer’s Perspective
  • VMware vSphere Cluster Resource Pools Best Practices
  • Insight Into vMotion: Architectures, Performance, Best Practices, and Futures
  • VMware vSphere 5 Design Discussions
  • vCenter: A Technical Deep Dive
  • Supercharged SAN: Fine-tune Your VAAI Enabled vSphere SAN with This Collection of Configuration and Performance Best Practices
  • Architecting and Operating a VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster
  • Troubleshooting and Monitoring Virtual Networks

• Supportive YouTube videos:

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR6MakMdGW4
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwoVGB68B9Y
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gvjbJXulSA
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=uQR-gM0lEd8&feature=endscreen
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHpq9PiOZdc
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qg7pVNuAnU
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55p3ZD9l54o

Vmware vSphere Host Network Design using 10GBe links with a 5k & 2k

Considering your ISCSI backbone is 1GB, limit the ISCSI peak bandwidth 10,000 Kbits/sec = 1GB

 

Click Image to enlarge

 

 

 

VCAP-DCD – Study Pack

VCAP-DCD Study pack

LINK

During my time studying for the DCD exam, I referenced and used a number of different materials. I’ve collated these resources into a ‘Study Pack’ available for download. The file is around 170MB and includes the VMware blueprint and recommended resources, VMware product information guides and other resources collected from other members of the community, so I do not take credit for their great work! I’ve also included a few of my own notes here and there.

Path Selection Policy with ALUA

path-selection-policy-with-alua

It’s important to understand how VMware ESXi servers handle connections to their associated storage arrays.
If we look specifically with fibre channel fabrics, we have several multipathing options to be considered.
There are three path selection policy (PSP) plugins that VMware uses natively to determine the I/O channel that data will travel over to the storage device.

1. Fixed Path
2. Most Recently Used (MRU)
3. Round Robin (RR)

VDS Port Binding Best Practices / Auto Grow Enable switch

When choosing a port binding type, consider how you want to connect your virtual machines and virtual network adapters to a vDS and how you intend to use your virtual machines. Port binding type, along with all other vDS and port group configuration, can be set only through vCenter Server.

VMware Reference Link 

Static binding

When you connect a virtual machine to a port group configured with static binding, a port is immediately assigned and reserved for it, guaranteeing connectivity at all times. The port is disconnected only when the virtual machine is removed from the port group. You can connect a virtual machine to a static-binding port group only through vCenter Server.

Note: Static binding is the default setting, recommended for general use.

Dynamic binding

In a port group configured with dynamic binding, a port is assigned to a virtual machine only when the virtual machine is powered on and its NIC is in a connected state. The port is disconnected when the virtual machine is powered off or the virtual machine's NIC is disconnected. Virtual machines connected to a port group configured with dynamic binding must be powered on and off through vCenter.

Dynamic binding can be used in environments where you have more virtual machines than available ports, but do not plan to have a greater number of virtual machines active than you have available ports. For example, if you have 300 virtual machines and 100 ports, but never have more than 90 virtual machines active at one time, dynamic binding would be appropriate for your port group.

Note: Dynamic binding is deprecated from ESXi 5.0, but this option is still available in vSphere Client. It is strongly recommended to use Static Binding for better performance.

Ephemeral binding

In a port group configured with ephemeral binding, a port is created and assigned to a virtual machine by the host when the virtual machine is powered on and its NIC is in a connected state. The port is deleted when the virtual machine is powered off or the virtual machine's NIC is disconnected.

You can assign a virtual machine to a distributed port group with ephemeral port binding on ESX/ESXi and vCenter, giving you the flexibility to manage virtual machine connections through the host when vCenter is down. Although only ephemeral binding allows you to modify virtual machine network connections when vCenter is down, network traffic is unaffected by vCenter failure regardless of port binding type.