VMWare

Three Years to #VCDX

/ seanpmassey / 1 Comment

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— 
I took the one less traveled by, 
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

“Life is a journey, not a destination.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s good to have goals.  It’s good to have goals that seem like they might just be a little out of your reach as they force you to challenge yourself and grow.

On Thursday, I completed the goals a set of personal goals that I had set for myself at the beginning of the year – achieve my VMware Certified Professional Certifications on the Data Center and Desktop products.  I passed my first VCP exam in August at VMworld.  I passed the VCP Desktop exam Thursday morning.

This was actually the second time I took the Desktop exam.  The first time I took it was on the last day of VMworld.  I hadn’t actually planned on taking the test, but I had some time to kill before my flight.  I barely missed a passing score on that exam, which I thought was pretty good considering that I had not prepared for that exam in any way and was rushing through it at the end.  After a month of reviewing Jason Langer’s VCP5–DT study guide, I was ready to sit for this test again.

So now that I’ve achieved these two certifications, I’ve been trying to decide what’s next. It didn’t take long to set a new goal –  to become a VMware Certified Design Expert, or VCDX, within three years.

For those who are not familiar with VMware’s certification tracks, there are four levels.  Although the analogy might not be 100% accurate, I’m going to relate these levels to the different types of college degrees that one can get.  Those four levels are:

  • VMware Certified Associate (VCA) –  a new entry-level certification track.  Does not require any classroom training.  Think of it as an associates degree.
  • VMware Certified Professional  (VCP) –  The primary VMware certification.  Requires a 5–day instructor-led classroom training and proctored exam.  This certification is required to attempt any higher level certifications.  Think of it as a Bachelor’s degree.
  • VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP) –  The level above the VCP, and a VCP is required to try for this certification.  Does not require any additional classroom training, but it does require in-depth knowledge of the products you are being certified on.  Under the current programs, there are two VCAPs that you can get for each product track – Design and Administration. Design focuses on the planning and design steps of implementing the product, and Administration focuses on actually running it once it is implemented.  This is equivalent to a Master’s Degree. 
  • VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) –  This is a PhD of VMware Certifications.  In order to even attempt this certification, you need to hold both the Design and the Administration VCAPs for the VCDX you’re attempting.  Anyone aspiring to this level needs to submit a design for a VMware environment.  If that design submission is accepted, they will need to defend that design in front of a panel of VCDX holders.  Some people have spent over 500 hours on their designs or gone in front of the panel multiple times.  Like I said…it’s the PhD of VMware Certifications.  (For the record, the two certifications that come closest to this are the soon-to-be-defunct Microsoft Certified Architect, which was a very expensive certification that required learning from the programmers of the Microsoft system followed by a panel defense and the Cisco Certified Architect, which requires a CCDE and a panel defense).  There are only around 125 VCDX’s currently.

My goal for acheiving this, as I said above, is three years.  This seemed like a reasonable goal because:

  1. I have two take two advanced certifications before I can even attempt to submit a design for the VCDX.  Depending on what products are released in the next couple of years, I will have to recertify to keep current.
  2. I want to get a lot more real-life experience, especially in the design area.
  3. The design work for the submission will take a significant chunk of my time.
  4. Baby Massey #2 is slated to arrive in early April. 

I have put together a plan that will get me into position to meet all of the prerequisties of the VCDX within a year, and I’m starting to build up my home lab so I can really dive into this.

Now, I may never reach this goal.  This is a very difficult road to go down.  But there is no harm in not making it to this destination as this road is also filled with the rewards of knowledge and growth.

What Does the Software-Defined Data Center Suite Mean For Managed Services Providers

/ seanpmassey

If one thing has been made clear by the general sessions at this year’s VMWorld, it’s that the cloud is now here to stay, and VMWare and other vendors are providing tools to manage the cloud, where ever it might reside, and the machines that run on it.

The second general session of this year’s VMWorld focused on two tools in the vCloud Suite:  vCloud Automation Center, which handles infrastructure and application provisioning to turn IT into a service, and vCloud Operations Management, which handles monitoring and remediation of problems.  These tools, as well as some other tools in the vCloud Suite, tie in closely with both vSphere and other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to provide automated provisioning and management of public, private, and hybrid clouds.

As the presenters were demonstrating these products and showing how they worked together to deploy and maintain applications, I started to wonder what this meant for managed services providers who’s product was managing IT infrastructures.  These companies tend to focus on small-to-medium sized entities that don’t want to take on the additional expenses of staff, IT monitoring, or 24–hour operations.  Can this software replace these providers?

If managed services providers can’t find ways to bring additional value to their customers,they will be quickly replaced.  If software has gotten to the point where it can not only detect an issue but attempt to remediate it as well based on policies that the administrators set or perform a root cause analysis immediately to pinpoint the issues so administrators can act, then there is a significant cost savings that can be captured on the customer’s side.  Even if taking advantage of the advanced remediation provided by these software packages requires a little work to get right, the ongoing cost savings that would be generated make this sort of investment very attractive.

At $work, we currently use a managed service provider.  They provide monitoring and patching for the most critical servers in our environment, which comes out to about one third of our environment.  The rest are managed using a variety of tools such as the monitoring in vCenter and scripts.  Like many environments, the monitoring coverage is not ideal.

But when I look at the cost of expanding managed services to cover the rest of my environment, or even continuing it, and compare it to using a software solution, there’s no contest.  I can get a greater level of coverage, some level of automated remediation and intelligent baselining, and a short payback period.

Now, I realize that this won’t be implemented overnight.  These systems can be just as complex as the infrastructures they are monitoring, and they take time to learn the network and develop baselines.  But the payoff, if done right, is software that goes beyond monitoring systems to managing them for you.

Infrastructures are going to get more complex now that software-defined storage and networking are a reality and vSphere is getting application-aware features.  If managed services providers want to remain relevant, they need to bring more value to their customers, update their tools and their offerings to better support the cloud, and work more closely with their customers to understand their environments and their needs.

If they don’t, then their customers will be throwing good money after bad.

Notes from the Field

/ seanpmassey

Remember to Update your CRLs (if you have an Offline Root CA)

I had an interesting issue crop up two weeks ago in my VMware View environment –  it basically stopped accepting all the certificates from my internal CA as valid.  The logs showed that they were failing on a revocation check, and I had to disable revocation checking on both of my connection brokers after opening a case with VMware.  View 5.1 requires valid certificates on the connection brokers and VCenter, and if those certificates expire, are revoked, or are unable to be checked against a revocation list, the system will choke on them.

A similar issue reared its ugly head on my Exchange Server today when I had to replace an expiring certificate.  I received a similar error in my Exchange 2010 Management Console, and a little digging led me to some tips to better troubleshoot this issue.  It turns out that the issue was an expired revocation from my Offline Root CA, which has been…well…offline for a while, that needed to be updated. Once I updated the list and copied it to the distribution point, all of the issues I was having cleared up.

The tips in this post helped greatly when troubleshooting this issue: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserversecurity/thread/348a9b8d-8583-488c-9a96-42b892c4ae77/

Today’s Blog Roundup – (Another) Free Trip to VMWorld

/ seanpmassey

Matt over at Standalone Sysadmin is reporting that Gestalt IT is sponsoring a contest to win a free trip to VMworld in San Franscisco.

Unlike most normal contests, you need to describe how you’re going to use the trip to benefit the community.

This is very similar to a contest that Jason from boche.net ran about two months ago.

I’m half-tempted to enter the contest.  Live-blogging from VMWorld would be a great experience.