#vBrownBag Episodes

If you are a regular with vBrownBag and ProfessionalVMware.com then you are likely to be pursuing certifications, running some type of homelab, or simply trying to hone your skills.  It has been difficult dealing with short evaluation periods for licensing.  We have long lamented having to reinstall our environments or maintain multiple MyVMware accounts to
-> Continue reading HomeLab’ers Assemble! VMware EVALExperience!

This guest post is by Dean Lewis who blogs at www.educationalcentre.co.uk, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. We have open slots for guest bloggers, find out more about the guest blogger program here.

Last exam of the year

The past few months I’ve forced my head into revision for the three CCNP exams, with two down, I have TSHOOT left to do, and I’m aiming to pass before Christmas Day. Which is a nice goal to have, but when I have to recertify next year, It’ll be around 24th December.

But currently, Cisco only requires you to pass one of the three exams to keep the CCNP.
The TSHOOT is an interesting exam, compared with others. It contains a small number of multiple answer based questions, however the bulk of the exam is sat around a pre-defined and publicly available topology, where within a simulator you troubleshoot various support tickets.

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Sorry for the post delay on this. But, here it is.. the 2nd part of the ICND series Study Guide. As with the 1st post, the core purpose behind these network exams is to help you better understand the concepts involved to achieve your VCP-NV (NSX). This exam (ICND2) is needed to complete the requirements
-> Continue reading ICND2 (CCNA) Study Guide

This guest post is by David Espejo, who blogs at vcloudopia.wordpress.com, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. David writes in Spanish, so if you don’t speak Spanish be sure to use a browser that will translate for you. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

It’s been a long time since my last post, and as always, I appreciate the opportunity that the vBrownBag community offers me to publish here. I’ve been on the road with a growing list of project deadlines due to a new consultant role that I accepted, but I’m learning a lot so I hope to share all that new knowledge here.

In this occasion I will talk about what has often been cited as the main barrier to VXLAN adoption: the requirement of Multicast in the physical network and the resulting operational burden of deploying and managing such requirement.

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This guest post is by Anthony Chow who blogs at http://cloudn1n3.blogspot.co.nz/, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

Compute, Network and Storage are the 3 pillars of a data center. Storage had been my weakest point in terms of knowledge and experience.

Today I had a great chat with Brian Knudtson (@bknudtson) who is very knowledgeable in different aspects of the technology field and had opened my mind in the area of “Hyper-convergence”. In this post, I am stepping out of my comfort zone again and try to venture into this area and take a look at this emerging and expanding market. In VMworld 2014, VMware announced a new product EVO:RAIL which reinforce the idea that this “Hyperconvergence” market has huge potential in the coming years.

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It’s back!  As a special thank you to our listeners, the #vBrownBag crew is happy to once again run our annual end of year give-away!  Now through December 16th you can sign up using the form below to be entered to win one of these great prizes which were generously donated for our community by
-> Continue reading #vBrownBag End of Year Give-Away!

This guest post is by Bryan Krausen who blogs at ITDiversified, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

As mentioned in this article, there are many variables to take into consideration when deploying and configuring VMware Site Recovery Manager. When failing (or testing) your virtual machines from site to site, decisions must be made on what cluster will they start on, what priority will they be failed over, and what, if any, scripts will be executed after fail over has occurred. An equally important step is ensuring that the VMs can communicate on the correct network at the surviving site. VMware SRM has multiple ways of handling customization of a VM’s IP; one that is “automated” using IP Customization Rules and another that is completely manual, set configurations per VM.  Both are explained and shown below.

Note: Site Recovery Manager supports customization of the same guest operation systems which vSphere 5.5U2 supports. Check the document here for a support matrix.

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This guest post is by Dean Lewis who blogs at Educational Centre, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

So after an interesting North West VMUG event on 12th November, I’ve decided to write my own comments on the state of employment within IT. This is prompted by Neil Mills Talk at the above VMUG event, where he gave tips on super charging your CV, and the industry as he see’s it.

Most of my recruiting experience from the last year comes from a reseller/solutions provider point of view.

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This guest post is by Bryan Krausen who blogs at ITDiversified, where you can find his back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

VMware’s Site Recovery Manager provides the ability to failover VMs in the event of a disaster or for planned migrations between datacenters. In my case, we’re using it for the former as we have two “main” datacenters, one located in Louisville and the other in downtown Chicago. Although we’ve tried to deploy applications with site redundancy in mind, some applications are simply reliant on a single site, whether by limitations of the software or by choice.

Decisions, decisions… Planning a VMware SRM deployment takes considerable thought as there are many choices and routes to accomplish the same tasks. For example, we could choose to utilize EMC’s RecoverPoint or VMware vSphere Replication to replicate the data to the opposite site. We could choose to create a dedicated “DR” VLAN or should we explore spanning Layer 2 across the datacenters using VXLAN or OTV. Should we purchase additional capacity at both sites or simply suspend “Tier 2/3″ VMs in the event of a failure to ensure resources are available?

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This guest post is by Melissa Palmer who blogs at vmiss.net, where you can find her back catalogue of posts. Find out more about the guest blogger program here.

As part of #vDM30in30 Eric Wright wrote a great article on reducing technical debt, which got me thinking quite a bit.  Mainly about automation, and the journey it takes to get there.  Here’s a couple more ideas on how to get you started on the journey if you haven’t already begun.

(Mission Control at NASA Wallops.)

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