NetApp Engineer

Some of you may be aware that I have been working hard through the VCDX journey over the past year / 18 months. I’m not usually a VMware blogger as I think that space is more than filled, so I usually concentrate on the storage side. However the VCDX is still fairly exclusive, so I wanted to share this journey with everyone. It’s been a really good time, and I have learnt a hell of a lot! It’s helped me better understand the solutions and help my company as a whole put together better VMware solutions, so it’s been hugely beneficial. I’d recommend anyone that is focused on VMware for their company to go down the VCDX route. Even if you don’t get onto the final Defense, it’s a fantastic journey and you will learn a lot.

I won’t go into too much detail about my experience of the Enterprise Admin or Design exams as these have been replaced by the VCAP ones. They are obviously pre-req’s anyway, but I’d say after going through the rest of the journey that they are essential training to get you ready anyway. I’ll probably be sitting both the VCAP exams in the next few months just to make sure my skills are kept up to date.

The Defense Application

Make sure you free your diary for at least a week of solid work. People have said be prepared to do 30-40 hours of work on this, but I think I spent closer to 70 or 80! I had a full week off work, and used both weekends too. I had a lot of work to do as I haven’t really done many fully structured deployments as expected in the Defense application before, so I had to make one up. This is definitely a lot harder as you have to visual everything, including limitations and obstacles. If you make something up, you don’t usually make up challenges for yourself. To compensate, I think I ended up making my scenario a little more complex and I had to do a lot of checking through support docs which added to my work load.  Read more... (2616 words, 2 images, estimated 10:28 mins reading time)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWy1Sc9dtGs

New YouTube video showing some of the new features and functionality of NetApp SMVI 2.0. Not sure on a release date just yet, but looks promising!

mbralign has now been added to the NetApp download ToolChest. This is an absolutely vital tool for anyone doing any VMware projects! I’m not actually sure if it checks to see if it’s running on NetApp storage, but obviously will align all partitions to a 4k block boundar, so a useful tool to have in any tool box all the same! Has full support for Windows and Linux as well as Primary and Extended partitions.

http://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-2563

This script can help track when a VM was created. I’m not sure if it’s technical correct however as it works on the create time of a .vmsd file. Anyway, the principles are there, and should do the job.

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This can be useful to keep track of what people are creating. Get an index of the Virtual Machine sizes and the free space in the datastores (very important).

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I hate the VM logs, and in a lot of cases you can end up with thousands of them which are very hard to delete or even browse to the directory. I have this script running on a cron to do a regular clear up. As a matter of course I disable VM logging now, but it can still be a challenge to clear up all the log files.

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Can’t remember which datastore a certain virtual machine is on and you’re on the command line only? Can happen, honest! In conjunction with other scripts, this can be quite helpful though. Just call the script and pass it the server name you are looking for.

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This script is useful if you want to keep an eye on new machines. I had a customer that couldn’t keep track of who was creating machines and the datastores filling up all the time. You don’t want full datastores!!!

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HPC really isn’t something I’m involved with, or ever have been involved with. But I am starting to pay a little attention. ONTAP GX is going to (eventually) get converged with ONTAP 7G and we’ll have Grid Computing based storage, potentially platform independent (don’t forget V-Filers!). I’m not holding my breath just yet for that, but believe me it is coming!

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So this week we heard that IBM have purchased Transitive. I’m no expert on Transitive, but I understand it’s a technology that allows running different architecture applications and systems onto a Intel based platform.

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