It’s been quite a long time since my last “Friday Shorts” installment and the links are certainly piling up! So, without further ado here’s a few tidbits of information that I shared over the last little while…
A little bit of certification news!
VMware education and certification has certainly taken it’s fair share of backlash in the last few months, and honestly it’s rightly deserved! People don’t like when they invest in a certification, both in money and time, just to have an expiry date placed on all their efforts! Either way, that’s old news and nothing is changing there. What I was most concerned about was whether or not I would be able to skip my upgrade of my VCP and just take a VCAP exam instead, which would in turn re-up my VCP. Then the announcement of no more VCAP was made – which through those questions of mine for a loop – but now, after this announcement it appears that their will be an upgrade/migration path for those current VCAP holders to work towards the newly minted VCIX. Have a read and figure out where you fit in and start planning. I already hold a VCAP5-DCA so by taking the design portion of the VCIX I would be able to earn my VCIX certification in full – sounds good to me! Now we just need the flipping exams blueprints to come out so we all can get to studying! 🙂
New version of RVTools!
Yup, the most famous peice of “nice to haveware” has an updated version. I’ve used RVTools for quite some time now – as an administrator any piece of free software that I can get to help me with my job is gold! RVTools saves me a ton of time when gathering information as it pertains to my virtual environment and my VMs. If you haven’t used it definitely check it out – if you have, upgrade – you can see all of the new changes and download here!!
KEMP giving away LoadMaster!
Keeping on the topic of free tools let’s talk about KEMP for a moment! They are now offering their flagship KEMP LoadMaster with a free tier! If you need any load balancing done at all I would definitely check this out! Now, there is going to be some limitations right, nothing in this world is completely free 🙂 Certainly it’s only community supported and you can only balance up to a maximum of 20 MB/s – but hey, may be a great solution for your lab! Eric Shanks has a great introduction to how to get it up and going on his blog so if you need a hand check it out! I’ve also done up a quick review a few months back on load balancing your LogInsight installation with KEMP. Anyways, if you are interested in checking it go and get yourself a copy!
You got your snapshot in my VVOL!
As my mind wanders during the tail end of the NHL season I often find my mind racing about different things during the commercial breaks of Habs games – this time I said to myself, self, do snapshots work the same when utilizing the new VVOL technology. Then myself replied and it said, hey self, you know who would know this answer, Cormac Hogan. A quick look at his blog and low and behold there it was, a post in regards to shapshots and VVOLs. If you have some time check it out – Cormac has a great way of laying things out in quick and easy to follow blog posts and this on is no exception. In fact, before the first place team in the eastern conference returned from the tv timeout I had a complete understanding of it – now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
#SFD7 – Did you see it?
It appears that most if not all the videos from Storage Field Day 7 have been uploaded from the Silicon Valley internets into the wide world of YouTube! There was a great list of delegates, vendors and presenters there so I would definitely recommend you check them out! There were crazy hard drive watches, fire alarms, and best of all, a ton of great tech being talked about! IMO the show could of done with just a few more memes though 🙂 With that said you can find all their is to know about Storage Field Day 7 over at GestaltIT’s landing page!
