VCAP5-DCA Objective 1.1 vBrownBag

This past Wednesday I presented a ProfessionalVMware.com vBrownBag on Objective 1.1 of the VCAP5-DCA Blueprint. Objective 1.1 covers implementing and managing complex storage solutions. Lots of fun stuff like LUN Masking, SSD Tagging, VAAI, NPIV, Storage Profiles, etc.

I was originally going to cover all of Objective 1 but there is way too much information to cover in an hour so there will be a part II covering more (and hopefully the rest of) of Objective 1 in the near future.

Click here to watch a recording of Wednesday’s vBrownBag covering Objective 1.1 of the VCAP5-DCA Blueprint – http://www.virtualnetworkdesign.com/brownbag/2012-06-20.mp4

Here is the sliderocket slide deck:

During the presentation I had an issue unclaiming the local storage to tag it as an SSD. Still have not figured that out yet. A reboot does cause the claim rules to run and afterwards the local storage is identified as an SSD. Not sure if there is away to unclaim and run the claimrule against local storage to add the enable_ssd option. I could have sworn I was able to do this previously in my lab without a reboot, but I may have been working on a shared datastore and not local storage.

Here are the resource links from the slide deck:

• vCenter Storage Filters http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/08/11/storage-filters/
• NPIV: N-Port ID Virtualization http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/11/npiv-n-port-id-virtualization.html
• Swap to Host Cache aka Swap to SSD http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/08/18/swap-to-host-cache-aka-swap-to-ssd/
• Profile Driven Storage http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/08/vsphere-50-storage-features-part-10-profile-driven-storage.html
• VMFS-5 VMFS-3, What’s the Deal? http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2011/07/21/vmfs-5-vmfs-3-whats-the-deal/
• Forcing the NMP Plugin for Microsoft Clusting LUNs of vSphere http://wahlnetwork.com/2012/06/18/forcing-the-nmp-plugin-for-microsoft-clustering-luns-on-vsphere/
• Using vscsiStats for Storage Performance Analysis http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10095

Here is the link to the powershell script that will generate the nice graphs from the vscsiStats histograms – http://www.vspecialist.co.uk/display-vscsistats-data-with-microsoft-chart-controls/ <-This is an AWESOME tool!

And of course some great VCAP5-DCA study guides:

Edward Grigson – @egrigson
http://www.vexperienced.co.uk/vcap5-dca/
http://www.vexperienced.co.uk/2012/04/12/vcap5-dca-whats-new/

The SaffaGeek – @greggrobertson5
http://thesaffageek.co.uk/vcap5-dca-objectives/

There are several other great VCAP5-DCA study guides out there. Feel free to add them in the comments of this post and I will update the slide to add them for future vBrownBags.

Lot of information to cover. Hope everyone enjoyed it and learned something new – I did.