C/D/H Talks Tech

I just finished up the VMware authorized training course, VMware Infrastructure 3: Deploy, Secure, Analyze.   I did it remotely; we used WebEx for the course slides and to communicate, and Citrix to log into our lab.  The instructor was very good and had a lot of experience. 

The first part of the course was “Storage Administration.”  We learned how to manage VMFS volumes, configure replication and security, and troubleshoot storage based events.  We also found out how Storage VMotion works.  Storage VMotion is a really powerful tool that allows you to VMotion entire LUNS from one SAN to another with no downtime.  No other virtualization competitor has any product like that.

Next we learned how to correctly configure virtual networks, vmkernal ports, and the service console.  The service console section was the most interesting because it’s the one area where people forget to configure properly.  There was a lot of emphasis on network security; your virtual network is just as vulnerable as your physical one, and therefore must be configured appropriately.   This section also included a module on iSCSI configuration.

The next module was how to configure DRS clusters and how to monitor performance.  There was a great lab in this section where we configured a DRS cluster with resource pools and simulated loads on the virtual machines.  We then moved them to other resource pools and saw how the CPU was throttled, lower or higher, based on the pool.   This lab really emphasized how important it is to configure your resource pools correctly, otherwise your servers may not be performing optimally.

Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of my training.