VMware Certification & General Advice Thread

Hellsmk2 · 17 Jun 2020 at 20:24

Vince said:
I'm serious, but im also sensible as in I have a budget to work within. I think the thing to do is have a play and see what happens. I think I can evaluate it so perhaps thats the next thing to do.

Setting up the underlying infrastructure can be done in a couple of hours.

The difficulty in any vdi deployment is in optimising your gold image. Be prepared to sink a lot of time tweaking it the desktop.

Have been deploying View for over 10 years now, and every company underestimates the effort needed to get the their gold image right.

Throrik · 17 Jun 2020 at 22:06

Hellsmk2 said:
Have been deploying View for over 10 years now, and every company underestimates the effort needed to get the their gold image right.

This is one key thing for any form of Deployment in my mind. I spent years as an SCCM Administrator and also multiple years as a Horizon Admin and I have probably never once been happy with my 'image' as it was.

ChrisD. · 18 Jun 2020 at 11:26

As I said in the other thread, I'm not much of an EUC guy, but what has been posted covers it well. Also don't forget that the cooler features require a more expensive license. HOL is a good place to look, you can also run a trial period now on most of our products. Have a look here: https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=horizon-7

ChrisD. · 18 Jun 2020 at 12:07

By the way, I've been doing a lot of HCX and VMC on AWS recently, so if anyone has any queries then please let me know.

Throrik · 16 Sep 2020 at 11:55

Slightly unrelated, but vSphere GSS are absolutely garbage lately... Raised an issue that we can't seem to get people on, then they downgrade from a p1 to a p2 to a p3, request uplift and manager assistance gets ignored, can't get through to the live queue as you can only raise p1s through the portal during COVID. Missed their SLAs by over 18 hours at this point and one of our biggest clients is an NHS trust which is having major performance impact. #Rant

ChrisD. · 19 Sep 2020 at 10:48

Throrik said:
Slightly unrelated, but vSphere GSS are absolutely garbage lately... Raised an issue that we can't seem to get people on, then they downgrade from a p1 to a p2 to a p3, request uplift and manager assistance gets ignored, can't get through to the live queue as you can only raise p1s through the portal during COVID. Missed their SLAs by over 18 hours at this point and one of our biggest clients is an NHS trust which is having major performance impact. #Rant

Sorry to hear about your experience. Can you send me the SR number and I’ll have a look at the case. Also do you have a TAM? As if you have, I would raise the issue with them also.

Throrik · 19 Sep 2020 at 13:54

ChrisD. said:
Sorry to hear about your experience. Can you send me the SR number and I’ll have a look at the case. Also do you have a TAM? As if you have, I would raise the issue with them also.

Thanks, we're getting to somewhere thanks to our Partner Manager, a difficult one to diagnose unfortunately, ballooning isn't kicking in prior to swapping and nobody has a clue why, I suspect a bug in the ESXi Version potentially, we can't upgrade further on the Cloud Platform at the moment due to an ACI dependency either, bloody frustrating, it's held together by a piece of string.

ChrisD. · 20 Sep 2020 at 09:41

What build are you on?

Throrik · 20 Sep 2020 at 15:38

ChrisD. said:
What build are you on?

Latest version of 6.5 - 16576891. Our platform is behind most of our clients because nobody 'owns' it until suddenly something goes wrong lol.

Cromulent · 25 Sep 2020 at 03:43

ChrisD. said:
I've been meaning to do this for a while. For those who don't know, I work for VMware in the Professional Services Organisation as a Senior Consultant. I specialise in the SDDC suite of our products, mainly around VCF, HCI, vSAN, NSX etc. It involves the design and delivery as well as health checks for our customers.

I've amassed quite a few certs, VCIX DCV (both VCAPs) and a couple of VCPs (DCV and NV). I'm currently studying towards VCAP in NV and once the current COVID-19 situation is over I'll most likely be pursuing VCDX however I'm not sure in which track yet.

I thought I'd start this thread if anyone here, professional or otherwise, has any specific VMware questions, wants guidance on exam paths, our products and what not. Or if anyone is interested in joining VMware I can share how I feel about them as an employee (spoiler - very good!).

I do have a blog which you can check out here. I've just added a new homelab post and I'm working on an NSX-T 3.0 one at the moment.

So, anyone else certified? Or even any other employees? Please feel to share any questions you have.

I'm glad I found this thread. I'm in the process of starting up a business which will be in the virtualisation arena and I'm in the process of evaluating hypervisors. The obvious choice is QEMU and KVM running on a Linux host since it is free. If I got into serious trouble I could always take out a support contract for the host OS from SUSE but I'm not sure how good their support is. I also have the option of Xen but since I've used VMWare Workstation Pro since version 10 and have upgraded every time a new version comes out I thought I'd take a look at VMWare offers and I have to admit I'm confused. Can you point me in the right direction for hypervisors, please? I thought all I needed to know about was ESXi but it seems VMWare's offerings are much more complex than that.

I don't want to do any exams but I wouldn't mind purchasing the exam study guides just for beginners just to get a high-level overview if you have any recommendations? Errr, yeah. Not really sure what else to add as I'm so ignorant of VMWare. But it is important for my business to learn about all the different options before I make a final decision.

ChrisD. · 25 Sep 2020 at 10:08

Cromulent said:
Can you point me in the right direction for hypervisors, please?

Who are the end clients going to be? If small business then look into vSphere Essentials.

Throrik · 25 Sep 2020 at 10:55

Definitely would need more info in what you're trying to do - VMware are the biggest name in the game for obvious reasons, hugely mature products with mostly excellent support for the average joe. They're also expensive at times. I've worked with multiple Hypervisors over my career, but VMware is easily the best. QEMU/KVM as mentioned, yeah if you're an absolute *nix guru I can see why people like that, but I can imagine support being expensive from someone like SuSE.

ChrisD. · 25 Sep 2020 at 11:03

@Throrik can you PM or trust me the SR if you don't mind? I wouldn't mind taking a look and it's a quiet day.

Cromulent · 25 Sep 2020 at 11:38

ChrisD. said:
Who are the end clients going to be? If small business then look into vSphere Essentials.

The end clients are going to be people renting virtual private servers from me. So developers, devops engineers and sys admins. All I want to support is Linux but if I could offer Windows Server virtual machines that would be a bonus from a business point of view. It could be a small business, it could be an individual. Either one is likely.

The three companies nearest to what I want to do are Linode, Digital Ocean and Vultr.

Throrik said:
Definitely would need more info in what you're trying to do - VMware are the biggest name in the game for obvious reasons, hugely mature products with mostly excellent support for the average joe. They're also expensive at times. I've worked with multiple Hypervisors over my career, but VMware is easily the best. QEMU/KVM as mentioned, yeah if you're an absolute *nix guru I can see why people like that, but I can imagine support being expensive from someone like SuSE.

I'm pretty good with Linux. Not sure I'd call myself a guru but I've been using it for 10 years or so on unmanaged servers so am used to using it in an environment as a sys admin. For the rest see above for a bit more information.

Edit: If there is anything specific either or you want to know just say and I'll try and answer any questions you might have.

#Chri5# · 25 Sep 2020 at 12:51

Cromulent said:
The end clients are going to be people renting virtual private servers from me. So developers, devops engineers and sys admins. All I want to support is Linux but if I could offer Windows Server virtual machines that would be a bonus from a business point of view. It could be a small business, it could be an individual. Either one is likely.

The three companies nearest to what I want to do are Linode, Digital Ocean and Vultr.

As a MSP (or whatever tag you want), I'd expect that you'd need to look at the specific hosting / service provider product & licensing models:

https://www.vmware.com/uk/partners/service-provider.html
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/lic...spla-program?activetab=spla-program:primaryr2

It's a while since I was involved with the Microsoft SPLA stuff, but IIRC, if you want to offer rented Windows Servers, then you can only use SPLA licenses. Biggest benefits is probably them being PAYG, so your costs grow with your customer base.

Throrik · 25 Sep 2020 at 15:28

ChrisD. said:
@Throrik can you PM or trust me the SR if you don't mind? I wouldn't mind taking a look and it's a quiet day.

Sent you a PM, didn't realise they'd been enabled on the forum now haha.

ChrisD. · 25 Sep 2020 at 15:43

Throrik said:
Sent you a PM, didn't realise they'd been enabled on the forum now haha.

Just had a look, looks like the assigned engineer is going to try and reproduce this, you could ask for it to be escalated to engineering to have a look.

The memory graph does look very odd!

Under advanced settings on an affected host has the line sched.mem.maxmemctl been added?

Throrik · 25 Sep 2020 at 16:12

ChrisD. said:
Just had a look, looks like the assigned engineer is going to try and reproduce this, you could ask for it to be escalated to engineering to have a look.

The memory graph does look very odd!

Under advanced settings on an affected host has the line sched.mem.maxmemctl been added?

Yeah, he's been discussing with Engineering - we can easily reproduce it by allowing the clusters to become saturated again and go >90% utilisation on memory as we're massively oversubscribed (despite our tech director denying this) but this has major impact for the clients which we can't really afford at the moment.

sched.mem.maxmemctl has been checked yeah, one of the first things I looked at. I will admit I had to go and pour over some of Duncan Eppings infamous articles on the finer details for this case haha.

Cromulent · 25 Sep 2020 at 17:22

#Chri5# said:
As a MSP (or whatever tag you want), I'd expect that you'd need to look at the specific hosting / service provider product & licensing models:

https://www.vmware.com/uk/partners/service-provider.html
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/licensing-programs/spla-program?activetab=spla-programrimaryr2

It's a while since I was involved with the Microsoft SPLA stuff, but IIRC, if you want to offer rented Windows Servers, then you can only use SPLA licenses. Biggest benefits is probably them being PAYG, so your costs grow with your customer base.

Thank you for the links. Thinking about this a bit more I think I'll give the Microsoft stuff a miss. I'd love to learn Windows Server but for the time being, I don't have the knowledge to offer it to clients so I'll just stick to Linux.

When it comes to VMware everything looks very promising. I've been reading about it this afternoon. The important thing is that it is easy to incorporate into custom code and script things like virtual machine creation and booting etc. I use JavaScript, Python and C++ in various parts of my stack and the VMware solution would need to fit into that scenario. The big advantage of QEMU and KVM is that it is essentially just a couple of (albeit complicated) command-line tools that you can use with other Linux tools very easily and thus is very easy to script. Does anyone have any sources about real-world scenarios where people have integrated VMware into custom applications?

Cromulent · 25 Sep 2020 at 17:31

Found what I was looking for and from a development point of view, it looks really promising but complicated. If I become a service partner does that effectively give you access to all VMware products for a monthly fee or are you restricted? I'm quite confused. I only started looking into this yesterday because I upgraded VMware Workstation Pro to version 16 and that got me thinking about VMware hypervisors.