Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Monthly Archives: October 2009
iSCSI LUN is very slow/no longer visible from vSphere host
Posted by on October 29, 2009
I encountered this situation in my home lab recently – to be honest I’m not exactly sure of the cause yet, but I think it was because of some excessive I/O from the large number of virtualized vSphere hosts and FT instances I have been using mixed with some scheduled storage vMotion – over the weekend all of my virtual machines seem to have died and crashed or become unresponsive.
Firstly, to be clear this is a lab setup; using a cheap/home PC type SATA disk and equipment not your typical production cluster so it’s already working pretty hard (and doing quite well, most of the time too)
The hosts could ping the Openfiler via he vmkernel interface using vmkping so I knew there wasn’t an IP/VLAN problem but access to the LUNs was very slow, or intermittent – directory listings would be very slow, time out and eventually became non-responsive.
I couldn’t power off or restart VMs via the VI client, and starting them was very slow/unresponsive and eventually failed, I tried rebooting the vSphere 4 hosts, as well as the OpenFiler PC that runs the storage but that didn’t resolve the problem either.
At some point during this troubleshooting the 1TB iSCSI LUN I store my VMs on disappeared totally from the vSphere hosts and no amount of rescanning HBA’s would bring it back.
The Path/LUN was visible down the iSCSI HBA but from the storage tab of the VI client
Visible down the iSCSI path..
But the VMFS volume it contains is missing from the list of data stores
This is a command line representation of the same thing from the /vmfs/devices/disks directory.
OpenFiler and it’s LVM tools didn’t seem to report any disk/iSCSI problems and my thoughts turned to some kind of logical VMFS corruption, which reminded me of that long standing but never completed task to install some kind of VMFS backup utility!
At this point I powered down all of the ESX hosts, except one to eliminate any complications and set about researching VMFS repair/recovery tools.
I checked the VMKernel log file (/var/log/vmkernel) and found the following
[root@ml110-2 /]# tail /var/log/vmkernel
Oct 26 17:31:56 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:48.323 cpu0:4096)VMNIX: VmkDev: 2249: Added SCSI device vml0:3:0 (t10.F405E46494C454009653D4361323D294E41744D217146765)
Oct 26 17:31:57 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:49.244 cpu1:4097)NMP: nmp_CompleteCommandForPath: Command 0x12 (0x410004168500) to NMP device "mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0" failed on physical path "vmhba0:C0:T0:L0" H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x24 0x0.
Oct 26 17:31:57 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:49.244 cpu1:4097)ScsiDeviceIO: 747: Command 0x12 to device "mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x24 0x0.
Oct 26 17:32:00 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:51.750 cpu0:4103)ScsiCore: 1179: Sync CR at 64
Oct 26 17:32:01 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:52.702 cpu0:4103)ScsiCore: 1179: Sync CR at 48
Oct 26 17:32:02 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:53.702 cpu0:4103)ScsiCore: 1179: Sync CR at 32
Oct 26 17:32:03 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:54.690 cpu0:4103)ScsiCore: 1179: Sync CR at 16
Oct 26 17:32:04 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:55.700 cpu0:4103)WARNING: ScsiDeviceIO: 1374: I/O failed due to too many reservation conflicts. t10.F405E46494C454009653D4361323D294E41744D217146765 (920 0 3)
Oct 26 17:32:04 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:55.700 cpu0:4103)ScsiDeviceIO: 2348: Could not execute READ CAPACITY for Device "t10.F405E46494C454009653D4361323D294E41744D217146765" from Plugin "NMP" due to SCSI reservation. Using default values.
Oct 26 17:32:04 ml110-2 vmkernel: 0:00:06:55.881 cpu1:4103)FSS: 3647: No FS driver claimed device ‘4a531c32-1d468864-4515-0019bbcbc9ac’: Not supported
Due to too many SCSI reservation conflicts, so hopefully it wasn’t looking like corruption but a locked-out disk – a quick Google turned up this KB article – which reminded me that SATA disks can only do so much 🙂
Multiple reboots of hosts and the OpenFiler hadn’t cleared this situation – so I had to use vmkfstools to reset the locks and get my LUN back, these are the steps I took..
You need to find the disk ID to pass to the vmkfstools –L targetreset command, to do this from the command line look under /vmfs/devices/disks (top screenshot below)
You should be able to identify which one you want by matching up the disk identifier.
Then pass this identifier to the vmkfstools command as follows (your own disk identifier will be different) – hint: use cut & paste or tab-completion to put the disk identifier in.
vmkfstools-L targetreset /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.F405E46494C4540096(…)
You will then need to rescan the relevant HBA using the esxcfg-rescan command (in this instance the LUN is presented down the iSCSI HBA – which is vmhba34 in vSphere)
esxcfg-rescan vmhba34
(you can also do this part via the vSphere client)
if you now look under /vmfs/volumes the VMFS volume should be back online, or do a refresh in the vSphere client storage pane.
All was now resolved and virtual machines started to change from (inaccessible) in the VM inventory back to the correct VM names.
One other complication was that my DC, DNS, SQL and vCenter server are all VMs on this platform and residing on that same LUN. So you can imagine the havoc that causes when none of them can run because the storage has disappeared; in this case it’s worth remembering that you can point the vSphere client directly at an ESX node, not just vCenter and start/stop VMs from there – to do this just put the hostname or IP address when you logon rather than the vCenter address (and remember the root password for your boxes!) – if you had DRS enabled it does mean you’ll have to go hunting for where the VM was running when it died.
In conclusion I guess there was gradual degradation of access as all the hosts fought with a single SATA disk and increased I/O traffic until the point all my troubleshooting/restarting of VMs overwhelmed what it could do. I might need to reconsider how many VMs I run from a single SATA disk as I’m probably pushing it too far – remember kids this is a lab/home setup; not production, so I can get away with it 🙂
In my case it was an inconvenience that it took the volume offline and prevented further access, I can only assume this mechanism is in-place to prevent disk activity being dropped/lost which would result in corruption of the VMFS or individual VMs.
With the mention of I/O DRS in upcoming versions of vSphere that could be an interesting way of pre-emotively avoiding this situation if it does automated storage vMotion to less busy LUNs rather than just vMotion between hosts on the basis of IOPs.
Installing VMware Workstation on Windows 7
Posted by on October 27, 2009
You may recall I previously posted on problems installing VMware Workstation 6.5 on Windows 7, this problem seems to have been resolved with the upcoming VMware Workstation 7 which adds support for Windows 7 as a guest and as a host.
You can download the Workstation 7 RC build here Release Build here and see the full features list, I can confirm it installed perfectly on my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 machine.
(Screenshot from RC build, see above link for RTM build)
Some new features include official support for Windows 7 *with Aero support!* (shown below)
And best of all – it now provides "official support for ESX as a guest VM under Workstation (my previous posts on workarounds for Workstation 6.5 here)
As an aside I’m running Windows 7 on a machine with a 64-bit SSD hard drive, I’m hoping to make use of the linked clone functionality to save disk space as I often run VM’s which are built from a common base OS template (see this post here for more info on how I’ve managed linked images in the past)– performance so far has been great both for host and guest as I/O doesn’t get as bogged down as it does with traditional spindle based disks.
**UPDATE: ah, the perils of the scheduled post – as this article went live the final RTM build of Workstation 7 has been released, I’ve updated the links in this post**
Getting access to VMworld content if you couldn’t make it in person
Posted by on October 25, 2009
Now the noise around VMworld has calmed down I thought I would let you know that the vast amount of excellent technical content that was presented at the event itself is available to stream online or as an MP3 (audio only) or slide download (audio only).
As you’d expect, the catch is it’s not free to you unless you attended VMworld in-person. However, you can purchase a VMworld subscription which costs $699 USD per annum and gives you full access to stream and download content from the event, and all previous events back to 2004 – so if travel and time out of the office is not an option for you – how about you (or your employer) pay for a subscription to the content itself – which is obviously cheaper than attending in person.
I have pasted a full list of all sessions from VMworld 2009 US below – please don’t ask me to post the sessions online, this is explicitly forbidden as you’d expect – if you want the content I’m afraid you’ll have to pay – click the graphic below (but it’s excellent value IMHO
Note: you’ll need a vmworld.com account to view the session details linked below (it’s free and can be done here)
Super Sessions
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SS4880 |
NetApp: Clear up the Cloud – Key Infrastructure Requirements and Real-World Implementations |
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SS5000 |
Dell: How to Get Ahead in the Cloud With Your Feet Planted Firmly on the Ground |
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SS5001 |
VMware: Extending Your IT Beyond the Datacenter: The vCloud Initiative |
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SS5081 |
Wyse: Desktop Virtualization / Cloud Computing: We Did It – Here’s How and What we Learned |
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SS5082 |
Cisco and VMware: Delivering Innovation for Virtualization |
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SS5120 |
IBM: What You Need to Know to Virtualize Today’s Data Center |
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SS5121 |
Intel: Technology transformations central to the evolution of flexible computing |
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SS5140 |
EMC: Infrastructure Architectures Purpose Built for the Virtual Datacenter |
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SS5160 |
HP: Stop Virtualizing Servers, Start Virtualizing Infrastructure |
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SS5220 |
Symantec: Complete the Promise of Virtualization |
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SS5240 |
VMware, Cisco and EMC: Engineering Developments Enabling the Virtual Datacenter |
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SS5241 |
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SS5440 |
VMware: Enabling Better Business Outcomes with Policy-Driven Service Level Management |
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Business Workshops
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BW4740 |
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BW4741 |
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BW4742 |
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BW4743 |
Desktop Virtualization
Enterprise Applications
Technology and Architecture
Virtualization 101
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V11721 |
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V12226 |
Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution with VMware |
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V12644 |
Designing a Virtualization Infrastructure for the Small Environment |
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V12789 |
VMware vCenter Converter 101 (online only)* |
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V13100 |
The VMware Competitive Advantage – A Comparison of Server Virtualization Offerings |
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V13226 |
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V13227 |
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V13229 |
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V13395 |
Getting to Yes! Keys to Launching a Successful Data Center Virtualization Program |
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V13478 |
Executing Enterprise Virtualization – Continuing Case Study with USMC |
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V13496 |
VMware vSphere and VI Best Practices – Tips and Tricks (online only)* |
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V13760 |
Virtualization Management
Instructor-Led Labs (PDFs only)
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LAB01 |
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LAB02 |
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LAB03 |
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LAB04 |
VMware vSphere 4 – Performance Optimization & Troubleshooting |
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LAB05 |
VMware vSphere 4 – Security Hardening & Best Practices (vShield Zones) |
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LAB06 |
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LAB07 |
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LAB08 |
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LAB09 |
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LAB10 |
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LAB11 |
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LAB12 |
Self-Paced Labs (PDFs only)
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SPL13 |
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SPL14 |
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SPL15 |
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SPL16 |
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Basic Install & Config |
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SPL17 |
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SPL18 |
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SPL19 |
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SPL20 |
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SPL21 |
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SPL22 |
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SPL23 |
I wasn’t able to to go VMworld US in person this year because my wife and I were expecting a baby at that time, but luckily I received a VMworld subscription from VMware as a benefit of the vExpert programme; had I not I would have probably shelled out of my own pocket for one.
Justifying the spend
Whilst we seem to be slowly emerging from the economic apocalypse of the last 18 months it’s still very hard to get sign-off to attend such events in person and too many org’s treat VMworld/Tech-Ed as marketing type events – unless you are a vendor with a stand this couldn’t be further from the truth – these conferences are primarily technical training boot-camp camps, with some networking and general trade show features thrown in. However, they are what you make of them – the onus is on you to hunt down the sessions/track or people you are interested in – nobody drives your schedule but you – non self-starters need not apply.
I use the following analogy – which applies equally to Microsoft Tech-Ed and VMworld (..and I’m sure Oracle World, Apple World, etc.)
A typical 5-day technical training course on an individual product (Exchange, ESX, Windows 2008) in the UK will cost in the region of £1,500-3,000 GBP and those 5 days will be slow-paced (9.30 –> 4.30pm affairs). The course content and material has to cater to the lowest common denominator delegate, for a geek/experienced tech this can make for frustratingly slow progress and means you only cover a very narrow technical focus, or broad high-level overview – you can’t easily dive in and out of the bits that are relevant to you with a traditionally delivered course and even the best instructor in the world can’t dedicate that much time to you in a classroom environment.
So compare that training course is £2-3000 + travel + accommodation + time out of the office to VMworld (for example..), even at the most expensive register on-site on the day prices
- VMWorld Full Conference Pass* 1,260 EUR (£1,176 GBP at current exchange rate) (Tech-Ed 5 days c.£2000 full price* ticket)
- Travel (airfare from most of continental Europe, economy/flexible flight) c.£400**
- Hotel (normal business hotel, 4 nights) £900**
+Access to on-demand streamed and downloaded content following the conference (access allowed until the next VMworld) included
+Lunch/breakfast usually included
+Networking opportunities, access to product teams and managers included
+trade show with relevant vendors/suppliers included
+bag and pen included (ok, I’m struggling with that one! :))
note:
*Early registration attracts a large discount on the full conference pass – look for “early bird” tickets which can knock a significant percentage off the full price
**If you are prepared to “slum” it with budget airlines and hotels this is significantly cheaper.
Prices for reference:
With Microsoft Tech-Ed they usually give a complimentary Technet Direct subscription – which is worth hundreds of pounds on it’s own and gives you multiple copies of almost every Microsoft product for your own use.
So if you look at it pragmatically – VMworld/Tech-Ed give you the flexibility to tailor your content to what is important to you; as well as the ability to take all the information away with you to review online post-conference (even for the sessions you didn’t make in person)
With a training course you walk away with a nice certificate, some spiral bound manuals and if you are lucky – a pen 🙂
And they both come out to roughly the same price.
I’m not saying this is for everyone – you need to be a self-starter to make the most of these conferences, and if you do a limited scope day-job and that is all you are interested in doing, traditional training courses are probably your best bet but for those of us that work as consultants or want to broaden our horizons – go for it!
My write-ups of previous VMWorld and Tech-Ed events can be found at the following links:
Tech-Ed EMEA 2008
https://vinf.net/2008/10/31/off-to-microsoft-teched-emea-2008/
https://vinf.net/2008/11/04/teched-emea-2008-it-pro-day-1/
https://vinf.net/2008/11/04/teched-emea-2008-it-pro-day-2/
https://vinf.net/2008/11/06/teched-emea-2008-it-pro-day-3/
https://vinf.net/2008/11/06/teched-emea-2008-it-pro-day-4/
https://vinf.net/2008/11/07/teched-emea-2008-it-pro-day-5/
VMworld Europe 2009
https://vinf.net/2009/02/23/vmworld-partner-day-keynote/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/24/vmworld-partner-day-wrap-up/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/24/vmworld-europe-day-1-keynote/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/24/dc02-best-practices-for-lab-manager-vmworld-europe-2009/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/24/dc14-overview-of-2009-vmware-datacenter-products-vmworld-europe-2009/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/24/vmworld-europe-day-1-wrap-up/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/24/vmware-client-hypervisor-cvp-grid-application-thoughts/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/25/vmworld-europe-day-2-keynote/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/25/how-vmware-it-use-vmware-internally/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/26/hands-on-lab-01-vsphere-features-overview/
https://vinf.net/2009/02/26/hands-on-lab-12-cisco-nexus-1000v-switch/
Windows 7 and the Intel 855 video driver problem
Posted by on October 21, 2009
Judging by the several hundreds of hits that this post on my blog gets every day since January I would say there is a *serious* demand from the general internet community to use laptops with the Intel 855 family video chipset with Windows 7, and it’s not even been released to the general public until now!
Whilst this may be an “older” chipset; in reality those laptops aren’t beyond serviceable life – and if anything the performance increases in Win7 will make them more usable and extend their life a bit further.
Nobody realistically expects fantastic 3D/Aero graphics from this combo, but a driver that supports the panel’s native resolution would be more than adequate for browsing/word processing etc. no doubt these ex-corporate laptops are being cycled around family members/students for some time to come rather than forcing people to squint at standard VGA.
There are ways to get the Vista driver bodged into Win7 (see this post and it’s comments), but it’s far from ideal or stable
Please Intel/Microsoft – surely you must be able to produce a basic/compatible driver by today! otherwise I’m sure some of the Windows launch parties could be something of a disappointment!
if it goes by way of evidence – this is the number of hits my original blog post about this problem has had in the last 10 months, it will be interesting to see what it does from launch day onwards!
BlackBerry app for WordPress
Posted by on October 15, 2009
I must be a bit behind the times, but I have just stumbled across the beta version of a blackberry app that let’s you publish and manage your blog directly from your phone, there is also an iPhone version
Very cool, you can now all look forward to accidental posts from my pocket and I can look forward to RSI from my blackberry Pearl 🙂
If you are interested you can download it OTA from httphere
Incidentally it also supports the builtin camera, and this post was typed on on a blackberry 8120 pearl.
Can’t see a way of viewing stats yet, which would be a nice addition.
VMware AppSpeed Probes and more 2% Maintenance Mode Problems
Posted by on October 14, 2009
Following on from my last post on problems entering maintenance mode with FT-enabled VMs, I seem to have found another one – if you have the rather excellent AppSpeed product deployed on an ESX cluster and you want to put a host into maintenance mode it gets stuck at 2% as it can’t move the AppSpeed probe VM onto an alternative host
If you try to manually vMotion the problematic probe off to another host in the cluster you get the following error
If you shutdown or suspend the AppSpeed probe VM then the switch to maintenance mode continues as expected.
This would make sense as it plugs directly into a dedicated vSwitch on that host to monitor network traffic so vMotioning it off wouldn’t be of any use – assuming the other nodes in the cluster are also running AppSpeed probes.
However it would be great if there was a more automated way to handle this? guess it’s tricky as on one hand its great that AppSpeed doesn’t rely on any ESX-host agents and is essentially self-contained with probes running as VM appliances but on the other hand the probe doesn’t know the guest is being put into maintenance mode so should be shut down/suspended rather than vMotioned to an alternative host.
There is integration with the vCenter server via a plug-in so maybe in future versions that could trap a maintenance mode event and initiate (or suggest) shutting down the AppSpeed probes.
VMware FT, 2 Nodes and stuck on 2% entering maintenance mode
Posted by on October 14, 2009
I have a 2 node vSphere cluster running on a pair of ML115g5 servers (cheap ESX nodes, FT compatible) and I was trying to put one into maintenance mode so I could update its host profile, however it got stuck at 2% entering maintenance mode, it appeared to vMotion off the VMs it was running as expected but never passed the 2% mark.
After some investigation I noticed there were a pair of virtual machines still running on this host with FT enabled – the secondary was running on the other server ML115-1 (i.e not the one I wanted to switch to maintenance mode)
I was unable to use vMotion so that the primary and secondary VMs were temporarily running on the same ESX host (and that doesn’t make much sense anyway)
That makes sense, the client doesn’t let you deliberately do something to that host that would break the FT protection as there would be no node to run the secondary copy. incidentally this is good UI design – you have to opt-in to break something – so you just have to temporarily disable FT and should be able to proceed.
If I had a 3rd node in this cluster there wouldn’t be a problem as it would vMotion the secondary (or primary) to an alternative node automatically (shown below is how to do this manually)
However in my case all of the options to disable/turn-off FT were greyed out and you would appear to be stuck and unable to progress.
the fix is pretty simple and you just need to cancel the maintenance mode job by right-clicking in the recent tasks pane and choosing cancel, which then re-enables the menu options and allows you to proceed. Then turn-off (not disable – that doesn’t work) fault tolerance for the problematic virtual machines
The virtual machine now doesn’t have FT turned on, if you just disable FT it doesn’t resolve this problem as it leaves the secondary VM in-situ, you need to turn it off.
So, moral of the story is – if you’re stuck at 2% look for virtual machines that can’t be vMotioned off the host – if you want to use FT – a 3rd node would be a good idea to keep the VM FT’d during individual host maintenance; this is a lab environment rather than an enterprise grade production system but you could envision some 2-node clusters for some SMB users – worth bearing in mind if you work in that space.
Designing Active Directory – Talk by Brian Desmond in London
Posted by on October 13, 2009
If you’re in the UK and are interested in Active Directory – Brian Desmond (an MVP for AD) will be giving a talk on Active Directory design on 29th October in London.
Details here on the ADUG website here and – registration is free.
I’ve been working with Active Directory for a long time but it’s always refreshing to have some Q&A with industry peers, so if you can make it it promises to be an interesting evening.
Not sure if it will be recorded/streamed for people that can’t make it – if not can I make that suggestion to the ADUG team- I can bring some recording equipment if you need it.
Performance Update on Cheap vSphere Server
Posted by on October 7, 2009
My home lab has a pair of HP ML110 servers with 8Gb of RAM running vSphere 4 (more info here) it’s configured in a cluster with iSCSI storage running from an old HP D530 PC with a 1Tb hard disk running OpenFiler. it performs pretty well and meets most of my needs, I thought I’d do a quick couple of screenshots of the average performance I have seen on it over the last 3 months.
it’s running a constant load of about 17 mostly Windows virtual machines and a varying load of test environments which are suspended to disk – think the most I have ever had running on the 2-node cluster at one time was about 45 VMs and performance was ok – trying to use VUM to patch all those VMs at the same time killed things though, as all the VMs are running from a single 1Tb SATA disk over OpenFiler.
This is a list of all the VMs, you can create your own html list as follows, or you can also save it as a CSV to import into Excel to manipulate.
the following screenshots show the last 3 months of performance stats from vCenter as the number of VMs has increased and decreased as I’ve provisioned and removed VMs for testing.
Overall CPU usage for the cluster
vMotion and VM Reconfiguration activities
Cluster Memory consumption
The new overview page feature can show you a quick summary of virtual machine performance
Drilling down into the performance tab on each host gives more information on specific performance like disk and network
You can also produce a stacked graph showing guest CPU usage of each VM on a host
or identify which VMs have the busiest virtual disks
You can also view a stacked (per VM) graph showing on a per-host basis how much physical RAM the guests are consuming, relative to each other over time.
My Technical Book Reading List
Posted by on October 6, 2009
I work as a technical architect in a consultancy role in the Windows Infrastructure & Virtualization space, and as such I’m paid for my experience and opinion, but it’s also an important part of my job to proactively keep on to top of industry trends and investigate new technologies that may solve customer problems, even problems they don’t know they have {yet}.
Twitter and blogs are a useful resource for current and less formal or structured information if used carefully, but it’s all too easy to be distracted from the job at hand by the latest shiny tech or flamewar so you need to measure the amount of time you spend there and they are no substitute IMHO for traditional study and hands-on “playing” time.
Like many I’m currently studying for my VCP4 exam, and have recently upgraded my MCSE to the current MCITP:EA 2008 certification so I thought I would publish a reading list for anyone else looking to do the same as well as general industry books I have been reading recently.
Maintaining a balance between this study/pro-active time and staying a well utilised/billed out resource is hard and I find it often spills into my own personal time so you need to have a good level of personal interest/dedication otherwise you will struggle – I’m a geek at heart and I look upon this as investing in my career but it’s more important that your kids remember what you look like!
This is one area where travelling for work via public transport rather than driving works well – plenty of study time to be had with a good pair of headphones
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ASIN: B000POGDVG |
Shure Se210 Sound Isolating Earphones- White: Electronics & Photo(i.e not the rubbish ones that ship with the iPod), a good list of tunes to block everyone else out and a book/laptop with VMs.
Maintaining a good home lab environment is also critical for me, and I run all the services for my demanding demo environments as well as my home users (read: wife & kids) there and that really does teach you something about availability :) I wrote some details of my lab setup here but I have an updated post in the pipeline as there have been some significant changes to support my vSphere study.
Anyways, enough rambling and on with the list..
VCP4 Upgrade
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ISBN: 0470481382 |
Mastering VMware VSphere 4: Scott Lowe: BooksYou can’t go far wrong with the Lowe, this is the definitive vSphere book at the moment.
VCP4 practice exams online at the SLOG here
VCP4 resource list here
if you wanted a similar book for VI3 I would recommend this one;
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ISBN: 0971151083 |
VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide: Scott Herold, Ron Oglesby, Mike Laverick: BooksMicrosoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP)
Windows 2008 MCITP Core Exams study guide
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ISBN: 0735625727 |
MCITP Self-Paced Training Kit Exams 70-640, 70-642, 70-643, 70-647 : Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise Administrator Core Requirements: Windows … Core Requirements PRO-Certification: Nelson Ruest, Danielle Ruest, Tony Northrup, J.C. Mackin, Anil Desai, Orin Thomas, John Policelli, Ian McLean, P. Mancuso, and D.R. Miller Dan Holme: BooksThis is a comprehensive set of books for the 4 core exams, not as dry as previous versions and lots of practical lab excercises, as usual good set of practice tests on the included CD
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ISBN: 0735623902 |
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit Exam 70-620 : Configuring Windows Vista™ Client: Configuring Windows Vista Client Self Paced Training Kit 70-620: Ian McLean and Orin Thomas: BooksFor the client component of the MCITP:Enterprise Administrator cert
MOSS 2007 Exam
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ISBN: 0470226633 |
MCTS – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Configuration Study Guide: Exam 70-630: James Pyles: BooksNot the most exciting product for me, but it does cover the exam requirements – seems to spend a lot of time explaining what each menu item is within the MOSS UI, which was a bit frustrating.
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ISBN: 0735625387 |
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices: Bill English Ben Curry, Daniel Webster, SharePoint Product teams: BooksVery good book, puts a lot of real world around MOSS deployments
General Good Books to Read
Cisco UCS
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ISBN: 0557057396 |
Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server – UCS Unified Computing System: Silvano Gai, Tommi Salli, Roger Andersson: BooksGood book covering what Cisco’s new UCS blade system and consolidated I/O model is; not much information available elsewhere at the moment, although 1/2 the book is spent discussing the various CPU/memory bus architectures which is a good update to your knowledge but would have liked to have seen more time dedicated to how UCS works and some example configurations
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ISBN: 158705888X |
I/O Consolidation in the Data Center: A Complete Guide to Data Center Ethernet and Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Networking Technology: IP Communications: Silvano Gai, Claudio DeSanti: BooksGeneral computing/tech
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ISBN: 0596102356 |
Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications: Cal Henderson: BooksAn excellent book, with a focus on open source technologies and a lot of practical insight from the building of Flickr – good for briding the infrastructure/application divide.
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ISBN: 0393333949 |
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from "Edison" to "Google": N Carr: Books
If you don’t get cloud computing or understand where things could go, you need to read this book, brilliant and not a long, drawn-out read and not that technical.
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ISBN: 0596515812 |
Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB: James Murty: BooksAimed more at developers rather than infrastructure people but if you want to try things out for yourself it has some easy to understand examples.
I hope you found this list useful, you may notice that these are affiliate links – should you wish to purchase any of these books Amazon will pay me a nominal commission which I can use towards the normally ad-free funding of this site and my time, although you are entirely able to go and purchase any of these books directly from the Amazon site.
Baby and non-IT related books
We recently had our 2nd child and it reminded me of these great books for all fathers to-be 🙂
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ISBN: 140190288X |
The Bloke’s Guide to Pregnancy: Jon Smith: Books|
ISBN: 1844250598 |
The Haynes Baby Manual: Conception to Two Years: Ian Banks: Books|
ISBN: 1931686238 |
The Baby Owner’s Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-shooting Tips and Advice on First-year Maintenance: Louis Borgenicht, Joe Borgenicht: Books
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 