Into the certification saddle again. Soothing cream at the ready...

Finally, I've made time and found energy to concentrate on updating my IT certification.  I'm in sore need of it - my MCSE is in NT4, My CCNA has been out of date for god only knows how long, and the Citrix was Metaframe XP2.  Ye-es, I'm out of date.  And what I have been conscious of is that the tech knowledge that I have on tap is not perhaps all it should be, and because of that I enjoyed my last job less.  (I'm currently "resting", by the way.  More on this later.)


So I'm hitting the books again.  I'm working towards updating my MCSE to 2003 level rather than 2008 (I've barely touched 2008 so far), figuring I can take the upgrade exam later if I really want to.  I also had a set of books for the core four exams, so that helped too.  I'm also using practice exams from www.transcenders.com, who have never failed me in the past.  In my experience, the transcenders are bloody hard - if you're passing all the practice exams well, the real thing is a relative cakewalk.

So that's the core of what I do dealt with.  How about the nice-to-haves?

Cisco stuff?  It's been good knowledge to have, and occasionally it's useful.  I wouldn't say I've ever used it regularly, and the 2003 networking side seems to have been expanded enough to include enough of the additional TCP/IP stuff I got out of taking it last time around.

I've done quite a bit of VMWare stuff in my last job, so thought that maybe the VCP program would be useful.  But you have to attend the course, or you can't even take the exam.  This boils my piss for several reasons.

VMWare say - Oh, you have to do the coursework too.  It's a pre-requisite, you know. 

I say - Balls. Absolute, unalloyed, bollocks. 

This is about money, pure and simple.  This is about nice cosy tie-ins with training providers, where employers with money to spare (and how many of them are there these days?) cheerfully hand over three thousand bucks so that one of their employees can spend five days having the manual read to them.

I've been managing VM farms for yonks, and left most of them in a better state than when I arrived.  There's not a lot they haven't chucked at me.  What am I going to learn in the four days that it takes the new boy in the corner whose organization might be going virtual next year to get up to speed?  (No offence to the new boy - I've been him before)

Who's to say too, that I don't learn best self-studying?  And haven't VMWare figured anything from Microsoft, Cisco's approach?  Have they not figured that one of the reasons organizations stick with Microsoft and Cisco is because it's easy to get support?   That having a good, accessible certification program that's not treated as just another cash cow is in fact, actually an insurance for tomorrow? 

Like this tomorrow, for example, where Microsoft and Citrix offer virtualization products too.  Hyper-V is covered in the MCITP certification, there's a separate CCA for XenServer. 

And unlike VMWare, and the father-and son sack race at Mr Burn's house, attendance is not mandatory.

I wonder what virtualization solution I'll be implementing next?

Adding a VMWare node, and my big one for the year...

So I got the go-ahead to add another VMWare node to our infrastructure. This makes sense in lots of ways - I've only got two nodes at the moment and they're oversubscribed really - I couldn't run all my VM's on one box if the other fell over. I've also got another reasonably powerful, new box sitting around from our stalled Email project, so my only cost right now is in licences.

So I went to the reseller, and said simply - I want to add a new node. I'll add right now, I'm no VMWare guru. I can do what I need to with ours, I've built a fair few virtual machines on both ESX and VmWare free - we have a touching aquiantance, let's say. Our existing infrastructure is ESX 3 nodes, Virtual Center / Server 2.

Which they don't sell anymore - we're onto ver 4 - VSphere. Which doesn't work quite as wholeheartedly as the reseller led me to believe. My own silly fault for not going religiously through the upgrade section on the VMWare website, which would have pointed this out to me. This is, of course, an omission on my part of which my boss is going to remain blissfully ignorant.

The next fly in the ointment is that our existing estate is out of support. So I went back to our reseller and got a quote to renew it (without which I can't upgrade our existing nodes to VSphere and restore harmony to the universe.) Then, I thought, I'll cover my arse properly this time. So I raised a support ticket with VMWare themselves to confirm that this support contract covered everything I needed. Not too difficult, but that was a month ago, and I'm still waiting for an answer.

Anyway, licensing fun and my biggie aside, the installation's been incredibly easy. I created another VM datastore on our HP SAN, pointed the new and both old nodes towards it. The new node's picked everything up, the older ones won't pick up the new storage until they're rebooted. So now I have three datastores on the same SAN. I know I could have added extents to my existing datastores, but given the expansion in our VMWare holding that's likely over the next couple of years, I don't see that as a problem. I've got two Citrix XenApp VM's purring away on my new VSphere node, I can import VM's from the other two if required - I just can't use VMotion or HA, and I'm having to administer it for now through the VSphere client.

Which is all well and dandy, but if that's what I wanted then I could have got Citrix XenServer for nothing. Come on, VMWare, get your arse in gear.