Eric Sloof

I’m delivering an instructor led VMware Sales Professional training this Friday so I thought what’s the best way to deliver such a training? The first thing I did was getting certified myself. After studying hard on the sales topics I’m finally a VSP. Hoera! Here are my scores :

Selling Infrastructure Optimization Solutions  01-Apr-2008  83.0%
Delivering the VMware Message  31-Mar-2008  81.3%
VMware Solutions Overview  31-Mar-2008  93.4%
VMware Products Overview  30-Mar-2008  90.0%
VMware Corporate Overview  30-Mar-2008  87.5%
Virtualization Overview   30-Mar-2008  0.33 90.0%

The VMware Sales Professional (VSP) program is an online, self-paced curriculum that has been broken down into an accreditation for each of VMware’s four main solution areas. The first accreditation can be completed in about 5-7 hours and each subsequent accreditation requires about 1-2 hours. Together, this sales-focused training curriculum:

• Jumpstarts a person’s understanding of how to sell VMware products & solutions
• Reduces the time needed to be effective
• Ensures a consistent message is being evangelized

Coming soon to a city near you: VMware Virtualization Forum 2008. VMware Virtualization Forum 2008 is the key virtualization event of the year. The Forum will bring together the industry's market leaders to address the business and technology challenges that CIOs and IT managers face today. At VMware's Virtualization Forum 2008 you will receive the latest product updates and information, see live demos and connect with VMware and VMware's partners. The Forum will provide you with the deep level of understanding required to turn your infrastructure challenges into a competitive advantage through VMware's virtualization solutions/technology.

The bottom line of the Yankee Group report "Virtualization Price War: VMware’s Little Big Horn?" is - Rapid commoditization and intensified competition in virtualization technology has precipitated a price war, which is a key element of emerging Anywhere Applications environment. This war is a boon for corporate enterprises who can pick and choose from a wide array of products at discounted prices.�? And makes a comparison between Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) and VMware ESX. - I didn’t know that Longhorn has HA and where is Hyper-V in the comparison? Don’t make me laugh!

This course is open to anyone but is designed for students who have already taken a VMware Infrastructure 3 instructor-led course. It assumes a strong working knowledge of VMware Infrastructure 3. The course contains sixteen brief eLearning modules. Topics include: an overview module of many the new features, a module on upgrading an existing VMware Infrastructure to ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, and several guided demonstrations on how to operate three of the key new features: Storage VMotion, VMware Update Manager, and Guided Consolidation. In addition, the course provides eight interactive simulations, which give the student hands-on practice with the procedures being demonstrated.

The VMware Certified Design Engineer certification will be available later this year. The certification involved taking several courses and exams, including:

• Courses
  Install and Configure
  DSA
  Design course (currently under development)
• Exam
  VCP on VI3
  Enterprise Exam (currently in private beta)
  Design Exam (currently under development)

Once all of this has been completed the candidate must present a defensible design to a panel of VMware Solution Architects for consideration. As you may guess, this is a certification specifically targeted for VMware partners that will be assisting VMware in design and deployment and is only intended for a relatively small audience. That being said, the Enterprise Exam, which has a number of live lab style questions, should be available to the public in the next few months and may become part of a mid-line certification between VCP on VI3 and VCDX. That is also under consideration.

Jon C. Hall Technical Certification Developer VMware, Inc.

VMware is proud to announce a new forum on the VMTN community, the VMware Certified Professional forum. This forum is for discussion and questions regarding the VCP program and exam. It is moderated by members of the certification team and frequented by VCPs and others knowledgeable in VMware products.

Scott has sent me a heads’ up this morning, he completed the physical build out of the lab this weekend.  Now he’s loading up various hypervisors to test the “ease of use�? and performance of each.

Most intelligent men would not state this, but I was fortunate enough to have my wife spending a week in Spain visiting her sister. This allowed me to pull a few late nighters and not only finish racking and cabling all the servers, but also custom cut and run all network cables (those that I could unplug for now anyways). To top it all off, I even got all 5 of my PE 1435's configured with various hypervisors.

Vizioncore's vCharter Pro is the first enterprise-class, scalable performance monitoring solution for companies running hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual machines.  Powered by Foglight®, vCharter Pro has built-in awareness of VMware® Infrastructure, which provides layered views encompassing VirtualCenter, Datacenter, clusters, resource pools, ESX Server, VM and datastore levels. vCharter Pro can help administrators pinpoint resource contention issues among CPU, memory, disk or NIC.  Collected metrics are filtered via rules and customized alarms and stored in a central database for unattended monitoring and historical trending.  With just a few mouse clicks, administrators can drill from the top down through lower layers to uncover problems, and by clicking on alarms, can obtain further information through pop-up windows.

NetCmdlets V2 is packed full of exciting new features including PowerShell Server (formerly PowerShell Remoting), Parameter Sets, Object Pipelining, and new Cmdlets for SSH Enabled Remoting and Amazon Web Services (S3) Integration. The /n software NetCmdlets extend the features of Microsoft Windows PowerShell with a broad range of network management and messaging capabilities. The current release contains more than 30 Cmdlets providing access to network and host protocols such as SNMP, LDAP, DNS, Syslog, HTTP, WebDav, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, Rexec/RShell, Telnet, and more.

Today one of the attendees in the Virtual Infrastructure 3 Install and Configure class discovered a new ESX 3.5 warning. When you want to use the VI-Client to take over the console of a virtual machine and at the same moment you are already on this VM running the VI-client. Are you still following me ;-) ? The following warning will appear in the console screen. By the way the WebAcces console doesn’t throw this error and is still singing around.