DISCLAIMER: I work for a Company which is a Compellent Business Partner, we sell and provide consultancy services on Compellent products.
Given my job, I deal every day with VMware customers, and, at least in Italy, the most misunderstood and mishandled aspect of a virtual infrastructure is the storage part.
VMware introduces another powerful layer on top of the already complex SAN scenario and this often confuse the customers even more, in order to mitigate this several big storage names (NetApp and EMC in primis) created plugins to seamlessly manage storage directly from the familiar vSphere client, hiding many of the repetitive and sometimes complex tasks.
Compellent may not be the first at the game but they surely took an interesting approach, they provide integration at both ends of the storage stack.
In fact you can provision and manage the storage from a vSphere plugin (expected to be GA during Q4) or you can do the same from Enterprise Manager, which is the management interface for your Compellent storage infrastructure (provides a single pane-of-glass on all your Compellent systems).
This approach in my opinion gives you a great degree of flexibility, if you’re a storage guy and you’re in charge to provide storage to your company’s VMware infrastructure you can use your familiar storage GUI to provision storage at the Datastore level and if you’re a multiple-caps IT guy, you can use the vSphere client to do the same with a simple wizard, without getting your hands dirty inside the storage interface.
Below you can find a couple of videos showing the integration at both ends:
Today an e-mail from the VMware VCDX cert team ended up into my inbox, I was eagerly hoping for a confirmation of my VCDX design submission (still waiting from the 26th of August ) but instead it was an official notification of something I was actually already aware of:
Registration for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 4 – Datacenter Administration (VCAP4-DCA) exam is now open.
Registrations for the VMware Enterprise Administration on VMware Infrastructure 3 Exam: VCE310 have been closed. No new registrations for this exam will be accepted.
The final opportunity to deliver a defense in pursuit of the VMware Certified Design Expert on VI3 (VCDX3) certification will be at VMware Partner Exchange in Orlando, Florida the week of February 7, 2011.
As a matter of fact they extended the deadline for those who were already preparing a design defense, and as the next paragraph show us, the last application deadline for VCDX3 is now extended to November 22th:
If you have passed both the VCE310 and VCD310 exams and wish to apply for a VCDX3 certification:
The application will be due on November 22, 2010, at 5:00 PM PST.
This will be the final opportunity to achieve the VCDX3 certification.
Please note that defense slots are limited and will be reserved for candidates who submit completed applications in the order received.
VCAP4-DCD Exam vouchers will be distributed to eligible candidates at a later time.
Included in the e-mail there are some interesting Q&A:
Q. Will my VI3-based credentials be withdrawn or invalidated?
A. No. Holders of VCP3 and VCDX3 retain those credentials in perpetuity. VMware believes that they remain significant differentiators. However, over time their significance compared to vSphere 4-based credentials will gradually diminish. As time goes on, potential customers, employers, or partners will increasingly express a preference for vSphere 4 credentials.
Q. I have been preparing hard for the VCE310 and/or VCD310 exams. Hasn’t all that time I spent been wasted?
A. No. There is significant continuity between VI3 and vSphere 4. As you prepare for the VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD exams, you will be able to focus more on new features and differences, and less on fundamentals.
Q. I passed the VCE310 and the VCD310 exams; am I eligible for the discount on the VCAP4-DCA exam?
A. Yes. You are eligible for discount vouchers for both exams.
So basically, if you were desperate to meet the August 28th deadline and decided to give up, you can resume your work and try to submit a design and defend it at the Partner Exchange 2011
With the *real* VMworld winding down, the hype for the European event is building up (the event is smaller, but at least we have decent beers here ).
It’s been a LONG time since I’ve been to a VMworld event (it was February 2008), this year will be all different to me, the keynote will be delivered by the new CEO (in 2008 Diane Greene did the opening speech) and there will be a lot of new interesting ecosystem partners on the showfloor.
This year I will travel alone, I’ll stay at the CABINN Metro which is probably the cheapest hotel in Copenhagen from Monday ’til Thursday so if anyone want to join me to do a tweetup or just to share a beer at the (in)famous VMworld party just let me know, you can reach me at fabio@p2v.it or on twitter @fabiorapposelli.
Italians do it better
Se siete italiani, state leggendo il mio blog, e sarete presenti al VMworld Europe vi invito ad aggiungervi a questa lista: http://bit.ly/VMworld2010IT, sto cercando di raggruppare un contingente italiano per condividere le esperienze sulla virtualizzazione e magari riuscire finalmente a creare un VMUG Italiano, se vi piace l’idea fate girare il link!
Like many before, I borrow this post title from (the always great) Duncan Epping to say that I’ve sit through the Design Exam and PASSED!
This time I scored 400, a little better than my VCE310, which in my opinion was much harder.
The day before taking the test I did an extensive research on the Internet to see what the other who passed VCD310 were saying about the test, and after taking it I can affirm that everyone was right there was one of the multiple-answer question with a duplicated answer, leading to an impossible to answer question, also the design portion was quite messy, I completed it with 10 seconds left but I’m sure that my drawing was awful.
Right now I should be on holiday but I’m neck-deep into the VCDX application form, I’m trying to reach the last deadline for VCDX3 defenses which is August 30th, wish me luck!
The most important change (in my opinion) is regarding vSphere 4.1 support, now you can run ESX 4.1 on Fusion, definitely fundamental if you’re a developer or an architect.
) but instead it was an official notification of something I was actually already aware of:
