Review of VMware vSphere: Design Workshop [V6.5]

I had the opportunity to attend the VMware vSphere: Design Workshop [V6.5]  which I took as a Live On-line class. The class was 3 days long and I took the class so I could sit for the VCAP 6.5 Data Center Design Certification. I am still in the process of studying for the exam and hope to sit for it within the next few months. I will probably have a few more reviews to do of some of the study material I used and hopefully I will be able to turn that into a Study Guide of my own that I will be able to share. 

The class began like any other with introductions and an overview of the class and course material. They even had a section to cover where I could get coffee .and find the restroom (which I found humorous since I took the class in my dining room, so hopefully I am well acquainted with were to find these services in my home). 

My class mates consisted of mostly VMware Employees (TAMs and Systems Engineers) and a few Sysadmins from Partners or clients of varying levels of experience with vSphere. In all I feel like I was in a good group. There was a great deal of discussions had on various topics in the materials and it was interesting to see everyone's take on things based on their personal experiences. 

Our instructor was very knowledgeable and although at the time I took this class I don't believe he sat for the exam himself he did have the VCAP - DCD 6.0. 

The modules themselves were very similar to a book I had ready called VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook. Which made me feel better for spending the money on this book before I took this class. Pretty much everything that was covered in the book was also covered in class which made it more of a review for me than anything else.

What was interesting about this class is that all the modules and the labs built off of each other. Meaning if you made a mistake on module 2 it would effect your results in module 7 which can be very frustrating if you do not double check your work. At the end of each day we had somewhere between 45 minutes to 3 hours of homework (labs) that we had to complete (otherwise you would not be able to complete the final lab).

At the end of the class you are presented with you own design which you should have been able to create by doing the labs, however VMware is also nice enough to give you the answers (the real design) for you to study for the exam. I would definitely suggest attending this class if you are going to pursue certification  or if you want to get a greater understanding of vSphere Design.

A new beginning....

Yesterday I was named the Partner VMUG Leader for the Philadelphia VMware User Group.

I look forward to serving the local VMUG Community and hope to assist in making it stronger and more active.

To find out more about VMUG you can check it out here:

https://www.vmug.com/

While you are there you should also check out the VMUG Advantage program which provides an amazing opportunity for people looking to gain experience with VMware products but with the EVAL-Experience and discounts on VMware Classes and Exams. Find out more here.

https://www.vmug.com/Join/VMUG-Advantage-Membership

Okay, I think I have a plan.....

After some quick thinking and talking it over with my Family and my boss. I am going to upgrade my VCP 6.0 to a VCP 6.5 and then move forward with the VCAP 6.5.  As I already have a VCP 6.0 that is active I am eligible to take the Delta exam which I have done twice before.


More Information to come....

ARGH!!!! You have got to be kidding me here!

So I took the design class that I was registered for, only to find out on the first day of  training that I am not eligible to take the VCAP 6.5. Now I know I have been doing this for a while, but the last time I looked into it, you were able to upgrade to a higher tier cert on a newer version as long as you had an active VCP. Well it turns out that has been changed.

I will do a post in the coming days to talk about the class, and right now I need to regroup and figure out what I am going to do.

It's Official!!!

I just received my digital books for VMware vSphere: Design Workshop [V6.5]! I am looking forward to taking this class next week

How to tell if your users AD account password has expired

Like I said in a previous post we are dealing with the after math of a disaster so most of our Administrative tools are still offline until we get around to bringing back online. One of those tools was a real life saver and would email not only the admin team but the end users that their AD password was about to expire. So without that we are flying blind, which is not a big deal for the day to day management of our network.


Moving along I got a call the other day from one of my users who was working remote who said that he could not connect to email. So I asked him when was the last time he reset his password, which he said he did not know.

So I opened up my command line and ran the following command

net user %USERNAME% /domain

Replace %Username% with the username you want to query and it will return a ton of information about the user account including the date the password will expire. 

TCP Reverse Proxies, the next step in web hosting

So as I mentioned previously, I have been dealing with a DR issue at work. One of the services that we did not bring back due to networking issues is our IIS ARR server which was acting as a reverse proxy for several of our web services.

So there are many options out there which we can go with so but I would say that the front runners at this time are either NGINX or PFSense. Over the next few days I will go into more details with additional posts with more information.