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vCenter Operations Blog Series

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vcops-dashboard-screen

I recently came across the blog series that David Davis, of VirtualizationSoftware.com, guest wrote for VMware on VCOPS which I though was a great resource for those ramping up or looking to dive deeper into VCOPS.  I couldn’t find a list of all the articles in  the series, so I created one (14 posts at time of writing):

  1. Why Do You Need More Tools?
  2. How to Select a Virtualization Management Tool
  3. Evaluating VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite
  4. Understanding VMware Center Operations Management Suite Editions
  5. vCenter Operations Manager Architecture
  6. Installing vCenter Operations Manager
  7. Adding Your License in vCenter Operations Manager
  8. Understanding vCenter Operations Badges
  9. Right-Sizing Virtual Machines with vC Ops
  10. Configuring Policies and Groups
  11. Understanding and Configuring Alerts
  12. Introduction to Capacity Planning From the World View
  13. Capacity Analysis of Your vSphere Hosts
  14. Capacity Analysis of Virtual Machines

 

VMware “Getting Up to Speed” Education List

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A frequent request from my clients is

what education resources do you have to help get me up to speed with recent changes?

This is always a loaded question as everyone’s current speed varies as does the type of education resources that work best for them.  However, I put together this list for a client’s architecture team recently as an attempted shot gun answer.  Sharing it hoping parts of it might be useful to others.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

VMware TV’s YouTube channel is the best portal for all kinds of various educational video.  Some of them might be included in resources listed below.

Try to leverage the VMware Learning Path tool to guide you through different learning paths based on solution, your role, or accreditation your would like to achieve.

Use the Product Walkthrough portal for self-paced review of key solutions from VMware.

Take advantage of the VMware Hands On Labs to get hands guided experience with the various product offerings without having to do any install and setup in your own lab.

Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure

Operations Management

  • Free online vCenter Log Insight videos
  • Free online vCenter Operations videos
  • HOL-SDC-1301: Applied Cloud Operations will review Log Insight and VCOPS from a cloud operations perspective
  • VCOPS Resources page has additional education items
  • Free online vCenter Orchestrator videos (remember Orchestrator comes with vSphere)
  • Orchestrator Resources page has additional education items
  • Vmware Training Courses, my general course recommendations:
    • Free VMware vCenter Operations Manager Fundamentals is a 2.5 hour online course to help you understand fundamentals
    • VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Advanced Usage and Dashboard Design — is a 3 day course focused on the advanced capabilities such as adapters, customization, and management
    • VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Analyze and Predict — 2 day course for experienced users of vSphere teaches using VCOPS as a forensic and predictive tool
    • VMware vCenter Orchestrator: Develop Workflows — 3 day course to learn to use Orchestrator to automate IT workflows for both physical and virtual environments

Software Defined Networking

Note: it’s always recommended to leverage VMware PSO Credits for education classes.  This can give you a price advantage for groups of attendees and gives you more flexibility on when to attend classes.

Temper Your New Release Excitement & Protect Yourself

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With all the new releases that have spun out of VMware in the past few months it’s great to see all the excitement from my clients wanting to upgrade (and with good reason).  There is an exciting set of new features and capabilities to add value to your environment in these releases.

However, make sure you temper your new release excitement by checking and double checking your planned upgrades to ensure everything in the infrastructure is compatabile with the new releases.  A great place to start is the Release Notes for each product’s new version.  Then check the VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes and the VMware Compatibility Guide.  The Matrixes help you understand which versions of VMware products have been tested and support working with each other (did you know that SRM 5.5 won’t work with ESXi 5.0 U3?). And the Guide helps you understand all the partner ecosystem dependancies for different aspects of the VMware solution set (did you know that SRM 5.5 doesn’t yet have an EMC SRDF SRA available?)

I use the SRM examples above as I’ve had clients in the past who rushed to upgrade SRM without checking these two resources…and broke their deployment.  When dealing with infrastructure components that are the foundation for your entire enterprise make sure you upgrade the systems from the bottom up as well as measure twice and cut once…