November

I’m really happy to anounce that another course I’ve created for Pluralsight has gone live in their library today. This one has a wordy title, being Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect: Implement a Workload Management Strategy, and this is a part of the Azure AZ 303 Solutions Architect focused exam path. This year Pluralsight have been putting a very specific focus on creating Microsoft Azure content spificially targetted at helping learners learn exam objectives and pass the exam to achieve a certification, rather than going deep in to skill building of all of the solutions that are covered in an exam. These are being called “certification prep paths”. What this means is that each of the courses in the learning path for Microsoft Azure exams are hyper focused on the specific objectivies for that section of the exam being covered, so while you won’t necessarily get a deep dive of the product or technology in question, you will get the coverage you need if you have the certification in mind. ...

New Pluralsight Course: Formatting Data in PowerShell I’m a bit late to the party with this post, as this course went live around the 27th of October, 2020, but I’m happy to say I’ve had my second course at Pluralsight recently go live! This course is another PowerShell based course in the PowerShell 7 fundamentals track at Pluralsight, titled Formatting Data in PowerShell. This course is aimed to help you understand the PowerShell formatting system and why results are formatted the way they are by default, and then how to override that formatting to get the data in the format you need it in. ...

Overview A few weeks ago VMware released vSphere 6.7U1, and in that release comes a tool that has been desired by many customers and partners, which is the vCenter Converge Tool, or in other words, a tool to convert an external vCenter and PSC architecture in to an embedded deployment. In the last few releases of vCenter Server, VMware have supported replication of the PSC functionality between embedded deployment models, including Enhanced Linked Mode (named Embedded Linked Mode for an embedded deployment). It has been clear that the embedded model should now be the default model and it is the recommended model from VMware, in fact last week VMware announced their plans to deprecate the external PSC, but until today we did not have a way to automatically converge an external model in to an embedded model. ...

Disclaimer: Vembu are a sponsor of Virtual Tassie and this post is a sponsored blog post. This post has been written in my own words but may contain some material supplied by Vembu for an upcoming release or announcement. Vembu have been hard at work behind the scenes on a new version of their BDR suite and version 4.0 is due for release soon. As a quick recap, the BDR Suite is a range of products available from Vembu to help businesses with data protection and disaster recovery of their workloads. There are several products available under the suite, all of which are managed from a central management portal. ...

Last week I sat the VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualisation Deploy ( VCAP6-DCV Deploy) exam in Auckland and I’m happy to say I passed the exam. I thought I would do a bit of a write up below of my experience. I’ve been reasonably heavily focused in the VMware space for about 2 years now. Prior to that I was a stock standard Windows Sys admin. 2 years ago I was working for a University and I ended up in a role change that saw me take on a bit more in the VMware and storage space, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never had any industry certifications and in 2016 I made it a bit of a personal goal to chase a few down. Towards the middle of the year I decided to pursue the VCP6-DCV certification. Because I was new to the certification track, I had to do the foundations and VCP exams. I passed both in June. From there I was looking at doing a Microsoft Exchange / Office365 certification because I worked a lot in this space at the University, but July was when I changed jobs and my focus shifted. ...

Hi all, This is just a quick note to let you all know of a limitation with vSphere 6.5. Repointing of a vCenter Server to a Platform Services Controller (PSC) in another vSphere SSO domain SITE is not supported. Please see the caution at the top of this VMware KB article. Note: As of 21/11/2016, the KB article for repointing a VC to a PSC WITHIN the same SSO domain site (see here) also has a caution to say it is not supported with 6.5. I believe this is a mistake in the KB article, as the 6.5 documentation has steps on how to repoint within the same SSO site, and I’ve reached out to the product manager Adam Eckerle who also believes this is an error and is investigating. ...

[toc] Introduction Well, another vForum Australia event has come and gone this week and I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on my few busy days spent in Sydney attending this event. This was my third time attending vForum, and this roughly reflects how long I’ve seriously been working in the VMware ecosystem. While the last two years were OK, this year was my favourite by far, most likely due to not being afraid to meet new people and get involved in some events. Earlier this year I had a career change, and when that happened I had some moments of clarity which also resulted in me wanting to achieve some personal goals as well, and a big part of that is around community involvement. Although it is early in my own personal journey, having a glimpse into the great communities that are involved in different pockets of the IT world has been an eye opener and is an area I will personally be trying to put a lot of focus into, all while trying to manage that work / life / family balance thing! ...