A couple of days ago, VMware announced that they would offer existing VCP5-DCV certified folks a shortcut to extending their certification, by introducing a new delta exam. The new test is a Pearson Vue delivered test as you would expect and has the code VCP550D. The exam is the same duration (75 minutes) and length (65 questions) as the normal VCP5 exam, but it is taken remotely like the introductory level VCA exams and is also considerably cheaper than the full exam, at £80.

In a move that justifies (if that’s the right word) the developments made by Nutanix, Simplivity et al, VMware announced two releases of their Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA) products, which are called VMware EVO. This is the Project Marvin initiative which has been whispered about for a while since an internal VMware poster was seen up on a wall by someone who shouldn’t have seen it! The EVO part means Evolution and the product names RAIL and RACK are down to the amount of space they take up in the datacentre.

A personal snapshot of some of the big news from the show; The keynote from day 1 mentioned IT bravely delivering brave products by making brave decisions, bravely. There were also some new product numbers announced, which is what people really want to hear, I guess. I’m sure Pat Gelsinger broke the vSphere 6.0 Beta NDA by mentioning that it contained VVols, but who’s gonna tell him? There was also an update to the cloud stack, with vCloud Suite 5.

I’ve been talking to my VMware Technical Account Manager about access to the vSphere Beta for a while now but in a surprising move (for me at least) VMware have just announced the public beta of vSphere 6. Of course, the usual beta rules apply, meaning no public disclosure about the contents of the beta, but since it’s a public beta, anyone and everyone can sign up for it. That means I don’t need to tell you anything as you can go and look for yourself.

An increasing number of motherboards these days have USB sockets built in, which makes it very easy (and cheap) to run an ESX host, without having to obtain any local DAS storage. Good for the home labber, also good for the corporate guy who’s boot-from-SAN usually. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel here, since there are already blogs out there that talk you through the entire process - like this one from Brian Graf at vtagion;

Intro Migrating VMs to a NetApp filer is all well and good, but there’s a disk alignment issue to get past once those migrations are done, otherwise your expected performance will be seriously impacted. You should use the version of the mbralign tool included with the latest NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) to check VMDK partition alignment. There is a version of mbralign for ESX hosts and one for ESXi hosts and you’re given the option to select the correct one at download.

Just as I was thinking about starting this blog site, along came the public release of VMware’s entry in to the cloud space, vCloud Hybrid Service. I think that VMware first started telling me that I was on a “Journey to the Cloud” at VMworld way back in 2008. I guess I have been meandering a bit since then as I am not sure that I have gone too far on that journey.