The deep core of the phenomena

I was going to just tweet this news, but I thought it is too exciting for 140 characters to handle!

I'm a big believer in everything visual as you know, and I think that this kind of video based training is the way to go for anyone learning about something new for the first time. The next step, of course, would be reading full-blown books and product manuals, but again: it is way too easy to start your knowledge journey with this kind of CBTs to get you up to speed with the main concepts and most importantly to see the whole thing in front of you without worrying about setting the labs and related prerequisites.

With that said, I was really excited to know about this new releases coming soon from Trainsignal, and even more excited when I knew about the great instructors of the series: David Davis, Hal Rottenberg and Rick Scherer!

Without further ramblings, here are the main highlights of the videos included, and you can read the full details on the official site here:

VMware View & ThinApp – David Davis

• Video 1 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Overview – Understanding the Options
• Video 2 Introduction to VMware View
• Video 3 Installing VMware View 4
• Video 4 Deploying Virtual Desktops with View
• Video 5 Automated Virtual Desktop Deployment with View Pools
• Video 6 Adding a Terminal Services Pool in View
• Video 7 Understanding View Composer Linked Clones
• Video 8 Introduction to ThinApp 4
• Video 9 Installing ThinApp
• Video 10 Virtualizing Applications with ThinApp

Managing VMware vSphere with PowerCLI – Hal Rottenberg

• Video 1 Introduction to Power CLI
• Video 2 PowerShell Basics
• Video 3-1 PowerCLI Concepts – Part 1
• Video 3-2 PowerCLI Concepts – Part 2
• Video 4 Power CLI in the Real World
• Video 5 PowerCLI Cmdlet Deep Dives

Cisco Nexus 1000V VMware vSphere Third-Party Virtual Distributed Switch – Rick Scherer

• Video 1 Getting Started with the Nexus 1000V
• Video 2 Integrating the Cisco Nexus 1000V with vCenter Server
• Video 3 High Availability Option for the Cisco Nexus 1000V
• Video 4 Configuring Port Profiles on the Cisco Nexus 1000V

I'm definitely getting a copy of this as soon as it will be released!

Okay, so I'm probably the last person who wrote his VCP-410 exam on the planet, but at least I've done it with an awesome score! 481 out of 500!

I've been rescheduling this exam since November 2009 due to many factors, but mainly because of the lack of time! Today I had to sit the exam anyways to get the certificate without sitting the ICM course, and voila!

As I see from the VMware community forums, this is not an easy score to achieve, and that it also qualifies me (along with other requirements of course) to become a VMware Certified Instructor! Well, I never considered that before, but after a very recent discussion with one of the VMware'ians in my region, I was kind of enthused about this idea.

Now, I can't tell you anything about the content itself – as per the agreement that you accept at the beginning of the exam – but I can at least share with you some thoughts about my preparations and the materials I used. I always find these kind of blog post an inspiration and encouragement for me to sit my exams, so I hope it will motivate you in a way or another:

My thoughts:

• The overall exam was way easy than I expected. I remember I had a quite hard time in my VCP-310 exam, but for this one I felt very comfortable.
• The diagrams that I've been designing till date gave me an incredible knowledge about the very specific details in the subjects, and consequently helped me a lot to nail down many questions in the exam related to vDS, memory management and HA.
• The blog posts from my fellow bloggers are also very useful; I can tell you that I answered one question about the PVSCSI from Scott Sauer's awesome article here.
• If you are new to these kinds of IT exams, you have to read the questions extremely careful, especially if English is not your native language. You will get so many tricks in the wordings, and you may also be miss-directed to points that are not essential to the question being asked.
• I saw many blog posts talking about horror stories related to the config maximums questions, but I can tell you that I got only one or two of them, and they were related to information everyone should be aware of. I found Simon Long's practice tests very useful in that regard and definitely better than reading through a boring flat PDF file.
• I can tell you that 99% of the exam will come from the official VMware documentation. I can't stress enough on the importance of reading these documentations.

The Materials/facilities I used:

• Hands-on experience on vSphere since its early Beta (lab + production).
• VMware vSphere Documentations (a must, must, MUST read from a-z)
• Scott Lowe's Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0 book.
• Forbes Guthrie's vReference Card.
• Uncountable number of VMworld 2007-9 sessions

Congrats to all my fellow VCPs, and good luck for all the candidates. Don't hesitate to email me if you need any help!

• This is the first diagram of more ESX blueprints to come. Previously I was focused more onto the vSphere architectures as a whole, but there will be more granular diagrams on ESX itself as a hypervisor very soon.
• The colors play a major role in this diagram. I thought I should stick with the original colors used in the vCenter Server Recourse monitoring box (on the top right of the diagram) instead of reinventing the wheel. As an example, if you want to scan through the swapping memory reclamation technique, all what you need is to focus your sight on the red colors. Whether it’s in the VMs, hypervisor, esxtop or vCenter, the red color will always relate to the swapping activity, and so forth.
• In the MMU virtualization I did not put much detail (as I was hoping to) because of the diagram limited space, but I'm planning to make more detailed diagrams about this topic in the future, along with other technologies like NUMA and EPT/RVI for example.
• In the memory reclamation techniques, you might have noticed that the "idle memory tax" is not there. I intend to illustrate that in a deferent topic related to shares and resource management.
• The Memory compression and swapping to SSD are future features coming soon in the vSphere generation. This information was mentioned in the VMworld 2009 session TA2627 so it's public.
• The most interesting part for me while creating this diagram was the ESXTOP. I have a wild idea of creating a crazy huge diagram (poster-like) and add the deferent screens and options for ESXTOP along with real-world numbers and descriptions to show the beauty of this incredible tool. I might also use Duncan's esxtop section as a reference for the thresholds, I urge you to go there and share your experience!
• For some reason, the PDF converter kept converting the ESXTOP text box into an image and then down-sample it, which ended up not looking as sharp and clean as in the original Visio diagram. I'm trying to figure out why the Acrobat is giving me this grief, so I will probably update the PDF later on (check the version numbers).
• I've received a number of emails asking for some descriptions accompanying my diagrams (like the admission control calculations in the HA diagram), and I believe you are right about that, especially for the newbies entering the fascinating world of VMware. I'll revisit these diagrams in the future with detailed descriptions and write-ups, so stay tuned.

I hope you'll like this diagram and see the real beauty of the ESX memory management (well a glimpse of it at least). If you have any corrections or suggestions please drop a comment or email and let me know your thoughts.

Recourses:
- Book: Operating System Concepts (Part Three – Memory Management)
- Book: Modern Operating Systems 3rd Edition (Chapter 3 – Memory Management)
- Documentation: vSphere Resource Management Guide
- WP: Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMwareо ESX™ Server
- WP: Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server – by Carl A. Waldspurger
- VMworld2009 Session: TA2963 “esxtop for advanced users”
- VMworld2009 Session: TA2627 “Understanding "Host" and "Guest" Memory Usage and Related Memory Management Concepts”
- Blog: Arnim van Lieshout (Part-1 , Part-2, Part-3)

First and foremost, special thanks must go to Eric Siebert for his great efforts to organize this much awaited voting of the top virtualization blogs. I'm truly honored to make it to the list, and I appreciate all the votes from my readers and for their valuable trust.

Congratulations to everyone, and especially the 10 new bloggers who made it to the list: Vaughn Stewart, Alan Renouf, Frank Denneman, Simon Long, Simon Seagrave, Forbes Guthrie, Scott Drummonds, Maish Saidel-Keesing, and Chris Wolf.

The top 25 in order are listed below, and the complete voting statistics can be found on vSphere-Land.com here.

• Yellow Bricks – Duncan Epping
  
• Virtual Geek – Chad Sakac
  
• Scott Lowe's Blog – Scott Lowe
  
• NTPro.nl – Eric Sloof
  
• RTFM Education – Mike Laverick
  
• Virtualization Evangelist – Jason Boche
  
• VM/ETC – Rich Brambley
  
• Gabe's Virtual World – Gabrie van Zanten
  
• Virtual Storage Guy – Vaughn Stewart
  
• Virtu-Al – Alan Renouf
  
• Virtualization Pro – Eric Siebert
  
• vCritical – Eric Gray
  
• VMware Tips - Rick Scherer
  
• Frank Denneman – Frank Denneman
  
• The VM Guy – Dave Lawrence
  
• Planet VM – Tom Howarth
  
• The Slog – Simon Long
  
• VMGuru.nl
  
• Mike D's Virt. Blog – Mike DiPetrillo
  
• HyperViZor – Hany Michael
  
• Techhead – Simon Seagrave
  
• vReference – Forbes Guthrie
  
• Pivot Point – Scott Drummonds
  
• Technodrone – Maish Saidel-Keesing
  
• Chris Wolf
  

I can't finish this post without mentioning my favorite bloggers who didn't make it in the list this time, but I'm most confident that we will see many of their names in six months from now:

In no special order:

• Massimo Re Ferre'
• Arnim van Lieshout
• Scott Sauer
• Barry Coombs
• Simon Gallagher
• Joep Piscaer
• Luc Dekens
• Vladan SEGET
• Daniel Eason
• Kenneth van Ditmarsch

What a wonderful start of 2010! Yesterday I was truly honored to make it to the Planet V12n Top 5 bloggers of the year! I do understand that it's Duncan Epping's personal view, but that is by itself something to be proud of! Besides, just being there in one list with these incredible bloggers like Chad Sakac, Eric Siebert, Alan Renouf and Ken Cline, is another thing that makes you feel so proud and honored!

Hany Michael – If there is anyone who managed to create unique articles then it is Hany. His diagrams are insane. The details that he puts into every single diagram are just unseen. The following were my favorite, and let's hope Hany keeps up posting these excellent diagrams

Surprisingly, today morning I woke up to find myself considered for the Top 25 bloggers arranged by Eric Siebert (are you serious??!!):

There are also many new bloggers out there producing some great content who could make the list like Hany Michael, Scott Sauer/Aaron Sweemer, Maish Saidel-Keesing, Scott Drummonds, Frank Denneman and Steve Chambers.

Again, I simply can't believe that I'm being considered to be placed in this list, and I still see that there are so many things to be done for improving my blog to reach the high level and quality of the other blogger's contents. Your votes will be truly appreciated no matter what the results will be, and I promise all my dear readers that I'll put more efforts in 2010 to make my blog worth your valuable trust & appreciation.

Unfortunately, I don't have the plugin/statistics that list down the most viewed articles of the year (I really needed to steal this idea from Duncan & Gabe!), so I'm going to list down the posts that I've been constantly getting positive feedback about. This may help you position my very humble blog in the top 25, or let's say: help you decide whether I should even make it to the top 25 in the first place!