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This tweet from @JuniperCertify has caught my attention:

Later that day, I got an e-mail from Juniper with the same announcement. Juniper has launched its Design Certification Track inside the Juniper Networks Certification Program (JNCP) and the Juniper Networks Certified Design Associate (JNCDA) is the first available certification.

The new Design Certification Track

A picture says more than a thousands words (… I found this in the blog post “Juniper Networks New Network Design Curriculum and Certifications” on the Juniper “My Certification Journey” blog):

While I was playing with my shiny, new HP StoreOnce VSA in my lab, I noticed a curious behavior. I created a NAS share for some tests with Veeam Backup & Replication. Creating a new share is nothing fancy. You can create a share in two ways:

• using the GUI, or
• using the CLI

So I created a new share:

Today, I took my very first VMware beta exam. I took the 2V0-621D exam, known as the VMware Certified Professional 6 – Data Center Virtualization Delta Beta Exam, at a local Pearson VUE test center. This exam is a possible migration paths from a valid VCP5-DCV, or any valid solution track VCP, to the VCP6-DCV certification.

The benefit of a beta exam is the low price (currently 50 US-$) and a chance to upgrade the associated certification, in this case the VCP6-DCV. This was the main reason for me to request the authorization and schedule an appointment at a local Pearson VUE testcenter. When I pass the exams, that would be a very effective and simple upgrade.

Some weeks ago, HP has published an updated version of their HP Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP). The SPP 2015.04.0 has added support for

• new HP ProLiant servers and options,
• support for Red Had Enterprise Linux 6.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, VMware vSphere 5.5 U2 and (of course) VMware vSphere 6.0,
• HP Smart Update Manager v7.2.0 was added,
• the HP USB Key Utility for Windows v2.0.0.0 can now handle downloads greater than 4GB (important, because this release may not fit on a standard DVD media…)
• select Linux firmware components is now available in rpm format

In addition, the SPP covers two important customer advisories:

Today, VMware has published the long-awaited patch for the ESXi 6.0 CBT bug. This patch is the result of a problem, which is described in KB2114076 (Backing up a virtual machine with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled fails after upgrading to or installing VMware ESXi 6.0). All customers that upgraded to ESXi 6.0 or installed ESXi 6.0 were affected.

Symptoms of this bug were:

• Powering on virtual machines fails
• Expanding the size of a virtual disk fails
• Taking virtual machine quiesced snapshots fails
• Error messages like “An error occurred while taking a snapshot: msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCINGERROR” (vSphere Client), “WARNING: CBT: 191: No memory available! Called from 0x4180219af50e” (vmkernel.log) or “Creating cbt node 92b78c-cbt failed with error Cannot allocate memory (0xbad0014, Out of memory)” in the vmware.log of the affected virtual machine

A workaround was to disable CBT, which resulted in longer running backups.

Yesterday, at 02:13am (CET), I got an awesome e-mail:

Dear Patrick,

I am pleased to welcome you to the PernixPro program!

I’m very happy to be part of this program!

PernixData | PernixPro

This program is similar to the VMware vExpert or Microsoft MVP program. It’s designed to spread the magic of PernixData FVP. I am totally convinced of PernixData FVP. Because of this, I’m very pleased to be part of the program. Thank you for the recognition!

When talking to SMB customers, most of them don’t want to talk about their backup strategy. It’s paradox: They know that data loss can ruin their business, but they don’t want to invest money into a fully tested recovery concept (I try to avoid the word “backup concept” - Recovery is the key). Because of tight budgets and lacking knowledge, many customers use traditional concepts in a virtualized world. This often ends  in traditional backup applications with agents deployed into guest OS, and backups that are written to tape (or worse: On USB disks). If you ask a customer “Why do you store your data on tape?”, only a few argue with costs per GB or performance. Most the customer argue with something like

A free StoreOnce VSA, like the well known 1 TB StoreVirtual VSA? That would be too cool to be real. But it is real! Since February, HP offers a free 1 TB version of their StoreOnce VSA. I totally missed this announcement, but thanks to Calvin Zito I noticed it today:

Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA http://t.co/71464n0iZp

— IT Godfather (@CalvinZito) April 19, 2015

The link leads to another blog post from Ashwin Shetty (Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA), in which he provides more information about the free 1 TB StoreOnce VSA.

There’s a world below clouds and enterprise environments with thousands of VMs and hundered or thousands of hosts. A world that consists of maximal three hosts. I’m working with quite a few customers, that are using VMware vSphere Essentials Plus. Those environments consist typically of two or three hosts and something between 10 and 100 VMs. Just to mention it: I don’t have any VMware vSphere Essentials customer. I can’t see any benefit for buying these license. Most of these environments are designed for a lifeime of three to four years. After that time, I come again and replace it with new gear. I can’t remember any customer that upgraded his VMware vSphere Essentials Plus. Even if the demands to the IT infrastructure increases, the license stays the same. The hosts and storage gets bigger, but the requirements stays the same: HA, vMotion, sometimes vSphere Replication, often (vSphere API for) Data Protection. Maybe this is a german thing and customers outside of german are growing faster and invest more in their IT.

What a great show by Eric Siebert, David Davis, Simon Seagrave and their special guests Scott Davis from Infinio and John Troyer from TechReckoning! If you missed it, watch the recording!

First, I want to thank Eric for his work. If you read tweets like these, you will get a bad conscience.

https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/579867795833233408

https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/578746970753269761

This is the seventh year that Eric has organized and conducted the annual Top vBlog contest. He put so much work into this contest and this should be be recognized. I also like to thank the sponsor Infinio for supporting this contest.