Passed the VCP4 (vcp410) exam today

I got an instructor level score, but that thing isn't easy. It's probably the most bizzare test i've ever taken. Most of the questions look like this:

You did X horribly wrong and against all best practices and recommendations.

Now you want to do Y.

What happens?

I dunno..I never did X wrong, so Y always works?

I'm just glad its over.

HP ESX Management Agent Cheat Sheet

To diagnose a hardware problem on an HP Server with ESX and the HP software agent installed run

hpasmcli

then you can do commands such as
show dimm
show iml
show ?
etc....

Tips for VCP 410 Exam

1) Buy this book Mastering VMware vSphere 4

2) Read this document vSphere Admin Guide

3) Read the vSphere Maximums PDF

4) Read the SAN Setup Guide

5) Read the VMWare forums.

6) Read every PDF from vmware.com about vSphere you can find.

7) Do installs, do upgrades (every method), Setup and try all the new features. You will find vSphere 4 to be a much bigger upgrade to 3.5 than you'd expect.

If you do vSphere all day long, you will fail this test (I do and I did the first time). You must read the forums and get involved in the VMWare community. They will throw some insane questions at you that any decent admin would never encounter, the ONLY way to know the answers to these is to read the forums for obscure issues bad admins have run into by setting up their ESX servers and vCenters incorrectly.

Study hard and good luck.

Build a ESX 4 Host

1) Install, take defaults, make swap partition 1600MB or just round up to 2GB
2) Setup/Configure -
NTP
Service Console Memory - 800MB
System Reserve - 1500mhz
Networks/Networking
Patch ESX
Install hardware (HP) Agents
Use Host Profiles to do all (or most) this if you can.

Hey look Email's aren't being delivered

I see an error when I Telnet to SMTP Exchange 2007 of 452 4.3.1 Insufficient system resources

The answer..

Apparently Ex2007 SMTP must have at least 1GB of free space or it gives that error and stops working.

Vizioncore's best practices for ESX host setup

ESX Host Configuration
vReplicator 2.5 uses the ESX Service Console to control replication and also uses VMware snapshot
technology. By default, the ESX Service Console is significantly resource constrained, which can impact
the performance of replication and snapshots3.
For best performance of replication and VMware snapshot operations, increase the memory allocation
of the Service Console to 800MB and CPU Reservation to 1500 MHz. You can configure these settings
through the VMware Infrastructure Client on the Configuration tab of each ESX host. The settings are
under “Memory” and “System Resource Allocation”.
The ESX Service Console should have a dedicated4 1Gbps network interface assigned to ensure adequate
bandwidth for replication. Sharing a network card between the service console and virtual machine
network can impact on replication performance.

http://www.vizioncore.com/products/vReplicator/documents/vReplicator-Best-Practices-v1.20.pdf

ESX4 Web Admin

By default ESX4 upgrade disables the web management console. Also a fresh install does the same. When you browse to it you get 403 Service Unavailable.

To get it working, go to
/etc/init.d
run ./vmware-webAccess start