VCP5

Happily I can report that I’ve passed the VCP5 exam last week, now I’m  logging into VMware daily eagerly awaiting confirmation that I’m a certified VCP.

I’m not going to rehash study techniques as there are plenty of blogs covering that in detail. I will say that hands on practice is the best way to confirm you really understand the concepts. Since vsphere5 can be run inside a esxi host there’s very little you can’t do without spending a large amount of money or being lucky enough to have a full set of servers and FC storage.

Bulding a vsphere5 lab inside a ESX5i host

For the last few days I’ve been smashing my head against a wall to build a vsphere5 lab inside a ESXi 5 host.

On first blush the whole thing seemed like a simple exercise to get a basic virtual two host setup going with a Sansymphony virtual server as a shared storage array. I figured I’d have two virtual switches, one for management and vmotion and one for iscsi as a starting point so that I could try out Host Profiles and Auto Deploy initally.

Try as I might the iSCSI connection would not work with a second vkernel port bound to iSCSI. Bind iSCSI to the initial management port and flatten the whole network configuration down to one network and iSCSI would connect to the target. Looking at netstat I could see the SYN sent on the host and SYN received on the target but that was it. Sure that I was getting things right inside the lab I reached out to google on nested esxi and found this article.

http://www.vcritical.com/2011/07/vmware-vsphere-can-virtualize-itself/

Sure enough I needed to make a key change to the virtual switches on the physicall ESXi host .

Configure a vSwitch and/or Port Group to have Promiscuous Mode enabled

What I don’t fully understand is why, right now my focus is on studying for the VCP5 exam but once that is out of the way I’ll update the post with an explanation because it makes no sense to me why it’s necessary.