Gearing up for VMware Course & Exam.
Another long time coming update! I’ve been a pretty busy guy lately between work and the holidays but things are starting to slow down for me again thankfully and that’s giving me the opportunity to get around to some things I’ve wanted to do for a while. One of them was to transition away from my basic Dovecot/Sendmail with Squirrelmail for web access and implement something a bit more feature filled. I tackled that one and setup an installation of Zimbra and have been pretty happy with it thus far. Nice having the extra features and their client is distributed for Windows, Linux and Mac so it covers all of my devices with the same client and of course supports the tasks/calendaring features without additional packages or workarounds – bonus!
Other big preps in order are getting myself organized and prepared for an upcoming VMware course at a local technical college. I’ve had an interest in earning the VCP certification for some time but the cost to obtain it as a result of the required training was always too prohibitive for me to go out and swing it on my own. The cost was also out of my employers budget and as of yet would offer only a slight value in their eyes as we are just now somewhat really gearing up our virtualization infrastructure after running a single ESXi host for about a year with a half dozen VM’s on it. I had hear about VMware’s Academic Alliance program a while back and casually kept an open ear in hopes a school nearby would hop on board and sure enough, the Madison Area Technical College is going to start offering the course in January 2011. After some discussion with the bossman at work, he and I are cleared to sit the course on the companies dime. Cost comes in at under $500 each with the required course books as well, not too shabby compared to the offer direct through VMware. Potential disadvantage some might see in it is the class runs 16 weeks vs a few days. So it’s clearly not for someone who just wants to get through it quick to sit the exam. Potential advantage is more time to learn the technologies for those who are not very experienced. I’m pretty comfortable with a lot of features having used it in a single host at the office and several hosts at my home lab, so I might prefer to go through it quicker than this but I can’t complain given the cost savings!
Seems that will be the big focus for me going into the future at least for the upcoming year. Big plans are to roll out more hosts and implement shared storage to utilize some of the enterprise features of vSphere. I’ve already been working on the storage features somewhat, so that’s coming along pretty good. Other plans for the year will incorporate a migration over to Linux servers for file and print services in branch offices with LDAP for directory services. This is going to be a huge welcomed change for me, considering right now we really don’t employ a centrally managed directory for our 40+ offices – instead each site relies on local accounts which gets to be a pain to manage. Finally is beginning to feel like we’re really getting ahead in the right direction for a change!
I’ll be trying to share some things along the way with my VMware experience as well as the Linux/LDAP experience in addition. I have some ideas written down for content to publish here with some brief write-ups and how-to’s for some Juniper, specifically SRX, related material since I’ve largely finished that project and have them out in the field now. So keep checking back and looking for that material to pop up, also feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed to get new content as I publish it. Till next time!