The last and first week of the year I normally reserve for some jobs around the house, some time with wife and kid and some studying.
This time the VCP5 exam was the goal. I combined this with the update of my vSphere4 administration and advanced administration course I give for Ictivity Training. This way I practice the new vSphere 5 features and have the course up-to-date.
Although I have given a vSphere5 administration course (with only the features of that where already available in vSphere4) there were quit some features I didn’t have the time to play with except in the VMware Vsphere: What’s new ESXi 5.0 and vCenter Server 5.0. This includes Storage profiles, Auto deploy and more.
As I follow @esloof on Twitter I read on his blog that the VCP5 exam is different than the VCP4 exam. With the previous VCP exam you had to know the maximum configurations out-of-your-head! There were quite some question: “What is the maximum size of a VMFS volume”. This is not the case any more. The exam is more based on global ESXi 5.0 knowledge with I think is a good thing.
The material I used for my preparation:
- VMware Education (by @esloof) VMware vSphere: What’s new ESXi 5.0 and vCenter Server 5.0
- Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) Mastering VMware vSphere 5
- Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) and Frank Denneman (@FrankDenneman) vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive
- And a lot of testing 🙂 in my home-lab
Gladly all the work payed-off and I passed my exam with a score of 411 where a minimum score of 300 is the passing rate.
As I’m VCAP4-DCD and VCAP4-DCA certified I will go for VCAP5 when it’s available.
After that maybe I will go for VCDX but I’m wondering if this certification brings me more interesting work here in the Netherlands. There aren’t many corporations in the Netherlands that need a VCDX for there environment.
So will we see. For now I’m glad I can call myself VCP5
While preparing for my VCP5 exam I was reading a lot of material including the upgrade guide.
As with all upgrade, not all upgrade paths are supported. That’s why I thought to make a list with some upgrade considerations.
- vSphere5 only comes with the ESXi hypervisor architecture. The main distinction is that ESX comes with a Service Console (also called SC or COS from Console Operating System) and ESXi only has a tech support mode (busybox implementation). If you want to perform command-line administration, you can use vCLI or PowerCLI.
- You can upgrade from ESX 3.5/4.x and ESXi 4.x installations to ESXi 5.0 preserving your VMFS partitions.
- New installation and boot devices options are:
- Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) like USB
- Disk larger than 2TB if the system firmware supports it.
- A minimum of 2098MB or RAM is required.
- No graphical installer is available because this requires a Service Console.
- The (text-base) installer can be used for new installations or upgrades
- New partitions use the GUID partition table (GPT) instead of the MBR. GUID supports partitions size larger than 2TB.
- New installations create a 4GB scratch partition. Any remaining disk space is formatted as VMFS datastore.
- Rolling back to a previous version of ESX/ESXi is not supported.
- When using a kick-start script (ks.cfg) you can press Shift-O when the ESXi installer screen appears to edit the boot options and provide the kick-start script (Example: ks=nfs//192.168.1.10/vSphere-install/esxi5.cfg nameserver=192.168.1.10 ip=192.168.1.1 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.1.254)
- The default database for vCenter 5 is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 express. This is bundled with the vCenter DVD. Requirements are:
- Microsoft Windows Installer version 4.5 (MSI 4.5)
- 4GB RAM
- 4GB Disk Storage
- 64 Bits Operating System
- A in-place upgrade on Windows XP is not supported
- When doing a in-place upgrade of your vCenter server, your vCenter server can be down for 40 till 50 minutes. During this downtime, DRS will not function. HA will.
- A in-place upgrade on a 32Bits Operating System is not supported. You have to perform a migration to a 64Bits Operating System.
- There is also a vCenter appliance available. This appliance is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (SLES11).
- Some configuration files are not migrated when performing a upgrade:
- /etc/sysconfig/mouse
- /etc/sudoers
- /etc/yp.conf
- Custom scripts that are added to /etc/rc.d
- Configuration files that are migrated are:
- /etc/vmware/esx.conf
- /etc/ntp.conf, ntp.drift, ntp.keys
- /etc/krb.*, /etc/krb5.*
- /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf
- /etc/pam.d/*
- /etc/vmware/vmkiscsid/*
- Configuration files that are partially migrated are:
- /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow (only root and vpxusers accounts)
- When performing a new vSphere5 installation the default partition table that is used will be GPT. When performing a in-place upgrade the MBR partition format will be kept.
- When migration from ESX the Service Console network interface cards (NICs) are converted to VMkernel NICs and the Service Console port group is removed.
- Rule set files and customized firewall rules are not preserved.
- You cannot perform a in-place upgrade from ESX4.x to ESXi 5.0 when the ESX4.x was upgraded from ESX3.x.
- When performing a in-place upgrade from ESX 4.x the /boot partition has to have more than 350Mb of free space. If the hosts that you are upgrading does not have more than 250MB of free space in the /boot partition, use a scripted or interactive upgrade instead.
- You can preserve your (local) VMFS datastores when upgrading. Afterward you can upgrade your VMFS3 datastore to VMFS5.