If you've kept up with what is happening, EMC and VMware have had a stellar performing year and VCE has gone from $0 to $100 million in just a few months. That being said, VCE is still ramping up on folks and we need more vArchitects. If you're interested, keep reading.

Qualities that VCE is looking for in a candidate:

• Are you a forward thinker? Have you wrapped your head around the thought that Vblocks aren't just a fad, but revolutionizing the industry!
• Do you have pre-sales experience? vArchitects are in a customer facing role, you have to talk the talk.
• Are you a rockstar with VMware, Cisco, and EMC technical skills? You don't have to be a guru in every facet, but being strong in one category will place you on a team where your skills can be noticed. There will be plenty of training, believe me.

Last week I built my vSphere Home Lab "The Green Machines". One of the biggest purchases I made for my lab was the Synology DS411+. I bought this NAS because DSM 3.0 is supposed to be "VMware Ready" and it has NFS, iSCSI, and iSCSI Thin Provisioning abilities. During my testing with iSCSI, I noticed some unusual behavior. If i ever put an I/O load on iSCSI, the connection to the VMware ESXi servers would drop off. It wasn't heavy I/O either, the connection would drop during an install of Office 2010 on my Windows 7 VM. The datastore on ESXi would gray out and go italic, but the NFS datastore was still available. I am running the latest DSM 3.0 Build 1372.

To remedy the situation, I would have to go back in to the Synology GUI, restart the iSCSI service, reboot the NAS, then reboot both of my ESXi servers and it was back. I did a quick google search which lead me to this post on the Synology forums ESX 4 and iSCSI problem. This was the same exact symptoms I saw so I opened up a ticket with Synology and sent them my log file. Luckily, they knew the exact problem and already have an undocumented remedy.

Quick plug for Louisville's VMware User Group. The Louisville VMUG will be taking place this Friday (1/21/11) at Sullivan University at 1:00pm - 5:00pm.

Hey everyone, got this in an email this morning and figured some of you may be interested. Veeam's new recruit, Rick Vanover (@RickVanover), will be leading a webinar. Read below...

On January 20th, Rick Vanover (@RickVanover) is doing a webinar on “5 New ways to use SureBackup”.

Join Rick Vanover, Veeam’s Product Strategy Specialist and VMware vExpert, as he shows a live demo of Veeam Backup & Replicaiton™ v5’s SureBackup™ Recovery Verification. This webinar will also include:

In my lab environment, I prefer to have more XP VMs than Windows 7 because of the RAM and disk foot print.

After getting my lab setup, it was time to get a Windows XP image ready for deployment. I went through the typical defaults in ESXi 4.1 and created my XP install for a template. I went through the entire install process and began installing the apps this machine would use. This VM in particular needed utorrent. After getting everything setup for port forwarding, I began downloading some Ubuntu ISOs to see what kind of speeds I was getting. I had about 5 ISOs going at one time and reaching speeds around 1mb/sec down, which is normal, but then all of sudden downloads crawled to 1-10kb/sec. A red button showed up at the bottom that said "Disk Overloaded 100%". To be honest, I was pretty ticked at this point because I figured The Green Machines should definitely be able to handle this kind of transaction.

Many of you know I've spent the past few weeks putting together a VMware vSphere home lab build. I'm proud to say that I'm finally getting all the pieces put together. I'm also going to give you a parts list so you can re-create it. Luckily, I got a bunch of components on Black Friday (for those outside the US, it's the day after Thanksgiving when every single store is on sale, including Newegg.com).

One goal of this was to retire my old "gaming" rig. It's in quotes because this thing is old now. This new lab should replace my desktop and have a central repository for all my music and photos. I was going back and forth on what to do. Should I build one massive box and do a nested vSphere environment like the vTARDIS or do I build 2 machines and have a NAS serve up storage. The latter is a bit more expensive and I'm doing this on a budget of $2000. After getting input from @vTexan, @j_nash, @Phaelon74, @ericsiebert, @ChrisDearden, @Virtual_Vic, @jasemccarty, and many more, I decided to go with building 2 machines and having a NAS serve up storage. I have to say thanks to my sponsors Veeam, Train Signal, VKernel, and PHD Virtual for helping me with this opportunity.

Since I'm building 2 boxes, I need to go green on everything. The last thing I want are machines sitting around using 350-600watts of power. My thought process was to build 2 machines that contain no drives, not even a CD drive, and boot from SD or USB. Also, many NAS devices out there by QNAP, Synology, and Thecus are able to serve up storage and do it with very low wattage. I also needed a managed gigabit switch to handle all the traffic. I wanted something with 16-24 ports that was also fanless to help cut down on energy.

A few weeks ago, @JimPeluso sparked a great question, "How will a Vblock change IT in 5 years?"

Let's examine how everything is done currently. An IT Manager is given a virtualization/VDI project with a budget of $900k. The IT Manager gathers his network, storage, and server teams and discusses what can be done. Or perhaps he grabs his one lonely systems admin and asks what can be done. No matter what size the company, this is going to be a long battle with a bunch of different vendors. Each person does their part and narrows down the playing field to 3 specific vendors they want running in their data center. Each vendor has a different plug, gimmick, and sales pitch, but in the end, all an IT Manager cares about is getting the job done and helping the business succeed. The IT Manager listens to the high level pitches then hands it off to engineers to develop a solution. Every vendor, both storage and servers, are going to ask the same questions, "What kind of workload are you running?", "Do you know the IOPS?", "Do you know what kind of performance you need?" and so forth. Yet, the same questions are being answered multiple times to several different companies. A week or so flies by and the IT Manager receives multiple solution responses and discusses it with the engineers over the next few weeks to decide we want Vendor X for storage and Vendor Y for servers.

What a year! More has happened in 2010 than anything else I could have imagined. I can honestly say I've crossed off a few bucket list items. Well, maybe not bucket list, but it's sure a great feeling to have accomplished what I did this year. First, I really made an effort to start blogging more, and that is what primarily led to greater things. I started KendrickColeman.com back in 2009 and completed a total of 13 posts. Ya, only 13! This year in 2010 I've done 88 posts including this one. Perhaps in 2011 I'll hit that triple digit mark. I still want to only create posts that will add value to an admin's life because who really needs another blog about VMware patches and releases?

Here are the Top 10 blog posts of 2010:

10. VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools For Advanced Tasks