VMware Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization

Recently I began the VMware vSphere : Install, Configuration, Manage course which is one of prerequisite courses required in order to take the VCP5-DCV exam.

The VCP5-DCV certification covers installing, configuring and managing a vSphere 5 environment with vCenter. 

Anyone with any experience with VMware or virtualization in general knows that the VCP5 is a very sought after and respected certification.

I had the opportunity to take the course at an extremely discounted rate so I took advantage of it right away.  The course covers the majority of the exam content, but not all.  So significant self-study and lab work is required in order to pass the exam.

The study materials I am using to supplement the course are as follows:

• The Official VCP5 Certification Guide
• Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5
• VMware vSphere 5.1 Documentation

 In order to fully cover the topics on the exam and gain hands on experience a lab is required.

There are two main options for building home lab.  First, build a physical lab consisting of physical ESXi hosts, shared storage and then virtualize the rest of the infrastructure.  Second, build a nested lab consisting of a fully virtualized infrastructure.  I chose the latter.

Since I already had a physical host running ESXi 5.1, I chose to virtualize my vCenter, iSCSI SAN, and domain controller.

I utilized FreeNAS for the iSCSI SAN.  It is simple and straight forward to setup and does the job very well.

Due to the limitation of the CPU in my ESXi 5.1 server, I had to elect to run the ESXi 5.5 hosts in VMware Workstation on my desktop which is capable of nested virtualization.  With this setup I am able to run a full vCenter environment along with virtual machines.

Here are some sample screen shots and a simple network diagram:

 

Juniper Networks Certified Associate (JNCIA) - Junos

Today after a long period of study I passed the JN0-102 exam and earned the JNCIA - Junos certification.  This is my first Juniper certification and will surely not be my last.

The JNCIA - Junos the first in the Junos certification track from Juniper.  It is the precursor to the JNCIS, JNCIP and JNCIE certifications in the Enterprise, Security and Service Provider certification tracks.

During my preparation for the exam, Juniper updated the JN0-101 exam to the JN0-102, removing some topics and introducing others.  I chose to take the JN0-102, which I shouldn't have since I hadn't studied the new topics thoroughly enough. 

I made the decision to take the JN0-102 based on the fact that Juniper had said the study materials for the old and new exams were the same and the exams were very similar.  However, once reading the detailed exam topics the night before the exam I learned otherwise.

I managed to pass the exam, but I know I would have done better on the JN0-101 exam.

Some topics the exam covers are routing, Junos operation, and subnetting.

Some of the resources I used for preparation are as follows;

• JNCIA-Junos study guides available for free from Juniper's Learning Portal
• Junos OS For Dummies
• Junosphere along with Juniper's Day One guides

The exam was straight forward with no real trick questions.

The Junos platform is more powerful and flexible to Cisco IOS in my opinion.  Features such as automatic archiving of configurations to a remote server, scheduled committing of configuration and the ability to rollback configurations to prevent locking one's self out of a device are some key features that I like.  The configuration syntax and methodology takes sometime to get used to if you're coming from a Cisco background and the Juniper equivalent to a Cisco configuration is usually longer.  But once you get used to it, you'll appreciate the power of Junos. 

For those thinking of taking the exam, be sure to take and pass the Pre-Assesment test on Juniper's website.  Once doing so you'll be given a 50% discount voucher code for the exam.

Parsing a Configuration File Using Bash

Here's a simple way to use a configuration file with a Bash shell script.

#Specify configuration file at command prompt
CONF_FILE=$1

#Read variables from conf file
ADDRESS=$(grep ADDRESS $CONF_FILE | awk -F= '{ print $2 }')
USERNAME=$(grep USERNAME $CONF_FILE | awk -F= '{ print $2 }')
FILETODOWNLOAD=$(grep FILETODOWNLOAD $CONF_FILE | awk -F= '{ print $2 }')
DOWNLOADPATH=$(grep DOWNLOADPATH $CONF_FILE | awk -F= '{ print $2 }')
LOGPATH=$(grep LOGPATH $CONF_FILE | awk -F= '{ print $2 }')
LOGRETENTION=$(grep LOGRETENTION $CONF_FILE | awk -F= '{ print $2 }')

Configuration file:

ADDRESS=192.168.88.20
USERNAME=sheldon
FILETODOWNLOAD=Downloads/*download.txt
DOWNLOADPATH=.
LOGPATH=logs/
LOGRETENTION=-1

The script uses grep and awk to parse the configuration and assign the directives in it to the variables in the script.