The winds are blowing with some information about the new VMware Certified Professional exam which covers the new “vSphere Suite” of products.

Basically, VMware is looking to increase the difficulty by a VERY large margin. Previously, the VCP 3 was taken in about an hour by most people. The beta testers in the VCP 4 program report that it’s going to be a FOUR HOUR test! The guide given to the beta testers which just outlines the areas to study is a whopping 16 pages long. Yikes!

So, what does this mean to you?

If you’re wanting to get “VCP certified” (or have a boss who’s demanding it) and you want to take the easier test, I would strongly advise that you make it a high priority goal to take the VCP while it’s still in version 3. If you delay too long, you’ll be stuck taking the four hour long VCP 4 exam instead and who knows how many times you’ll have to attempt it before passing. Grab the VCP study kit today and get started before it’s too late!

This process may vary slightly from testing center to testing center, but here’s an overview of the process I went through to take my VCP exam and it’s probably similar to what you’ll go through to take the test.

First, I had to schedule an appointment with your local Pearson Vue test center. I did this via their website and there’s not really much to say about that.

When I arrived, I had to sign-in and provide identification. At my testing center, they wanted two forms of ID, but the confirmation e-mail from Pearson Vue will confirm the requirements for your test, so be sure to read it closely. Bring multiple IDs regardless.

Next, I had to place everything in my pockets such as car keys and wallet into a backpack. The attendant placed a padlock on the backpack so that I could not get into the bag. She kept the key at the front desk while the backpack traveled with me so I could know that nobody was stealing my wallet.

I was lead into a small room with four or five computers each divided by a wall. Think of the study carols you used to have in school. The attendant started the particular testing program on the computer and told me to sit down and follow the on screen prompts. There were TV cameras watching the room to ensure that you don’t talk with other people or try to pull a cheat sheet out of your pocket.

On the computer system, I entered my name/etc. and the test began. Using the mouse, each question is answered one at a time. As you proceed, you have no indication of how well you’re doing. You may go back to previous questions and at the end of the test before you submit it, you have another chance to re-visit any questions. I think the time limit was 90 minutes and I took my time, being extra careful, and finished in about 60 minutes.

Once done, I took the backpack up to the front counter where the attendant was waiting with my print-out showing my score and certification number on a temporary form. I grabbed my keys and wallet and left. The print-out is your temporary proof that you passed or failed and it has a confirmation number and some other information on it.

A couple weeks later, I received the official certificate of completion from VMware in the mail along with a free serial number for a copy of VMware Workstation. The certificate is the usual “congratulations you’ve completed such and such” type, but I am proud of it. Even with my day-to-day use of VMware and relatively deep knowledge, I only passed with a 77 out of a required 70, so I’m very glad I prepared for the VCP exam in advance or I’d probably have failed.

The VCP Test Itself

Taking the official VMware Certified Professional test is much harder than most of the hundreds of tests I took in college for one simple reason: there can be multiple answers for each question.

You see, after many years in college, I have become very adept at taking multiple choice tests and when there is only one answer allowed per question, I can usually rule-out at least half of the questions and then reason the actual answer from what remains. You probably can too.

However, the VCP destroys that multiple-choice test taking skill by requiring multiple answers on most of the questions! For example, some questions may have a list of seven possible choices and you will select four of those to arrive at the correct answer. You can’t use deductive reasoning on these questions – you must know the answer and know it well.

The difficulty is also increased because a very large number of the VCP exam questions are derived from the introductory/early chapters in the official VMware manuals. Yeah, you know, those books/sections that you never read? If you’re like me and use the manuals as a reference and don’t actually read them from cover-to-cover, you’ll be in for a shock when you see that many VCP questions are pulled from those early beginner-level chapters in the manuals!

The hours I spent studying and memorizing the study guide and sample exam were invaluable. Having many possible answers per question really makes the test tough, especially when the questions may be about trivial information or even (gasp) things I know to be wrong or untrue from my experience using VMware on a daily basis! Do yourself a favor and grab the study kit. If you have to re-take the VCP test, it will cost you more than the kit, so it’s really stupid not to prepare fully with the kit.

VMware HA is a technology that helps with maintaining maximum uptime in a production environment by monitoring server status and automatically restarting servers on other hosts if necessary. By using a combination of techniques, the HA process will identify when a VM has become unreachable for any number of reasons and when this happens, the HA agent will power the VM up on another ESX host.

The HA process can determine that a VM is unreachable in a number of ways such as by network connectivity, heartbeat, or even by failure of an application. These conditions can trigger failover and thus the starting of another instance of the VM in question so that visible downtime to users is minimized.

VMware High Availability requires Virtual Center to setup and configure, but once it is configured, the VC machine can be removed (for example if it crashes) and the ESX hosts will continue to operate the HA environment.

Put simply, VMware DRS is a feature of Virtual Center that allows monitoring and and controlling of ESX host workloads. With the Distributed Resource Scheduler enabled, you can set certain resource requirements for various virtual servers such as the minimum RAM required or maximum CPU allowed to be consumed. In the DRS options, you can select manual, semi-automatic, or automatic management of the hosts and VMs so that you can maximize host utilization, reduced power, and guarantee service levels for your various VMs.

DRS takes advantage of VMotion so that it can move a VM between two servers without incurring downtime. In the automatic mode, an algorithm will determine the optimal deployment of virtual machines based upon the min/max settings you dictate, while the manual and semi-automatic modes allow you to have a finer grained level of control over VM movement.

In configuring DRS, you will create various logical structures in the Virtual Center interface such as “datacenters”, “clusters” and “resource pools”. Each of these logical constructs operates with DRS to control which hosts are allowed to run which VMs and which VMs can consume what resources. I’ll get more into these ideas in the detailed information pages.

VMotion is VMware’s name for one of the most useful technologies you’ll find as an administrator or consultant. VMotion allows the transitioning of a running virtual machine between different physical hosts without any downtime. By allowing this, admins can claim unheard-of uptime on servers, provide exceptional service to customers, and most importantly of all, reduce the hassle and workload on themselves!

VMotion requires shared storage that can be accessed by all of the ESX hosts which will be expected to run a VM. When you do a hot migration between hosts using Virtual Center, the VM is placed into snapshot mode, the memory of the VM transferred to the new location, and then snapshot mode is removed thus allowing the new host to write to the virtual machine’s files.

This ability to move VMs which are executing is the basis for the DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) as VMs can be rearranged on different ESX hosts to meet various CPU and memory requirements.

In addition to truly shared storage, VMotion requires a gigabit network and VMware Virtual Center.

VCB is the VMware Consolidated Backup product. It basically automates the process of entering snapshot mode and includes a driver to mount the virtual hard disk files (vmdk files) so you can copy data while a VM is up and running. VCB requires a Windows machine that can see the same LUN as the ESX hosts running the VMs. This is how the backup tool can open the vmdk files to access the data.

The VMware Certified Professional exam doesn’t focus extensively on VCB, at least as of the 3.5 update. It is good to have an idea of how it works and some of the requirements (such as the shared SAN) but an in-depth knowledge is not usually necessary.

VMware Virtual Center is a management tool that lets you administer one or more ESX hosts. When you are controlling multiple ESX hosts through VC, you gain access to many advanced features which are the key selling points of virtualization such as High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), and VMotion.

Imagine if you have a set of three ESX hosts, each running a few virtual machines. If one of the ESX hosts needs to be brought-down to add some RAM, you would open the Virtual Center interface and migrate the running VMs off of the host that needs work. Assuming you have shared storage such as iSCSI or a SAN, this can be done seamlessly without any interruption in access to the VM! Your users would never see the server drop offline. Imagine not having to schedule downtime for a virtual server with users — that’s what VMotion allows thanks to Virtual Center — and that’s just part of the story.

Virtual Center is run as a separate machine in addition to the ESX hosts. VC can be run in a virtual machine if desired, or you can run it on a standalone box. VC runs inside of Windows 2003 and will use a built-in version of MS SQL server or you can point it to a MS SQL server installation which is preferrable. Once VC is installed, you connect using the VI Client just as you would to an ESX host except that by connecting to the Virtual Center server, you can manage multiple hosts, VMotion, HA, and DRS.

If ESX is the engine of the Virtual Infrastructure “car”, Virtual Center is the driver’s seat with the controls and displays.

VMware ESX 3 is a hypervisor which means that it is a very thin layer of software that sits between the physical hardware and the various virtual machines. The hypervisor is responsible for translating requests such as disk access within a VM into actual disk access on the host regardless of whether the host is configured for a SAN, local SCSI, or NFS.

ESX is actually its own operating system. You boot a server from the CD and it installs ESX to the hard drive. The server then boots this ESX operating system. There is not any other operating system present as there is with Microsoft’s HyperV or products such as VMware Workstation. The fact that ESX is running directly on the “bare metal” means that it can offer performance and reliability that’s much higher than another product which must “talk” through a host operating system to get to the hardware. The down side to this is that ESX has its own drivers for the hardware so there is a fairly restricted set of hardware that it will run on. For example, you must have a supported SCSI disk controller.

ESX is available in a full version known currently as ESX 3.5 and also a free, reduced complexity version known as ESX 3i. 3i will run from a USB key or other form of storage but it seeks to reduce complexity by removing the Service Console which is a powerful command-line access method used to tweak, configure, and debug the regular ESX. Either version of ESX can be managed by Virtual Center.

You can think of ESX as the engine in the Virtual Infrastructure car. It does the heavy-lifting and actually provides the virtualization services.

Virtual Infrastructure 3, or VI3, is VMware’s suite of tools that you would use to virtualize and manage servers. It consists of ESX3, which is the actual hypervisor, Virtual Center (VC), which is the management tool which connects to ESX, and some other minor tools like VCB which aren’t really a focus as far as passing the VCP exam is concerned.

By using both ESX and VC, you gain some significant functionality such as VMotion which lets you move a live, running virtual machine between ESX hosts with no interruption. You can imagine how handy this is when you need to do server maintenance or are having trouble on a particular host. VMotion also allows things like HA (High Availability) where Virtual Center will automatically start and stop virtual machines should an ESX host become disconnected from the network, for example. DRS, or Distributed Resource Scheduling, is another component enabled by Virtual Center and this allows the server administrator to allocate minimum and maximum CPU and RAM resources to a VM, thus ensuring minimum service levels or perhaps controlling a server and its users from consuming an unacceptable amount of resources.

VI3 is the over-arching term for the core VMware enterprise products and what the VMware Certified Professional exam covers.