This week I attended the “VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting” class. It’s a four day class that gives you the right to certify for VCP similar to a few other classes. This is a fairly new class and this was the first class in the Nordic region. Our instructor was not dutch, even though his last name was Blom. He was from Sweden and was fairly well informed about the topics of this class and VMware in general.
The troubleshooting class sounded like an interesting class. I have never attended a VMware class before, but since I have been using VMware products for quite a while this class sounded like the most reasonable one to take.
This class had the following modules:
- ESXi Command Line Troubleshooting
- ESX/ESXi & vCenter Server log files
- Network troubleshooting
- Management troubleshooting
- Storage troubleshooting
- VMotion troubleshooting
- VMware Infrastructure troubleshooting
- vSphere 4 DRS Cluster Troubleshooting
Note that this class is not about performance troubleshooting. It’s only about troubleshooting configuration problems. A performance class is coming up soon from VMware educational services.
This class was around 70% labs and 30% lecture time. Most of the labs were performed as two-student teams. Most labs involved configuring something, either from the command line or from the vSphere client, and later a configuration issue was being introduced to our environment (by the instructor) that we should try to resolve.
This class was a good look into managing your infrastructure from vMA and we learned how it differed from the ESX console and the unsupported ESXi console. VMware’s educational labs were used and compared to the labs I attended at VMworld 2009, these actually worked. 
A few of the labs were a bit too repetitive and the scripts run by the instructor to bring problems into our configuration didn’t always work as intended. Most of the problems introduced did also IMHO not reflect problems you see in most real life environments. Since you were not allowed to watch the “Tasks and events” when troubleshooting a problem it made the troubleshooting a bit strange for some issues (you couldn’t monitor the progress of your VMotion if VMotion was the issue). It was still a very valid reason we couldn’t watch the logs when problems were introduced as it would have made it too easy to solve the issues, but it still made the troubleshooting situation a bit weird compared to real life.
The class was nice because of all the labs and for me it was especially useful because it made me get more familiar with vCLI which is required for supported command line management of ESXi. As we all know : ESXi is the future and the future is now.
