First AWS Certification

Good day All,

Welcome back, got my first AWS certification Solution Architect Associate, hopefully with more to come

Took me about close to 3 months to crack this one, sharing below the tips i used

1. enrolled for the 12 months free subscription
2. Got my self a official AWS Study guide which as examples and steps to test
3. AWS FAQ super important
4. AWS digital training and videos
5. you tube videos and blogs

If anyone is looking for any specific questions you can ping me and will happy to share more insights.. till next one you all have a good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

High Availability vs Fault tolerance - moving to cloud

Good day All,

Welcome back!!!

The other day someone asked me the difference between High Availability vs Fault tolerance in the cloud.

Administrators supporting on premises Application and Servers would just say oh High Availability is having multiple servers  and if 1 goes down still you have another server.
If Fault tolerance then some one would say oh yeah Windows cluster one node is down and another node is available to Serve Application

Lot of Admins still get confused and always use both the terms as synonymous

Lets take a example and break this down.

Assume that some one from Application team comes and tells you that my Application is critical and my requirement is i need 2 Servers for better performance and SLA is that at-least 1 Server should be up and running

Solution: In this case the most likely solution is that you will build a 2 Node cluster and both terms High Availability and Fault Tolerance are same in this case

Lets take an another example:

Application team guy comes to you and tells that my Application is critical and my requirement is that at-least 2 Servers needs to be running all the time for better performance of the application and it should be highly available as well.

Solution:  The likely solution in this case is building a 4 Node cluster with 2 Nodes as Active and 2 Nodes as Passive or 2 Node Active/ Active Cluster.

If you seen the requirement the SLA played a role in determining how you provide the solution and that differentiates the terms HA and FT.

If one of the VMware Admin reading this post probably will have a different perspective in terms of the terms HA and FT as this involves Virtual Machines

HA in terms of VMware would be If one ESX host goes down the virtual machine should be up and running in another ESX host
FT would be if Virtual machine does down another Virtual Machine should continue to Serve the Application running on the Virtual Machines.

The reason i wanted to post this now is because we are moving away from On premises to cloud and Application SLA's and cost will play a major role in building Servers and our understanding on both the terms should be very clear.

Hopefully this make sense and helps some one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If anyone else as any other thoughts free to reply on the post , Until next one you all have a good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

VMware on AWS - Snippets for Admins

Good day All,

Welcome back!!!

I know we are all so busy on day to day operations supporting keeping up with technology changes is getting quite difficult. Lot of you-tube videos are available so this below post is just couple of picture snippets for guys on the go to just look and understand and keep up what is going on...


What is VMware on AWS :

Hardware its running on:

Number of Host : 3 Host should be minimum so min and max values of CPU.RAM,Storage.

VSAN Architecture:

Hybrid link Mode so that you can see both On prem and VMware cloud on AWS in same Vcenter:

Virtual Machines in Vmware cloud on AWS can utilize all the benefit of AWS Public cloud offerings:

VMware cluster across 2 data centers: We know Availability zones(AZ) are nothing but data centers so now stretch cluster across AZ with just a checkbox and all your VM's are Highly available across AZ(data centers)..
All you VSphere features like HA,DRS,VMotion will work as usual.

Locations you can create SDDC now and upcoming :

want to try :

VMware hands on Lab:  https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/enrollments/lab/NEE-4711552987_8_571

various screen shot was taken from youtube videos and AWS blogs just to give users better understanding

Hopefully this is just a small snippet for admins to keep learning and if you ever decide to kick start on VMware on AWS just google VMware technical deep dive and it has plenty of information to start.

Hopefully this helps someone, until next one you all have a good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hybrid Cloud Extension - HCX - VMware Admin time to learn

Good day All,


Welcome back!!!!

HCX is been there for quite sometime i believe Vsphere version of 5.x but not till recently this got quite popular with Public cloud migrations and VMware on AWS included it for free.

So the 2 stand our features HCX are


1.Live Migrations\Replications - you can do migrations across different versions of VSphere 5.x to 6.x
2. No need to stretch VLAN's for VMotion, It uses a HCX Gateway and run as a proxy for migrations.


If you see recent case studies there is considerable growth in companies which are  on traditional VMware infrastructure are starting to look into VMware for AWS offering as the Cloud migrations are done with no downtime and most important thing not much of infrastructure changes

If you are one of those guys who would like to try it out then follow the below link VMware provides a free 1.5 hrs session can be extended to 8 hrs to try out all the features.

http://docs.hol.vmware.com/HOL-2019/hol-1981-01-hbd_pdf_en.pdf

https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/enrollments/lab/NEE-318377_87_457338

Hopefully this will help someone ,until next one you all have good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Amazon announcing outposts

Good day All,

Welcome back!!!!

Amazon recently on 2018  invite announced something called Outposts.
What does it means? if you are some one from MS world and familiar with something called Azure Stack then Outposts is similar .

We have companies pushing for Public cloud but we still have lot of reasons why we don't want to move to public cloud so both Amazon and Microsoft is bringing the public cloud into on-premises with there own hardware, same look and feel like Cloud but all stays in Premises and you ca then easily transition to cloud when you ready.


Amazon with Outposts will have Amazon hardware with VMware VSphere environment with SDDC(Software defined data center inbuilt with ESXi + VCenter + NSX + VSAN)


Highlights listed below;

Amazon own Hardware
Single Management interface for both on Premises and Cloud
On Premises AWS Services
Network resilience
Hardware will be own by AWS and VSphere by VMware so Client responsibility is only for VM
Easily extend from O-Premises to Cloud SDDC on AWS and High Speed Amazon public cloud Services.

All VMware Administrators will need to understand and learn VMware on AWS as lot of Companies with existing VMware infrastructure in On-Premise are looking to explore this option and we may end up supporting both On-premise and Cloud soon.

Until next on all have good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PA driving license in Exton - USA

Good day All,

Welcome back!!

Happy New Year to all the users checking my site!!! wanted to start of this year with a off topic of me getting a driving license in PA.

Did search around blogs to see how exactly driving test are done but couldn't get any information so thought to share my experience so that this may help some one.....

I am hoping that you have already done your written exam and booked a slot for the driving test if not you should do that first and PA PENDOT website is excellent with all the information.

Let me start with the day of the driving test.


1. Be on on time and no need to go inside the office.If you look around there should be a place marked for driving test start point. Just on your time go and park in the spot.
2. So you are in the driving seat and next to you should be the car owner.Make sure that he carries Car registration , Car insurance with Car VIN number mentioned properly, Car PA stickers are not expired and original driving license.
3. On time driving inspector will come to you and ask to confirm the address , if any changes required and then need to sign it. Inspector will ask the car owner for all the required documents , he will verify them and ask him to get down and wait in the office.

4. At this point inspector will go to front of your car and ask you do the following things

Switch on lights
switch off lights
right indicator
left indicator
high beam
wipers on and off
ask you to put hazard indicator and you need to wait till he ask you to switch off
will ask you to press horn 1 time

Now inspector will go back of the car and will ask these questions

switch off the hazard indicator
right indicator
left indicator
press break 1 time.

Now he will come next to you and he will buckle up and sit next to you.

5. Will ask you if you have any questions, he none he will ask you start the vehicle and go to parallel parking area.

6. As soon as you start, usually you will see a Stop sign so make sure to stop there and proceed...

7. In the parallel parking bay area while going he asked me to go between 2 cones on the drive way and then asked me to go to the spot to perform parallel parking.


8 So after reaching the parallel parking area you put the car in park mode and wait for inspector to give you instructions

Following are the instructions given to me

a. You can move 3 times front and 3 times back but need to make sure you put the car in the box.

If you hit the curb no need to panic can adjust it.


So Inspector will tell you take your time when you ready position your car for parallel parking and proceed..

Every one as the own process to do it but this is how i did

a. maintained  3 feet distance and parked the car so that my back headlights are in line with the parallel parking cones
b.At this point i put my right indicator , reverse gear and by turning my head back and looking through my right side back door window went back slowly.
c.As soon as i saw the cones in the right side back door corner i rotated my steering wheel all the way to right. Holding it tight started to go slowly backwards by looking at the right side mirror till i reached like 90 degree angle.
d. At about 90 degrees angle or if your driver seat is in line with cones rotate back the car steering wheel make it straight and by looking at right mirror go slowly back.

e. As soon as you able to see the front of the cones and you need to make a guess that you have enough space for front of the car and will not hit the cones.

f. Now turn you steering wheel all the way to left and start going slowly and if you in the box and enough distance in the front just stop the car and put the car in parking mode.

9. Following instructions was given to me at this point by inspector

you can do unlimited front and back but make sure to drive the car without hitting the cones.So when ready he said to proceed.

10. At this point  you put left indicator and start slowly not to hit the cones and proceed...

11. Inspector asked me to proceed though the mall so make sure you following the speed mentioned and also stop signs. Also make sure if any people are trying to cross stop for them and proceed.

12. Asked to take the main road, small 5 mints drive and back to office...

13. At this point if passed will ask you to park the vehicle at the front of the office, will be instructed to hand over the car to owner and follow him inside the office.

14. After you follow him will ask you sit and wait for someone to call you and give a token number.

15. After you get you token number you can proceed to area where you will called to a take a picture and license should be handed over in 2-3 mints.

if you have time day before the test in the evening go to the area, know all the stop signs, test parallel parking that will give you little confidence.


Hopefully this helps someone!!! Until next one you all have a good day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!