Got a call tonight concerning a VM that was having some issues. We had p2v’d our Virtual Center and when the new vCenter came online, apparently DRS decided to balance the heck out of things and somewhere in the process, a VM got squished and had a variety of issues.

When I was brought in, it wasn’t powering up and throwing an error concerning a lock. So here is what I tried.

I finally had a chance to use Square in a real world checkout scenario a few weekends ago. My friend and local Ankeny Iowa artist Luke Hubbard held his 2nd Annual Garage Gala. My wife and I stepped in to take care of the check out so Luke and his lovely wife Jen could handle entertaining, talking to guests and mingling with people that wanted to know more about the art.

The one big change for the Gala this year was the acceptance of credit cards. Luke had taken cash, check, and Dwolla in the years past though really, it was just check and cash. I was a bit disappointed, but not completely shocked, that no one used Dwolla, sorry guys. Adding credit this year was a huge step forward and I was quite pleased with the results.

Today I can add a few more letters to the old signature line. I passed the VMware Certified Professional 5 test!

Overall, I thought that the test was pretty fair. This test was rumored to test more on your real world experience with vSphere and it didn’t disappoint. I would say that the test was easier for me than the VCP4 test but I also have 2 more years of experience under my belt and had a chance to go to VMworld 2011 with some great sessions and labs that dug into the nitty gritty of 5.

Last night I had a maintenance that went fine, but had a little hiccup that I wanted to write about. The maintenance was to simply add another block of WWN Initiators to our configuration and everything ran smooth.

Now, the reason for adding this new block is simply that we were out of WWNs and needed to turn up 4 new UCS B-200 blades. Well, since I have the new WWNs, might as well use them right? This is where the error came up that raised a bunch of alarms for our networking team which in turn, gave me a bit of ass-ache.

Apple has recently announced a iPod nano (1st generation) Replacement Program. While this is great that they are being proactive and replacing iPods with bad batteries. I have to ask the question…how many of these owners have already moved on to other iPod devices?