Month: March 2011

Mac App: Visor

Admittedly, I spend less and less time at my Mac thanks to my newer iPad-based workflow. And I spend even less time in a terminal (well, until the past couple of days). And the last couple of days are what bring me to talk about this little app. Well, SIMBL plugin, really.

Visor was written by Antonin over at BinaryAge, and offers a simple, yet rather spectacular drop-down implementation of Terminal.app, very much akin to the command input window from Quake. This is triggered by a hotkey. Once the Visor window is in place, you have your Mac Terminal.app ready to go, and have the option to open new tabs as well, just like in a traditional Terminal.app window.

Visor is completely customizable, and can be made what you want, thought I have found the defaults to be pretty workable.

This all comes to light as I’m ramping up on the vCloud Director classes, and as such, I’m setting up vCloud Director (VCD) in my lab environment. VCD runs on Linux, and backends to an Oracle database (which I’m setting up on Linux), so I’m spending a fair amount of time SSH’d into my VMs to work toward getting things set up

Anyway, I have to recommend Visor if you spend any appreciable time in a terminal on your Mac. I love the elegance of something so simple, yet so functional!.


VCAP-DCD

Well, it happened on Friday. I passed the VCAP4-DCD exam. So now I have two VCAP credentials to drop behind my name.

I was rather surprised by the exam. It was definitely challenging, and asked many questions that I didn’t feel I completely understood. I guess knew better 🙂 There are times when you’re out building these designs that you just don’t understand what the customer is asking, so it’s not so far-fetched, except that, in the field, you can clarify things with the customer. Not so much with a proctored exam.

As I did with the DCA exam, here’s my instructor’s take on the DCD. If you didn’t read my DCA post, I talk about the exam from this perspective because there are many resources already written about how to prep for the exam, but I don’t see many that discuss the overall mapping of VMware Education’s offerings to the exam. That is in part because VMware doesn’t tend to develop courses toward certification, but toward a job role. There is definitely some overlap there, however, as the certifications are also developed toward a job role.

Unlike the VCAP-DCA, the VCAP-DCD only has one instructor-led course offering support for the exam: vSphere: Design Workshop. vDW is a 3-day course designed to teach, not how to design, per se, but how to approach design. We all want to have a nice design checklist or if-then flowchart to take into all of our design engagements, but we all know how different each of those engagements will be. We can’t always follow leading practices for one reason or another, but that’s ultimately OK, because we can justify our deviations. And, really, that’s the key. How does a deviation map to a business requirement? That’s what the vDW is geared toward teaching. It’s really more an exercise in critical thinking, which is of paramount importance when putting together a design for a customer.

This critical thinking is absolutely validated in the VCAP-DCD exam. While absolutely not required, I would suggest, without reservation, the vDW course for anyone approaching the DCD.

As a couple of points of disclosure, though. I feel like I’ve been clear so far, but I will repeat that I am employed directly by VMware Education, and I would also like to note that the vDW is probably my favorite class to deliver right now. It’s also a partner competency requirement. So I may seem biased, and in many ways, I am, but I’ve been a big proponent of good instructor-led training for far longer than I’ve been an instructor.

Anyway, it’s off to the vCloud with me. I’m ramping up on the vCloud Director classes, so I hope to see you in one somewhere along the line!

-jk