Tag: VMware

How I studied for the VMware VCP-NV 2023 Network Virtualization NSX-T Exam

I recently took the VCP-NV 2023 exam, also referred to as 2V0-41.20. The platform has been completely rebuilt since I took the VCP6-NV exam in 2018. I want to share some of the resources I used and hopefully help someone else to take and pass the exam.

Pluralsight

There is a Pluralsight course called: VCP-NV 2022: VMware Certified Professional – Network Virtualization (2V0-41.20). This course goes through many concepts and then has labs you can follow along with. Watching the approximately eight hours of content was very helpful for me because although I understood many of the networking concepts, I needed to know how things were done differently in NSX-T.

Hands On Labs

If you do not have a lab or maybe you don’t have the storage and compute resources necessary in your home lab to run a full NSX implementation, I would highly suggest using VMware Hands On Labs. It’s free and it is a great way to learn.

Using Your Home lab

I spent quite a bit of time messing with NSX in my home lab. This is one of the best ways for me to learn. I even found a way to install NSX from vCenter that was not mentioned in the videos on Pluralsight. The things I learned were a little bit less about helping me with the exam and more about understanding how things would work in a production environment.

Practice Exams

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any practice exams. What I had to do was make notes around everything listed in the exam guide. Also took a look at some resources, like this one from vBrownBag on YouTube to prepare me for the exam. The one I linked is for the 2.4 version of NSX-T, but I found a lot of the concepts to be the same.

Conclusion

These are the tools that I found invaluable in helping me learn the material needed to pass this exam. I hope that they can be of service to you as well.

How to Resolve Horizon View vCenter Connection Errors

I was recently working with a client that needed me to migrate Horizon View VMs to new storage. I thought it would be as easy as changing the storage settings for the pool and performing a rebalance across the cluster. Unfortunately, no rebalance operation was successful and I saw the following errors:

Provisioning error occurred for Machine XXX: Refit operation rebalance failed

vCenter at address <vCenter Address> has been temporarily disabled (this error would typically followed by another notification that the same vCenter had been enabled)

I was able to resolve the issue by following VMware KB 1030996. I the case of this customer there was only one working production pool. To test that there was an issue with the pool in use, I created a new temporary pool. I then tried recompose actions and looked for errors in the event log. There were none.

Creating a new temporary pool proved critical to resolving this issue. The crux of the problem as laid out in the KB is that there are two vCenter entries in the composer database. In my case the IP address and the FQDN (The FQDN being the correct entry). The correct Deployment Group ID was displayed in the View Composer Database entry for the new temporary pool I created. I was able to take that ID and replace it in the entries for the current production pool. After that was done, I was able to easily rebalance the production pool.