Certifications

[Phillip V]

You're lucky.  I have to supply my own training and exam costs. : (

Well this is my first employer/site that pays for exam costs/fees for anything IT-related. Thus, I am milking it for as much as possible. But the first 5 years of my IT career, I spent up to $2000 on certifications.

[Eddie Teach]

I thought you were in the army 

[Darth Wagtaros]

Thinking about getting a CCENT and a COMPTIA Green IT cert because I feel like it.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Failed the CEH by 1%.  I feel both stupid and depressed. 

[merithyn]

Failed the CEH by 1%.  I feel both stupid and depressed.

[Darth Wagtaros]

VMWare associate stuff for workplace mobility and virtual dater center. 

[DontSayBanana]

Just out of curiosity, how much virtualization is there really in the education sector?  It seems like a lot of the education applications are database-driven, and those are a pretty poor choice for virtualization, since they don't really share well when it comes to hogging system resources.

Unless you're doing some kind of weird thing going the other way trying to get discrete machines to look and act like a discrete unit.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Lots. Plus virtualization is movingonto desktops in my uni.

[Caliga]

Just out of curiosity, how much virtualization is there really in the education sector?  It seems like a lot of the education applications are database-driven, and those are a pretty poor choice for virtualization, since they don't really share well when it comes to hogging system resources.

We virtualize everything.  I don't understand what you mean unless you're commenting on the fact that SQL Server tends to consume all memory available to it which, while true, isn't a problem in a large enough virtual environment.  Our ERP has 48 Gb of RAM allocated to it.  We had been talking about upping that to 192 Gb but it doesn't seem to really need it, so we haven't gotten there yet.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Sql runs ok virtualized

[DontSayBanana]

Sql runs ok virtualized

Possibly.  I'd imagine it's got a lot to do with how normalized the tables are.  I'd imagine a 3NF database would work okay in a virtualized environment, but 5NF would damn near grind the system to a halt.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Scaling is the only issue.  If you have a large SQL database with a great deal of transactions you will obviously need a lot of resources allocated to that VM.  There are tools that can be used to get an idea of what resources are needed. Also, if your VM is stored on a POS appliance, yes, it'll run like shit.  Just a matter of finding the right equipment.  Most of my databases are pretty small, so having things run off a cruddy NAS with 8gb of RAM is just fine.  For a large Exchange environment or something you will probably want fast drives with fiber.  Or something. SQL (or any other databases) will run fine virtualized.

[Phillip V]

Failed the CEH by 1%.  I feel both stupid and depressed. 

So is that exam money lost?

[Darth Wagtaros]

Toast yo.  They are being very persnickity about retaking it too for some reason. 

[Darth Wagtaros]

took the CWTS exam and passed it. Should take the Certified Wireless Network Admin exam at some point, but will probably get a CCNA instead.  Am taking the VCP5-DCV in a few hours.  looks like a tough exam.