Category: News

Dec 28 2009

It’s that time again…

Time for you to pick the top VMware & virtualization related blog websites. The last vote was in June 2009 and there have been many great new bloggers since then that are worthy candidates for the top bloggers. Since there are so many top blogs I’ve decided to expand the top 20 blogs to the top 25 blogs and you get to pick the winners. Voting will open on Monday, Jan. 4th and I’m using a better survey tool this time. Because of the cost I’ve gotten a sponsor for the voting, TrainSignal has graciously signed on to sponsor the voting and as an added bonus they they are providing two copies of their awesome vSphere DVD training course that will be awarded to two random voters. The voting will be to pick your top 10 favorite blogs, I will then count and weigh the votes to determine the complete top 25 list. The top 10 blogs will receive a nice graphic that they can display on their website. Stay tuned for details on the voting!

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Dec 21 2009

Giving back to someone who deserves it

My secret project for the last month was putting together a gift for someone who would give you the shirt off his back if you asked for it. That someone is John Troyer from VMware who helps out bloggers, vExperts and the VMware community on a daily basis without asking anything in return. John has helped me out personally many a time doing things like writing the foreword to my book, getting a question answered by VMware engineers or getting me access to a beta program. I had planned on getting John a little gift for a while now as a token of my appreciation for all the help he has given me and with the holidays approaching I thought it was time to do it.

After thinking about it for a while I thought I would extend this to other people in the VMware community who know and deal with John and have also been affected by his generosity. I had to keep it a secret so John wouldn’t find out so I put together an email list of about 50 bloggers & vExperts who might want to contribute. The plan was to collect a small donation from anyone who wished to contribute which I would use to get John a gift with. I also had planned on getting him an appreciation plaque as well but after doing some research found an online group card that everyone could sign and add their own personal message to.

The response was overwhelmingly positive as everyone thought John definitely deserved this. As a result we were able to send John several gift cards and printed copies of the online group card that everyone had signed. In addition Chad Sakac from EMC kicked in with an Iomega storage unit for him as well. So thanks John for everything you do for us, I’m sure you already know we appreciate it but sometimes its nice to get a reminder of it anyway.

Update: Here’s the video link to John opening his surprise gift.

Update: Here’s a second video link recorded a few hours later.

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Nov 16 2009

What’s new at vSphere-land

I thought I’d give an update on some of the new things happening on this website.

  1. The vLaunchpad has been updated and over-hauled, the blog roll has been alphabetized for easier viewing. I’ve added a new Storage blogs category since virtualization and storage seem to be so closely tied to each other. I added lots of new reference links, removed some old blogs that haven’t been updated in a long time and added lots of new ones that were missing.  I also have added a Twitter section with my group lists and created a Tweet grid of the Top 20 bloggers and Top 100 VMware people that can be accessed at http://tweets.vsphere-land.com.
  2. I’ve created two Tweet lists using the new Twitter lists features so you can also quickly go to the Top 20 blogger or Top 100 VMware people tweets.
  3. Lots of vSphere link updates, including many new links on Thin Provisioning. Be sure and check out the new white paper VMware just released on the performance impact of using thin disks.

It’s been 6 months since I did an updated  Top 20 blog list, last time I let everyone vote on it instead of me picking it. Time to do another one, some of the blogs currently in the top 20 haven’t been updated in a while and there are lots of excellent new ones out there. I’m going to expand it to the Top 25 and setup a survey using a new dedicated survey website. Voting will open Dec. 1st and run through Dec. 15th.

I’d like to highlight some of the excellent new blogs that I added to the vLaunchpad:

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Oct 28 2009

New white paper on 5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery

Veeam approached me recently and asked if I was interested in writing a white paper for them to coincide with their launch of latest version of Veeam Backup & Recovery (4.0). The timeframe for writing it was short but I accepted it because I was interested in learning more about the vStorage APIs and also Veeam Backup & Recovery. While doing research for it I did learn a lot about the new vStorage APIs that I had not known before. Typically unless you’re a vendor or developer you don’t deal much with APIs, but I’m the curious type though and like to dig deep and find out how things work. There are many important new features in the vStorage APIs and other storage-related APIs in vSphere that are real game-changers for vendors if they choose to take advantage of them. Even if you’re not a developer you should know a bit about them so you have a better understanding of how things work in vSphere.

I learned two additional things while writing the white paper for Veeam, the first is their new 4.0 version of Veeam Backup & Recovery is the first of the many disk to disk backup applications to take full advantage of the new APIs in vSphere, the second is that there are some pretty smart folks at Veeam that are very passionate about their products. I’d like to thank Doug Hazelman & Anton Gostev for answering my many questions about how things work behind the scenes with their product. So go checkout the white paper and more importantly Veeam’s new 4.0 version which I’ll guarantee you’ll be impressed by. Also look for an upcoming tip on searchdatabackup.com that I did that compares how disk to disk backup vendors are using the vStorage APIs and where they are at with their product releases.

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Oct 08 2009

New Twitter lists for the top bloggers and VMware/Virtualization people

Twitter is a great tool for communicating with other virtualization professionals, but trying to find interesting people to follow especially if you are new to Twitter can be time-consuming and difficult. For that reason I put together some Twitter group lists to make following people that are related to VMware virtualization easier. The first list is just from my Top 20 blogger list on my vLaunchpad that was decided by a poll I did months ago, consequently that one was really easy to put together.

The second list is the top 100 people to follow that are related to VMware & virtualization, this one wasn’t easy at all to put together. The list started at about 300+ people that was part based on my followers and followings of other popular virtualization bloggers. Once I discovered that TweepML had a limit of 100 people I had to really trim that list down a lot, that wasn’t an easy task, especially the last 20 or so. There were some people I really wanted to keep on there but was forced to remove, the 100 person limit made for some difficult decisions. I did research a bit though to try and make sure the ones I included on the list did tweet often and that at least some of their tweets were VMware & virtualization related. I also did try and keep the list limited to actual people and not general types of twitter accounts that are used by companies and websites.

It is entirely possible I missed some people though that should be on the list, if you feel that’s the case be sure and drop me an email and I’ll try to re-work the list. Again, it wasn’t easy to limit it to 100 as there are many people that twit about VMware & virtualization but I did the best I could. So here are the lists, enjoy!

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Sep 11 2009

Largest collection of VMworld 2009 links on the planet

I started  posting links before VMworld started and have finally caught up with them all. Be sure and check out my huge link collection to find out everything that said, written or shown at VMworld this year. There was a lot of great video taken this year so check out the multimedia links section and watch some of the great videos like those that were made by John Troyer and VMworld TV. I’m still digging around and adding some additional links so be sure and check back.

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Aug 13 2009

Another new white paper: VMware vSphere 4 Fault Tolerance: Architecture and Performance

On the heals of the CPU Scheduler white paper comes another great one entitled VMware vSphere 4 Fault Tolerance: Architecture and Performance. If you plan on using the Fault Tolerance feature be sure and give this one a read. Also check out my many links on Fault Tolerance.

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Aug 12 2009

New white paper: VMware vSphere 4: The CPU Scheduler in VMware ESX 4

VMware just released a new 21 page white paper entitled VMware vSphere 4: The CPU Scheduler in VMware ESX 4 that is all about how the mysterious CPU scheduler functions. This is a highly recommended read and the scheduler is one of the most important components of the hypervisor and therefore you should understand how it functions. The white paper details how the scheduler works, changes made to it in ESX 4, verifies the effectiveness of CPU resource controls including Shares/Reservations/Limits, compares different co-scheduling algorithms and evaluates the performance impact of CPU scheduler changes in ESX 4. Be sure and go check it out.

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