Next week will be the one year birthday of the weekly VMTN community roundtable podcast. The brain child of John Troyer from VMware, the podcast was originally slated as a forum for some of the VMTN moderators to talk about some of the current hot topics in the VMTN forums and whatever other popular subjects came up. The first episode on 5/23/08 was a just couple of us guys from the VMTN forums talking about various topics, after a while the podcast became more popular as more people found out about it and the format shifted to talking about specific topics each week and special guests were invited who were related to the topic for the week.
On the podcast we mainly talk about technical stuff as most of the participants are admins, architects and technical gurus and have no tolerance for marketing and sales talk. John moderates the podcast and schedules special guests which include VMware employees, vendors, industry experts and well-known bloggers. Some of the regular participants who have been involved since the very beginning include myself, Edward Haletky, Ken Cline, Steve Beaver and Jason Boche. Other well-known participants include Eric Sloof, Duncan Epping, Scott Herold and many more.
Over the past year we’ve had a few bad moments, mainly because Talkshoe is a public forum, including technical issues (no audio), call crashers yelling obscenities and weird background noises and echoes but the podcasts produce some great technical information as the participants ask some great and tough questions of the guests. This past week was all about what is new with storage in vSphere and Paul Manning from VMware was the special guest. The podcast turned out to be a great one and lots of insider information about the new storage featues of vSphere was shared.
You can listen to the podcast live each week at Talkshoe’s website and also download a MP3 recording of it after it is finished, additionally the podcast is available on iTunes. While the podcast is going on there is an active chatroom where listeners can chat and share information and opinions. After each show John also posts notes and links to the VMware VMTN blog. So be sure and check it out each week and if you can’t make it to the live show listen to the recordings, all of the past 48 episodes are available to listen to.