Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

VMworld 2013 call for papers open!

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VMworld 2013 Call For Papers opened today. I know many of you are excited about this and hoping to have a session accepted at this top-of-the-bill event. Personally I always submit various sessions and for the last years always had atleast one of them excepted, and some years even multiple. So the obvious question I always get is “do you have tips”?

I guess at the risk of lowering my own chances, here they are, do note that as always there is a limited number of sessions that will be accepted. No guarantee that my tips will help in any shape or form, but these are my rules when I submit a session:

  • Be Original, make sure your suggestion is unique. If there are 10 others submitting the exact same, chances are slim you will get in. (Every year I see at least 5 or 6 community/bloggers panel sessions being submitted, with limited space make sure you work together on this and do not compete.)
  • Think Big, although your 2 host home-lab might be interesting to you VMworld is attended by 20.000+ people. So make sure your session appeals to the broader audience AND to the voting committee.
  • Quality over Quantity, really there is no point in submitting 10 sessions. Rather submit two or three, well thought out and developed submissions. This is what you will be judged on by the voting committee. They will read your title and summary, this will need to convince them!
  • Co-Present! Something I always try to do is to team up with someone. Not only will it make the “delivery” a lot easier, but a second pair of eyes on the submission will help!
  • Theme – Theme – Theme, although the theme for 2013 hasn’t been announced yet all of us can more or less guess what it will be about. We all know VMware has these three pillars they are focusing on, and that the SDDC is a major part of it… Make sure to submit something that hits that theme / fits in to those three pillars!

Now before you start running and submit a session, take a deep breath, sit down, relax and think about what you are going to submit. The Call For Papers will be open until April 12th so no need to rush, start scribbling down those ideas and go take your time to fine-tune them!

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/cfp

Top 25 bloggers 2013 results are out…

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The top 25 bloggers 2013 voting results are out again. This year the competition was insane. With newcomers like Cormac Hogan and Chris Wahl, but also old-timers like Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Eric Sloof and of course Frank “resource management” Denneman.

First of all, a BIG THANK YOU to Eric Siebert who took the time and effort again to set this up. I know how much work these kind of things take, so once again thanks Eric for spending your evenings on this! There were over 80 new blogs this year and 4 new blogs made the top 25, and one new blog made the top 10. With a total of ~1300 votes this is probably one of biggest community awards I have seen. Yes being a vExpert is awesome, but getting votes from your readers feels 10 times better.

I am not going to list the full top 25 here, I feel everyone should hit Eric’s page for that. I do want to thank everyone for taking the time to vote for me. I am honored to have been voted number 1 blogger for virtualization again for the 6th consecutive time. This is crazy, who would have thought that when I started yellow-bricks.com years ago… I sure did not expect that, and it was also never my intention. Thanks everyone, and please keep coming back and leave comments – be interactive!

There are two bloggers I do want to call out, first of all someone who I managed to persuade to start his own blog and who entered the Top 10 as a newcomer… Cormac “the god of all things VMware storage related” Hogan. What a tremendous achievement this year by Cormac. So many great articles, not just deep technical but also his “storage vendor overviews” are awesome. Of course the resource management guru who jumped from spot 5 to spot 2, Frank Denneman. Awesome work, what can I say more?! Keep it up,

Once again, make sure to watch the vChat below and hit Eric’s page for the full list. Thanks everyone, and see you next year 🙂

Vote for the top virtualization Blogs / 2012 looking back!

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Yes, it is that time of the year again… vSphere-land.com’s voting for the top virtualization blogs has started again. Of course I am hoping to end up somewhere at the top of the list again, but I realize like no one else that this is not a given. The competition once again is huge, there are a couple of new-comers which has published some outstanding work. Personally I am a huge fan of Cormac Hogan’s work and I hope he will make it in to the top 10 this year, I sure as hell voted for him! Of course I expect my friends like Frank Denneman, Alan Renouf, Massimo Referre and William Lam to also hit the top 10.

I am hoping each of you will select the top-10 blogs again based on quality, relevancy, longevity and frequency. (I personally find length of the article irrelevant, content is King!) I always use the yearly voting to look back at what happened the last 12 months. What happened in 2012, what has kept me busy?

For me 2012 started with Partner Exchange. Presented a 2-hr workshop on how to design a Cloud Infrastructure, together with Dave Hill (he is on the list as well, so vote for him :-)) and guests Frank Denneman and Chris Colotti. On top of that Chris Colotti and I presented a DR solution for vCloud Director based environments. This is something that people had been waiting on for a long time. I came up with the process/concept for this and also published a whitepaper on this topic. The same concept can be used for VMware View environments by the way, white paper out soon! I published a whole bunch of other white papers (1, 2) this year as part of my Tech Marketing responsibilities, of which the vMSC Best Practices paper is probably the most read and best received. I managed to get a couple of sessions approved at VMworld and had a blast presenting with my buddy Lee Dilworth. Also being a VMworld “Expert” was once again an awesome experience, I especially enjoyed the group discussions. I also presented as a couple of VMUGs (belgium, ireland, uk) and last but not least, published the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive… which happened to be the most sold book at VMworld San Francisco.

Along the way I managed to crank out an article or two hundred, and my blog went down during the vSphere 5.1 launch due to the massive amount of traffic. I can tell you that my hosting company was surprised as they thought it was a DDOS attack, but then they figured out it was just a massive amount of people hitting my site on the same day. I guess thanks for that 🙂

I did want to list my 10 top articles over the last 12 months in no particular order:

Thanks again to Eric Siebert who spends a MASSIVE amount of time going through the voting, filtering out discrepancies and making sure it all is done in a fair manner! Make sure to bookmark his website, add it to your RSS reader and follow him on twitter. So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey!

vMotion over VXLAN is it supported?

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I have seen this question popping up in multiple places now, vMotion over VXLAN is it supported? I googled it and nothing turned up, so I figured I would write a short statement:

In vSphere 5.1 (and earlier) vMotion over VXLAN is not supported.

This statement might change in the future, it could be that in the next version vMotion traffic over a VXLAN wire will be supported, but with the current release it is not. Do note that vMotioning virtual machines which are attached to a VXLAN network is supported.

The next question people ask typically is, will it work? Yes it probably will, but again… it is not supported. Keep that in mind when you are designing a multi-site environment and want to use VXLAN.

Storage vMotion does not rename files?

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A while back I posted that 5.0 U2 re-introduced the renaming behavior for VM file names. I was just informed by our excellent Support Team that unfortunately the release notes missed something crucial and Storage vMotion does not rename files by default. In order to get the renaming behavior you will have to set an advanced setting within vCenter.. This is how you do it:

  • Go to “Administration”
  • Click on “vCenter Server Settings”
  • Click “Advanced Settings”
  • Add the key “provisioning.relocate.enableRename” with value “true” and click “add”
  • Restart vCenter service or vCenter Server

Now the renaming of the files during the SvMotion process should work again!
All of you who need this functionality, please make sure to add this advanced setting.

storage vmotion does not rename files