Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Blogging

Win a free VMworld 2010 Copenhagen ticket!

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** NOTE: 2010! No longer valid for 2011 🙂 **

The VMworld Europe team gave me the opportunity to give away 1 free ticket for VMworld Europe 2010. (Please note, VMworld 2010 Europe Conference Ticket only!) I have been thinking about what kind of contest to set up and I even considered giving away the ticket to a random person. However, that doesn’t really cut it in my opinion. I would like this ticket to go to someone who really needs to be at VMworld. Someone who will really get the most out of it, someone who will use what he has learned to educate others, someone who has a project coming up and needs to apply his knowledge to bring a project / implementation to a success.

So what do you need to do in order to make a chance?

  • Leave a comment with your Name and a valid email address
  • Explain to us why you need to go to VMworld, we are looking for someone who will go the extra mile!

Who, when, where and what?

  • Two VMware Employees(Thanks Frank and Andy!) and I will go through a selection procedure and will select a winner
  • The winner will be announced on Tuesday 28th of September, closing date for the submission is Saturday 25th of September
  • Please note, only a VMworld Conference Pass no travel/lodging
  • VMware employees are not eligible

Good luck,

Vote Now!

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Yes, it is that time of the year again… vSphere-land.com’s voting for the Top 25 Blogs worldwide has started again. I had the honor of placing 1st three consecutive times and of course this time I want to be first again, although this year more than ever there seems to be a lot of competition out there!

My personal Top-10 changed slightly as a couple of bloggers did an outstanding job the last 6 months and others stopped or topics changed. Bloggers like Frank Denneman, who published amazing articles on Resource Management and NUMA scheduling, Simon Long with his VCP-4 online exam and Nick Weaver with the Uber VSA really stepped up to the plate!

Instead of asking for your votes, I am hoping each of you will select the top-10 blogs based on quality, longevity and frequency. (I personally find length of the article irrelevant, content is King!) I did wanted to list my top 10 articles over the last 6 months:

  1. Overhauled HA Deepdive
  2. ESXTOP
  3. VMware vCloud Director (vCD)
  4. vSphere 4.1, VMware HA New maximums and DRS integration will make our life easier
  5. Aligning your VMs virtual hard disks
  6. Memory Limits
  7. Changes to Snapshot mechanism Delete All
  8. HA/DRS and Flattened Shares
  9. IOps
  10. VMware related acronyms

Vote Now!

UML diagram your VM, vdisks and snapshots by @lucd22

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Somehow I missed out on this excellent script/blog about diagramming your vmdk’s and associated snapshot trees for the Planet V12n Top 5 post I do for the VMTN Blog weekly.

Luc Dekens is one of the leading PowerCLI script gurus and created this amazing script that creates a diagram of the relationship between VMs, VMDKs and Snapshots. Now you might wonder what the use case would be when there is a one to one relationship like the following:

Many will understand the relationship when you have a single snapshot. But is that still the case when you have multiple snapshots running on multiple disks? Probably not, check this diagram to get an idea:

Great work Luc, and my apologies for not selecting it for the Planet V12n Top 5 as it definitely deserved a spot.

It’s a trend?!

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There seems to be a trend in the blogosphere the last months. I already tweeted about it a couple of time but decided to create a list to make it more obvious for some of you non-believers. I guess after reading the following list the question is “who is next” and of course “where can I place my bet?”.

  • Simon Gallagher –> VMware
  • Simon Long –> VMware
  • Simon Seagrave –> EMC
  • Bas Raayman –> EMC
  • Rich Brambley –> Veeam
  • Alan Renouf –> EMC
  • Hany Michael –> VMware
  • Kenneth van Ditmarsch –> VMware
  • Scott Lowe –> EMC
  • Frank Denneman –> VMware
  • Rick Scherer –> EMC
  • Ken Cline –> Quest
  • Massimo Re Ferrè –> VMware
  • Ed Saipetch –> EMC
  • Mike Laverick –> Tech Target
  • …. more to come soon! Believe me.

Now I’m not judging any of the people mentioned or any of the vendors recruiting these experts; It’s merely an observation. Better said I fully understand why this is happening. The VMware community is full of experienced and knowledgeable people and especially the bloggers have a high visibility.

Now, place your bet.

Update your bookmarks…

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It’s time to update your bookmarks and/or RSS reader. Steve Jin, author of the book “VMware VI and vSphere SDK” and creator of the vSphere Java API, recently started blogging. His blog is called DoubleCloud and I highly recommend following Steve’s writings as he is one smart cookie.

Frank Denneman moved to a new home yesterday, well a new location for his Blog of course. Make sure you update your bookmarks/rss reader.