Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Blogging

Meet the vExperts

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A couple of months ago during the VMTN podcast I shared an idea with John Troyer and Edward Haletky. I thought that it would be cool to have a demo environment at the community booth where the vExperts could show there skills. After some discussions with the VMworld Team I decided to start building a lab and John Troyer asked the vExpert/Bloggers who would be willing to spend an our of their time at the Community Booth.

The list of vExpers that signed up is immense, and I’m really glad to see that guys like Eric Siebert, Scott Herold, Steve Beaver and Scott Lowe are participating. (Amongst many others of course.) I guess the full list will be published soon and I hope all of you take some time to visit the community booth and ask the vExperts some challenging questions! I know I will so you vExperts guys better be prepared. 😉

Blogs about virtualization for DBAs

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Brent Ozar approached me a couple of weeks ago about a new project he was working on as part of the Professional Association For SQL Server named “The Virtualization Virtual Chapter”. Brent wants to get DBAs acquainted with virtualization and all the caveats and strings attached to it. There’s no better and easier way of course then by simply syndicating some of the best virtualization blogs out there.

Brent announced it and released it officially yesterday.

It’s hard for DBAs to find good virtualization information.

We end up reading brochures and whitepapers trying to figure out the best way to virtualize our database servers.  We don’t have the time to sift through the entire blogosphere to figure out what’s relevant for DBAs.

At the Virtualization Virtual Chapter of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), we’re working to change that, and we’ve got some fantastic people helping.  These are some of the top bloggers in the virtualization world today:

These guys blog about virtualization in general, and their material can get pretty technical. I love reading about how Cisco’s new blade system works, for example, but I know most of you don’t have the time to sift through that much information.  That’s why I contacted these guys and asked if they’d be willing to syndicate their beginner-level virtualization stuff and their DBA-related posts in one place.

Starting today, you can get the latest DBA-focused virtualization news, tips and tricks in whatever way works best for you:

New book in town: vSphere Quick Start Guide

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Months ago I shared an idea on Twitter about starting a “super blog”. This “super blog” should have contained the top articles of some of the best VMware or virtualization bloggers around. I asked myself what the added value would be and came to the conclusion that there already were many “super blogs” around. Although the “super blog” idea died a slow death the urge to collaborate with others on a challenging project still lived on. (Although Stephen Foskett picked it up and created Gestalt IT at the time.)

This is when the idea of a book series was born, which I for obvious reasons did not share with the twitter community. This book, and hopefully the rest of the following books, is written by six well known VMware community members. I don’t think they need further introduction so here are there names: Bernie Baker(thanks Chad for the tip), Thomas Bryant III, Stu Radnidge, Dave Mishchenko, Alan Renouf and myself of course.

The original idea was to publish a series of short topics, deep-dives, with each book limited to 150 pages, pocket size, sold at a minimum price and completely “diy”. For those unfamiliar with the term “diy” it means “do it yourself”. In other words we do not have a publisher helping us or funding it. We also don’t have a marketing budget, so we are relying on you guys to spread the word and we will be relying on Lulu.com for distributing/selling it.

When we started outlining our first book Ron Oglesby gave us the opportunity to rewrite the Quick Start Guide he and his team at RapidApp published in March 2007. We all agreed that this would be a good start of the series. Thanks again Ron! Of course this book will exceed the limit we agreed on of 150 pages, but it is worth it. We hope to get it done before VMworld and bring a couple of copies to VMworld but the clock is ticking fast and we are not there yet. We will keep you informed!

I just hope we can get all you guys as excited about new technology and VMware products in general as we are!

Drummonds vs Crosby

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I was just watching the Drummonds vs Crosby debate. Many people have analyzed the videos already but the one worth reading is the article by Mr Stevie Chambers. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look it’s definitely worth it. One thing I would like to note is that in my opinion this was the wrong match. I don’t think Crosby is a performance expert. He seems to be more focused on: sales pitch, eula’s and features included in the hypervisor but not in Xenserver. In other words, Drummonds definitely won… knock out in the third round by EPT 😉

Now, my comment to Citrix… As Scott openly challenged you guys to show benchmark reports(Spec etc) and compare them to VMware’s reports please step up to the plate! That’s what ours and your customers would like to see!

@depping becomes @DuncanYB

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I was so sick and tired of waiting for Twitter.com to give a decent reply to my support requested I decided to open up a new account. From what I’ve been told unsuspending accounts can take up to 30 days. I guess their focus is on suspending accounts cause that only takes them seconds. Well I’m not going to wait anymore, I will delete my @depping account if and when it ever comes back and just continue to use my new account: http://www.twitter.com/DuncanYB

Please start following @DuncanYB instead of @depping and thanks all for your support and retweets. And if you don’t mind spreading the word about my new account I would appreciate it, cause I was down to 0 followers instead of the +800 I used to have.

I also decided not to auto tweet new blog articles anymore as it floods my and your time-line and most of you probably also use a RSS reader. Besides that PlanetV12n is already auto tweeting my articles, so I will probably retweet those once in a while.

Now lets just hope twitter doesn’t close down this account…