Everything-Virtual

Category: Blogging

  • Voting now open for the 2014 Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs

    It’s that time again, Eric Siebert from vSphere-Land.com runs a vote for the top VMware and Virtualisation blogs. As there are now over 300 blogs listed on the nominations page there are a lot of sites to choose from.

    The voting is simple and should take no longer than a couple of minutes and allows you to choose your top 10 favourite listed blogs. The scoring is such that a #1 vote gives you 10 points, #2 vote gives you 9 points all the way down to a single point for a 10th place vote.

    The following criteria should be taken into consideration when voting.

    • How long have they been blogging
    • How long are the posts
    • How often do they post
    • How well are the posts written

    If you like the content that I provide here and would like to cast a vote for my blog I would really appreciate it, the blogging is done because I want to do it but I hope you the reader also get something out of it.

    Thanks for continuing to read the blog and come back soon.

  • vExpert 2014 Nominations are Open

    VMware vExpert 2014

     

    It’s that time of year so VMware have announced that they have opened the vExpert 2014 applications. You can now submit your application and invite other people. As in previous years VMware offers 3 different paths. The deadline for application is March 6th, 2013 for Q1, after that you can become a vExpert in Q2, Q3,…

    Evangelist Path
    The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, VMTN contributors, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can also apply via the Evangelist path. A VMware employee reference is recommended if your activities weren’t all in public or were in a language other than English.

    Customer Path
    The Customer Path is for leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have been internal champions in their organizations, or worked with VMware to build success stories, act as customer references, given public interviews, spoken at conferences, or were VMUG leaders. A VMware employee reference is recommended if your activities weren’t all in public.

    VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
    The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning through accreditations and certifications and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements. A VMware employee reference is required for VPN Path candidates.

    A nice change this year is the new fast track method for those who were awarded the vExpert in 2013. If you’re a current 2013 vExpert, the 2014 application process has been shortened. Since you are a proven vExpert all VMware wants to know is what you have been doing since the May 2013 vExpert announcement. This makes it very easy to re-apply Smile

    In addition to the fast track change VMware have also introduced quarterly nominations to the 2014 vExpert program, this allows for new nominations to be presented each quarter.

    If you think you have what it takes to become a 2014 vExpert then go apply at http://bit.ly/LMJqB5! If you want someone else to apply for vExpert 2014 you can also sign them up: http://bit.ly/1bobFfF. More information on the vExpert program can be found here.

    Thanks to John Troyer & Corey Romero as well as the vExpert Team for making this happen Smile

    Good luck to everyone.

  • Another Year in the Life of Everything-Virtual.com

    A quick run down for 2013

    “The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 52,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

    In 2013, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 135 posts.

    The busiest day of the year was July 9th with 320 views. The most popular post that day was Condusiv V-locity VM Testing.”

    Compared to 2012 this is a drop in viewing figures so that just means I need to work harderSmile

    “19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 70,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

    In 2012, there were 36 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 90 posts.

    The busiest day of the year was June 1st with 435 views. The most popular post that day was VMware STOP: 0x0000005d Error.”

    All I can say is thanks to my readers for continuing to read my site Smile

    Click here to view the entire report

  • Installing the Home Lab – Configuring ESXi Syslog Settings

    In a previous post I installed and configured the Synology Syslog server to allow me to stop me getting the below message on my hosts.

    image

    The reason for the message is that I run my 3 ESXi hosts using SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB keys and as such there is no persistent storage for logs. In this post I am going to show you how to configure some VMware infrastructure to point to our newly configured Syslog server.

    (more…)

  • Installing the Home Lab – Configuring Datacenters and Hosts

    In the previous post we installed and configured access to vCenter 5.5, it’s great that we have vCenter installed but with no datacenter or Hosts configured we aren’t going to be doing too much with our new installation so what we need to do is add a new datacenter and a host to allow us to work with the vSphere suite.

    02-12-2013 09-18-25

    Launch the Windows based vCenter Client

    (more…)

  • Veeams’ Ultimate New Year’s Resolution 2014

     

     

     

    Exclusively for the virtualization community, Veeam raffles great prizes that will improve IT Pros daily working experience!

    Join the raffle and be fully equipped for 2014!

    Register now to get one of the following prizes:

    • Tablet of your choice: Android, iPad or Surface
    • Class of your choice: Microsoft Training or VMware Education Services course
    • Event of your choice: TechEd or VMworld in your geography (pass, no travel)
    • Home lab with HP and Netgear products: one mega server, ReadyNAS Pro, SSDs and amazing WiFi router
    • Software kit: MSDN subscription, Veeam NFR licenses and VMware vSphere

    Make sure to register before Dec. 24 to enter raffle!

    You can check out the competition here: http://go.veeam.com/ultimate-new-years-resolution.html

  • Condusiv V-locity VM Testing – Synology DS1513+

    This is a follow on posting about my Condusiv V-Locity VM testing carried out back in July.

    I have carried out testing on the Synology DS1513+ NAS using both iSCSI and NFS.

    Lab Setup

    Host Hardware

    ESXi HOST: Shuttle XPC SH67H3, 32GB RAM; 1x i7 3770 @ 3.4ghz with ESXi 5.1u1 (5.1.0 build 1021289)

    STORAGE PLATFORM

    Synology: DS1513+ running DSM 4.2

    (more…)

  • 2013 vExperts – Free one year subscription to TrainSignal

    What can I say, TrainSignal have a BIG gift for all of the 2013 vExperts (all 581 of us, btw who was the 581st?? as it was originally only 580) and that’s a years subscription to their Training Library.

    • Over 1,500 hours of IT pro video training
    • Over 200 hours of VMware video training
    • 30 VMware courses that include topics like vSphere 5.1, vSphere Advanced Networking, vCenter Operations Manager, vCloud Director 5.1, vSphere Performance, vSphere Troubleshooting, vSphere Design and new courses on the way (including VCAP-DCA5, EMC Storage Essentials, and more)
    • Certification practice exams (including the VCP)
    • Offline viewer (Win/Mac)
    • iPad compatible streaming

    A BIG thanks to TrainSignal for this.

    vExperts to find more information and to register for your subscription please go here

  • vExpert 2013 Award

    I am happy to announce that for a second year in a row I have been awarded the vExpert 2013. I wasn’t sure I had done enough blogging on my site over last year but then realised that it wasn’t just my blogging but also my moderation duties over at http://certforums.com that helped my chances. I run several blogs about Technology as I usually document installation guides\technical fixes and how to guides for various different products, I use my own site to assist me with obscure issues that occasionally crop up. With a family and long working days it’s not an easy thing to maintain but having a laptop\tablet and connection to my homelab certainly allows me to blog on the move.

    To give you an idea of numbers, over 1000 people applied for the vExpert award this year, only 580 succeeded in being awarded, in John Troyers words :-

    There were a lot of very smart, very accomplished people, even VCDXs, that weren’t named as vExpert this year.

    I will continue to blog and post on the various forums I attend so please continue to visit regularly.

    I would also like to congratulate all the new and renewed vExperts for 2013, especially Andrey and Craig, two of my fellow Certforum colleagues.

  • vForum London

    So I had the pleasure of attending the VMware vForum event at Wembley Stadium yesterday. One of the surprise finds at the event was the Condusiv Technologies stand down in the Solutions Exchange.

    Now I didn’t realise it but Condusiv Technologies are a company I have had experience of before, for those of you familiar with Diskeeper you will remember the name Executive Software, well at some point Executive Software rebranded themselves as Condusiv Technologies.

    For the most part Condusiv were there demonstrating their new V-locity software, the benefits of which are said to be :-

    • Increase application performance by 50%
    • Reduce latency by 50% for faster file access
    • Eliminate bottlenecks without expensive hardware
    • True "set and forget" management

    From what I saw of the demonstration I was very impressed with the potential of V-locity and I have asked Condusiv for an NFR license to do some home testing on my home lab, hopefully a license will be winging it’s way over to me soon so that I can run some tests on my various NAS devices here (both pre and post software install).

    In was good catching up with old friends from various different companies (VMware, EMC\MTI, GlobalKnowledge) as well as catching up with some of my fellow #LonVMUG’ers and I was also glad to see at least one other person wearing his CloudCreds t-shirt with pride Smile

    This was my first vForum event and I must say it was well presented with just the right amount of detail, the solutions exchange area was full of different vendors and the food\drink provided was top notch.

    Over all I was impressed and will be attending next years event as well.

    Thank you VMware.