Everything-Virtual

Category: Blogging

  • Top VMware Virtualization Blogs Voting Has Begun

    Every year Eric Siebert from vSphere-Land.com runs a vote for the top 25 VMware and Virtualisation blogs. As there now are over 180 blogs listed on the nominations list the vote has been increased to the top 50 blogs for the year.

    The voting is simple, should take no more than a couple of minutes of your time 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 often do they post
    • How well are the posts written
    • How long are the posts
    • How long have they been blogging

    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 reading the blog and come back soon.

  • VMware VCP 4 Passed – Lessons Learnt

    As I have stated in the past I have been studying for my VCP for a while, I managed to take the ICM course last year and probably spent a good four months afterwards studying to make sure I passed with ease. Disaster struck when work suddenly went crazy and my study opportunities disappeared. It was only in December that I remembered that I had received a discount voucher from VMware for a 70% discount on the cost of the exam (which for anyone who has sat the exam knows, it’s not cheap at £145).

    The reason for this post is that whilst I was lucky and received this email through the post the other day

    vcp

    It was actually very close to being a “Sorry You Failed, please try harder next time” message, why you ask?

    I booked the exam on the 21st of December, I was scheduled to sit it on the 23rd of December, I hadn’t studied for the exam in over two months and I hadn’t been playing with my lab at home because of time constraints (I spend 14+ hours of the day out of the house either at work or travelling to work, I have a wife and son who also want to see me and spend time with me so really, there wasn’t a lot of time to spare) but I knew that if I wanted to get my VCP instead of procrastinating about it I would have to give myself a reason to actually do it and that’s why I booked it when I did for when I did, I stood to lose the cost of the exam (in this case £52.20 which is what I paid for the exam after the 70% discount Smile). I then spent 2.5 days travelling to and from work (6 hours a day) as well as my lunch hour, studying for the VCP exam. Now luckily for me I have an Apple iPad 2 with the Kindle App installed, I also have a large number of VMware based books purchased from the Amazon store as well as the PDF’s mentioned in my previous post (VMware VCP 4 – Additional Study Material) so I knew I could go over the material I wasn’t sure about.

    This is where I learnt my lesson, 2.5 days is not enough time to cram for an exam, not after a hiatus of 2 months from study. My advice is definitely take more time to study but also make sure you give yourself a deadline to have the exam booked by.

  • Goals for 2012

    Reminding myself of the goals I had set for 2011 I discovered that I have accomplished the majority of my goals for 2011.

    To recap my goals for 2011 were.

    * Sit and pass my VCP vSphere 4 Exam Sat and passed my exam on the 23rd of December
    * Improve my VMware product knowledge (VMware View in particular) Having installed VMware View in my homelab and played with ThinApp my knowledge of both has greatly improved.
    * Produce more technical content for this site (as well as my-homelab.com) I had produced more content including a couple of videos but those were done for my-techvideos.com instead.
    * Move more into the VMware Virtualisation platform market and less of the Microsoft one. I took a position with a major online gambling company in their Windows Team Sad smile
    * Become a recognised VMware blogger (I want my vExpert). Obviously not in the same league as other bloggers but with 22k unique visitors to my blog in 2011 I am happy with that.
    * Continue to improve my home lab environment. Yes on this one, I have continued to play with various technologies including various SAN\NAS providers as well as other technologies


    As you can see the goals I set in 2011 were pretty wellWhat that’s meant for me is that my goals for 2011 were both realistic and in the main, achievable. It also means that I have to improve my goals for 2012 which could be difficult.

    My goals for 2012 are.

    * Sit and pass my VCP vSphere 5 Exam
    * Sit and pass my VCA-DT 4 Exam
    * Continue to produce technical content for both this site and my-techvideos.com
    * Continue to grow my VMware blogger status (I still want my vExpert), this includes attending more VMUG’s as well as VMworld 2012 this year.
    * Continue to build up my home lab environment and experiment with various technologies.

  • How To – Restore a deleted WordPress post

    A couple of days ago I made a mistake on my blog and accidently overwrote one of my posts, it was whilst using the excellent Windows Live Writer and was absolutely nothing to do with the software, it was entirely a PEBKAC issue.

    pebcak_20898

    The mistake was that I took an existing post (first part in a multipart series) and edited it to make the second part of the article (I am used to Word documents). In this case it was only after I posted up the draft to the website did I realise what I had done.

    (more…)