Congratulations to the Top 25 Bloggers for their effort and dedication to maintaining excellent content.
With the results in I am pleased to say that I still managed to stay in the list this year (improving my standing by 9 places 
)
For further details on this please head over to Eric’s site here
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.
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.
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 
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
Good luck to everyone.
In this post we are going to configure the Synology Syslog server so that we can get rid of the message below that occurs because my servers use the SanDisk Cruzer Fit USB drives
In earlier posts we have installed and configured vCenter 5.5 as well as assigning hosts to it, in this next post we are going to configure our iSCSI storage to allow us to later setup Multi-Pathing from our hosts to our storage.
In my home lab I am using a dedicated Synology DS1513+ for my storage, so let’s go set up the iSCSI LUNs on the Synology.
Log in to the Synology interface with your admin account
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.
Launch the Windows based vCenter Client
This post will detail all the steps required to install vCenter 5.5a on to a Windows 2012R2 guest machine, I should add that at the time of writing 2012R2 isn’t on the supported OS list and that there is an additional step that needs to be done to ensure that the installation succeeds first time.
You will need to get a copy of OCSetup.exe because for some insane reason Microsoft dropped the use of it in Windows 2012R2 (it’s present in 2012). As a side note you can also use a copy of the file from Windows 2008R2 if you don’t have 2012 available. Once you have a copy place it in the C:\Windows\System32 folder.
In the first post in this series we installed the Windows 2012 R2 Root Certificate Authority. This, the second in a series of posts details the configuration of the VMware specific Template and the distribution of the Root CA Certificate.
The following post, the first in series of posts, details the installation and configuration of a Windows 2012R2 Enterprise CA to be used with a VMware Infrastructure Home Lab.
It is assumed at this stage that you have a single host installed and are running a Windows Domain controller.
As this is a home lab I have chosen to install the CA on to my Domain Controller rather than a dedicated server but if your environment is capable of running a dedicated CA VM then please do so.
The installation can be carried out either using a PowerShell script or by using the Microsoft Wizard. I have only documented the PowerShell method here but you can use the Wizard if you want instead.
Use the PowerShell script below to install the CA and Web Enrolment roles.
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Add-WindowsFeature ADCS-Cert-Authority, ADCS-Web-Enrollment |
VMware have just announced the availability of some new Hands-On Labs, there are now 16 lab topics available, free to everyone. Labs are listed below along with a direct link to enroll in the lab.
· HOL-SDC-1301 – Applied Cloud Operations – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1301
· HOL-SDC-1302 – vSphere Distributed Switch from A to Z – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1302
· HOL-SDC-1304 – vSphere Performance Optimization – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1304
· HOL-SDC-1305 – Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery In Action – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1305
· HOL-SDC-1307 – vCloud Automation Solutions – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1307
· HOL-SDC-1308 – Virtual Storage Solutions – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1308
· HOL-SDC-1309 – vSphere Big Data Extensions – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1309
· HOL-SDC-1310 – vSphere and vSOM 101 – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1310
· HOL-SDC-1311 – VMware IT Business Management – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1311
· HOL-SDC-1313 – vCloud Suite Use Cases – Infrastructure Provisioning (IaaS) – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1313
· HOL-SDC-1314 – vCloud Suite Use Cases – Application Provisioning (PaaS) – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1314
· HOL-SDC-1315 – vCloud Suite Use Cases – Control & Compliance – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1315
· HOL-SDC-1316 – vCloud Suite Use Cases – Quality of Service – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1316
· HOL-SDC-1317 – vCloud Suite Use Cases – Business Critical Applications – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1317
· HOL-SDC-1318 – vCloud Suite Use Cases – Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery – Enroll in HOL-SDC-1318
· HOL-MBL-1301-AZ – Horizon View from A to Z – Enroll in HOL-MBL-1301-AZ
Log into the Online Portal at http://labs.hol.vmware.com.