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.
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 harder
“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
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.
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.
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 an earlier post I configured my Synology DS1513+ Storage server for iSCSI and enabled it for Multi-Pathing, in this post I will show you how to create and configure a vDS (vSphere Distributed Switch) for iSCSI use and how to enable Multipathing to use more than one network path to your storage (there by increasing throughput).
Using the vCenter client you can see that in the above screenshot that I have 4 Intel NIC ports on my hosts that aren’t currently assigned to a vswitch.
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
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:
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