Vote for your Favorite Blog

January 24th, 2012 by Justin No comments »

From vSphere-Land.com…..

There are over 180 blogs dedicated to VMware virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was over a year ago and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

  • Longevity – Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
  • Length – It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
  • Frequency – Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
  • Quality – It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

So please take all this into account when casting your votes, here are some more details on the voting:

  • You can pick 10 of your favorite blogs and also rank them in your order of preference after you pick your 10. The results will be weighted with #1 ranking getting 10 points and #10 rankings getting 1 point. Point totals will be tabulated and from them the top 50 will be determined.
  • Blogs are listed on the ballot  in alphabetical order with the current top 25 blogs highlighted in bold & underlined text, so please go through the whole list when making your choices (Duncan ended up on the bottom).
  • New this year we also having voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The choices of which blogs to include in the categories was the result of this survey and my best guessing. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.
  • Voting will run until 2/7, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special podcast with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer live at VMware Partner Exchange.
  • Several random voters will be picked to win a copy of the Train Signal’s  new vSphere 5 and View 5 video training courses.
  • Duplicate vote protect is enabled, we’ll be using geolocation, IP addresses & cookies to protect against duplicate votes. This isn’t Chicago, please be honest and fair when voting, any suspicious votes will be tossed.
  • If you are not familiar with a blog you can use my vLaunchpad to see links to them all. Try not to pick blogs based just on names but also take content into account. There are a lot of good blogs currently not in the top 25 that deserve to be there.

So what are you waiting for, head on over to http://vote.vsphere-land.com to cast your ballot and reward the best bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them know that you appreciate them. In case you need it here’s the direct link to the survey as well.

 

Related Posts:

  • No Related Posts

HP Storage Tech Day

January 23rd, 2012 by Justin No comments »

This week I’m off to Fort Collins Colorado to visit HP for their latest Tech Day on storage. This is my first invitation to the HP Tech Day events and I’m told they will be showing us all the latest and greatest technology that HP has to offer to the storage market. We were also told we would “have the opportunity to participate in discussions and deep-dive sessions where you will gain access to detailed information and can interact one-on-one with HP’s technical experts”…sounds good to me!

To say the least I am pretty excited!

I’m hoping to take away ideas and best practices as well as learn what new things HP has that will affect  my virtualization projects down the road. I also hope to share information about the projects and the situations that I have experienced while working with HP and other storage.

Stay tuned.

Related Posts:

Apple’s new Textbooks

January 22nd, 2012 by Justin No comments »

While I’m not an Apple fanboy by any means, we do have two iPads at our house but I’ve always struggled with what productive use they have. Almost half of the apps on mine are games, and I would say that the main purpose of the other one is playing Nemo in the car for Elizabeth.

Last week however, Apple released textbooks for the iBooks app. It looks like there are only 8 books so far, but already there are books on various math and science subjects. One of them, titled “E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth”, is a free download so I figured I would grab it and see how good they were.

It did take quite a while to download, but today when I opened the book for the first time it showed the cover page, then a video introducing the book… pretty cool stuff, definitely beats reading the introduction.

The first chapter is like any other ebook: text, pictures, footnotes, references, etc etc. The difference is when you click on the pictures or the graphics, that’s when the book really comes alive. So far I have discovered interactive maps, picture galleries (instead of just one picture to give an idea of what is being talked about they show you a bunch), videos that better explain what is being talked about, 3d graphs, and many other things.

From what I have seen students will not have to sit and read a text book anymore, instead it will be a fully interactive resource which will easily keep the students attention. Besides all of the fun stuff there is also knowledge review sections built right in to the textbook where students can take small quizes and see the right and wrong answers to test what they learned.

At SMS I am starting to see tools like the iPad gain traction in schools through grants and other funding. While new technologies like these will present some challenges for IT staff, it makes me happy to know that my daughter will have tools like this when she starts school in a few years, and it sure will beat what we had when I was there.

Related Posts:

Veeam NFR Keys for VMware and Microsoft Certified Professionals

January 19th, 2012 by Brad Eley No comments »

If you are a VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional (VCP), VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) or VMware User Group (VMUG) member, you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.
Register here.
Additionally, If you are a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) or a Most Valuable Professional (MVP), you can get a FREE 2-socket NFR license for Veeam Backup & Replication v6 for your home or work lab.
Register here.

The licenses are good for 12 months. Using my MCP status, I am going to use my licenses to set up a proof-of-concept for my peers and management for our Hyper-V environment. Today, we are still treating VMs as physical servers when it comes to backup so I hope to show the value-add of having Veeam for faster, more-efficient backups and very quick recoveries.

Related Posts:

  • No Related Posts

Virtualization Project Worksheet

January 12th, 2012 by Justin No comments »

In an effort to make migration to a virtual infrastructure easier, I have put together another document to aid in that process. This one tries to mimic the EMC SAN Worksheet you fill out when you get a new SAN. The difference is this one covers not only your storage but also many other subjects that someone like me (a consultant) would need to know when coming onsite to help migrate to a virtual environment.

Feel free to post comments with suggestions and ideas to improve the document.

Information included in this document:

  • vCenter Server
  • ESXi Server Settings
  • SAN Settings
  • Datastore naming conventions
  • Virtual Networking Needs
  • Alert Notification Settings
  • Active Directory credentials
  • Worksheets for each server to be P2V’d
    • Server Name / IP
    • Credentials
    • Guest OS Type
    • Downtime Window for P2V process
    • Server Purpose
    • Critical Application list
    • Helpful Information about server

Download Here:

Virtualization Project Worksheet

Related Posts:

19 queries in 0.483 seconds.