Just a reminder here on submitting VMworld sessions. The deadline is coming up quickly.
If you haven’t submitted yet, you have still some hours left to submit a Session Proposal for VMworld 2013.
Submit your session today!

Voted number 2 of top virtualization blogs
As many other IT-addicts, the first thing I do is pick up my phone to see what’s new on twitter, google+ and facebook and to my surprise I received a lot of direct messages and mentions congratulating on taking the second spot on the top 25 virtualization blog list. WOW talk about excitement! From being drowsy to uber-hyped in under a millisecond.
Thanks for voting me! I really appreciate the recognition. I love to blog and write articles and when I’m not researching I’m thinking of topics I can cover. Reaching the number 2 spot proves I’m doing something you all like. But actually I want to thank you for taking the time to vote on any of the top 25 blogs. Everybody spends a great deal of time researching and writing articles, getting votes is a great way to receive acknowledgement for your hard work.
A big thank you goes out to Eric for organizing this competition again. Awesome work and thanks for putting in all the effort. Viewing the stats it shows that this event is becoming more and more an industry event, organized by community members for community members. Great stuff. John, David, Simon similar to last year, great vChat. A delight to watch! BTW, thank you for the compliments! It’s always cool to hear some background details of the top 25 bloggers. I encourage you to watch the special vChat it’s great entertainment!
Congrats to Duncan for taking the number 1 spot. Well deserved! I know how much effort you put into the blog. Outstanding stuff. Congrats to the rest of the top 25 and a special congrats goes out to Cormac. Well deserved to enter in the top 10. If you are on twitter make sure you follow each and everyone of the top 25. These guys are a special bunch, all passionately about virtualization and great bunch of people in general. Here is the list of the top 25 on twitter:

Rank	Name	Twitter
01	Duncan Epping	@DuncanYB
02	Frank Denneman	@FrankDenneman
03	Scott Lowe	@scott_lowe
04	Eric Sloof	@ESloof
05	Chad Sakac	@SakacC
06	William Lam	@LamW
07	Mike Laverick	@Mike_Laverick
08	Alan Renouf	@AlanRenouf
09	Cormac Hogan	@VMwareStorage
10	Eric Siebert	@EricSiebert
11	Jason Boche	@JasonBoche
12	Chris Wahl	@Wahlnetwork
13	Vaugh Stewart	@vStewed
14	Andre Leibovici	@AndreLeibovici
15	Luc Dekens	@LucD
16	Vladan Seget	@vladan
17	Nick Howell	@that1guynick
18	Stephen Foskett	@SFoskett
19	Gabrie van Zanten	@gabvirtualworld
20	Tommy Trogden	@vtexan
21	Michael Webster	@vcdxnz001
22	Kendrick Coleman	@KendrickColeman
23	Simon Seagrave	@kiwi_si
24	Derek Seaman	@vDerekS
25	Brian Madden	@BrianMadden

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend a tech preview of PernixData Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP). Today PernixData exited stealth mode so we can finally talk about FVP. Duncan already posted a lengthy article about PernixData and FVP and I recommend you to read it.
At this moment a lot of companies are focusing on flash based solutions. PernixData distinguishes itself in today’s flash focused world by providing a new flash based technology but that is not a storage array based solution or a server-bound service. I’ll expand on what FVP does in a bit, let’s take a look at the aforementioned solutions. The solutions have drawbacks. A Storage array based flash solution is plagued by common physics. Distance between the workload and the fast medium (flash) generates a higher latency than when the flash disk is placed near the workload. Placing the flash inside a server provides the best performance but it must be shared between the hosts in the cluster to become a true enterprise solution. If the solution breaks important functions such as DRS and vMotion than the use case of this technology remains limited.
FVP solves these problems by providing a flash based data tier that becomes a cluster-based resource. FVP virtualizes server side flash devices such as SSD drives or PCIe flash devices (or both) and pools these resources into a data tier that is accessible to all the hosts in the cluster. One feature that stands out is remote access. By allowing access to remote devices, FVP allows the cluster to migrate virtual machines around while still offering performance acceleration. Therefor cluster features such as HA, DRS and Storage DRS are fully supported when using FVP.
Unlike other server based flash solutions, FVP accelerates both read and write operations. Turning the flash pool in to a “data-in-motion-tier”. All hot data exists in this tier, thus turning the compute layer into an all-IOPS-providing platform. Data that is at rest is moved to the storage array level, turning this layer into the capacity platform. By keeping the I/O operations as close to the source (virtual machines) as possible, performance is increased while reducing the traffic load to the storage platform as well. By filtering out read I/Os the traffic pattern to the array is changed as well, allow the array to focus more on the writes
Another great option is the ability to configure multiple protection levels when using write-back. Data is synchronously replicated to remote devices. During the tech preview Satyam and Poojan provided some insights on the available protection levels, however I’m not sure if I’m allowed to share these publically. For more information about FVP visit Pernixdata.com
The beauty of FVP is that its not a virtual appliance and that it does not require any agents installed in the guest OS. FVP is embedded inside the hypervisor. Now this for me is the key to believe that this ”data-in-motion-tier” is only the beginning of PernixData. By having insights in the hypervisor and understanding the dataflow of the virtual machines, FVP can become a true platform that accelerates all types of IOPS. I do not see any reasons why FVP is not able to replicate/encrypt/duplicate any type of input and output of a virtual machine. 🙂
As you can see I’m quite excited by this technology. I believe FVP is as revolutionary/disruptive as vMotion. It might not be as “flashy” (forgive the pun) as vMotion but it sure is exciting to know that the limitation of use-cases is actually the limitation of your imagination. I truly believe this technology will revolutionize virtual infrastructure ecosystem design.

When Eric Siebert opens up the voting for the top VMware & virtualization blogs you know another (blogging) year has passed. First of all I want to thank Eric for organizing this year in year out. I know he spends an awful lot of time on this. Thanks Eric!
Its amazing to see that there are more than 200 blogs dedicated to virtualization and that each month new blogs appear. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to read them all but I do want to show my appreciation for the blog sites that I usually visit. Best newcomer is an easy one, Cormac Hogan. The content is absolutely great and he should be in the top 10. Then we have the usually suspects, my technical marketing colleagues and buddies: Alan Renouf, Rawlinson Rivera and William Lam. I start of the day by making coffee, checking my email and logging into yellow-bricks.com. It’s the de facto standard of the virtualization blogs. Duncan’s blog provide not only technical in-depth articles, but also insights in the industry. Who else? Eric Sloof of course! Always nice to read to find out that your white paper is published before you get the official word through company channels. 😉 Two relative unknown blog sites but quality content: Erik Bussink and Rickard Nobel. These guys create awesome material. One blog that I’m missing in the list is the one from Josh Odgers. Great content. Hope to be able to vote for him next year.
When reviewing content from others you end up reviewing the stuff you did yourself and 2012 was a very busy year for me. During the year I published and co-authored a couple of white papers such as the vSphere Metro Cluster Case Study, Storage DRS interoperability guide and vCloud Director Resource Allocation Models.
I presented at a couple of VMUGS and at both VMword San Francisco and Europe. The resource pool best practice session was voted as one of the top 10 presentations of VMworld. And of course Duncan and I released the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive, also know as 50 shades of Orange. ☺ I believe it’s the best one of the series.

In the mean time I ended up writing for the vSphere blog, appearing on a couple of podcast and writing a little over a 100 blog articles on frankdenneman.nl. I then to focus on DRS, Storage DRS, SIOC and vMotion but once in a while I like to write about something that gives a little insight peek of my life such as the whiteboard desk or the documentaries I like to watch. It seems you like these articles also as they are frequently visited.
In my articles I try to give insights in the behavior of the features of vSphere, this to help you understand the impact of these features. Understanding the behavior allows you to match your design to the requirements and constrains of the project/virtual infrastructure your working on. During my years in the field I was always looking for this type of information, by providing this material I hope to help out my fellow architects.
When publishing more than over 100 articles you tend to like some more than others. While it’s very difficult to choose individual articles, I enjoyed spending time on writing a series of articles on the same topic, such as the series Architecture and design of datastore clusters (5 posts) and Designing your (Multi-NIC) vMotion network (5 posts). But I also like the individual post:
• vSphere 5.1 vMotion Deepdive
• A primer on Network I/O Control
• vSphere 5.1 Storage DRS load balancing and SIOC threshold enhancements
• HA admission control is not a capacity management tool
• Limiting the number of storage vMotions
I hope you can spare a couple of minutes to cast your vote and show your appreciation for the effort these bloggers put into their work. Instead of picking the customary names please look back and review last year, think about the cool articles you read that helped you or sparked your interest to dive into the technology yourself. Thanks
I can’t wait to watch the Top 25 countdown show Eric, John and Simon did in the previous years.

One of the benefits of working for VMware technical marketing, is that you have your own lab.
Luckily my lab is hosted by an external datacenter, which helps me avoid a costly power-bill at home each month 🙂 However, that means I need to connect to my lab remotely.
As a MAC user I used Remote Desktop Connection for MAC from Microsoft. One of the limiting factors of this RDP for MAC is the limited resolution of 1400 x 1050 px. The screens at home have a minimum resolution 2560 x 1440 px. This first world problem bugged me until today!
Today I found CoRD – http://cord.sourceforge.net/. CoRD allows me to connect to my servers with a resolution 2500 x 1600, using the full potential of my displays at home.

Another create option is the hotkey function, using a key combination I spin up a remote desktop connection. I love these kinds of shortcuts that help me reduce time spend navigating throughout the UI.
If you are using a MAC and often RDP into your lab, I highly recommend to download CoRD.
Btw, it’s free 😉