Eric Siebert of vsphere-land.com started a new election of the best 20 bloggers in the VMware and Virtualization scene. Because even more top blogs got started in 2009, Eric decided to expand the top 20 to the top 25.
To my suprise, Eric decided to nominate my blog as well. I’m really honored to be a nominee amongst the best virtualization bloggers out there. Unfortunately the list Eric is longer that the 10 votes one can cast, so good luck picking the ones who stand out above the excellent crowd.
This is my top 10 blogs;
Duncan Epping
Chad Sakac
Kenneth van Ditmarsch
Alan Renouf
Scott Lowe
Scott Drummonds
Hypervizor (Hany Michael)
Arnim van Lieshout
Arne Fokkema
Gabe Virtual world.
Go vote now before it’s too late!
http://vsphere-land.com/news/time-to-vote-for-your-favorite-bloggers.html
Wrap-up 2009
Daniel Easons blog post inspired me to write a wrap-up of 2009 myself. Beside the career move described in the previous post, 2009 was a year of finding two new addictions. Blogging and twitter(@frankdenneman). Beginning of February I started blogging and the first article was received pretty well. The article got mentioned on Yellow Bricks the same day. Now 10 months later, more than 37.000 people visited the site. It cannot hold a candle to the great blogs out there, but it’s nice start. Some of my articles appeared in a few Top 5 Planetv12n lists, got mentioned on Yellow Bricks and were featured in Scott Lowe’s virtualization short takes.
Trying to create in-depth articles is an excellent way to learn stuff. Most of the time describing a certain subject somehow challenged my current knowledge of that topic and ended up spending ridiculous amounts of time researching that particular subject. More often than not coming across very interesting material not really related to the subject but similarly interesting, consuming even more time. Some articles are more popular than others; these are the top five visited articles this year;
1. Increasing the queue depth
2. Lefthand SAN – Lessons learned
3. HP Continuous Access and the use of LUN balancing scripts
4. Impact of memory reservations
5. NFS and IP-HASH Load-Balancing
Lately I’m running into a few limitations of the free wordpress blog themes, that’s why I’ve decided to move to another site, stay tuned for the URL.
I’m aiming to release the new site at the beginning of next year.
Joining VMware
The year 2009 has been an interesting year. After leaving a long-term position, I participated in some really awesome projects, got to fiddle around with the cutting edge technology and got to work with some really excellent and inspiring people.
Begin August I got an e-mail from Duncan Epping If I would like to do some contractors work for VMware. As you can imagine, it didn’t take me long to respond with a Font size 72 YES. (Do you know you can make text blink in word?)
After completing a few project VMware offered me a permanent job, being a contractor for 9 years made the decision a bit tougher, but getting such a job offer is something you can hardly refuse.
Working with the best of the business, being able to access internal information and getting exposed to all the new stuff VMware is creating is just plain awesome. So on the 4th of January I will be joining VMware as the new Senior PSO Consultant.
vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide review
un•put•down•a•ble
Pronunciation: (un”poot-dou’nu-bul), [key]
—adj. Informal.
Adjective meaning consistently and irresistibly interesting. Typically refers to a book that is so well written and entertaining as to be difficult to (literally) put down and pause away from.
Normally a term used to describe novels, but the vSphere Quick Start Guide certainly fits the definition. Last month I was finishing three major projects and needed to write my VCDX application in one week, but somehow it kept ending up in my hands. So what’s so special about this book and how does it distinguish itself from the competition?
The book central theme is providing tips and ‘how to’s’ and it does this rather well. The book handles the traditional subjects, such like vCenter, Host, Virtual Machines, Networking and Storage. Besides the concise, easy to follow and non-ambiguous way the tips are written, I really like the minimal use of screenshots. This allowed using the (limited) space to contain as much content as possible.
Besides describing how to change settings via the Service Console CLI and the GUI, most tips also list PowerCLI and RemoteCLI example scripts. Incorporating PowerCLI scripts allows this book to be of value to the more experienced administrator who is using PowerCLI or RemoteCLI to manage its environment. The examples certainly increased my interest of picking up PowerCLI.
But what really makes this book shine is the short in-depth text accompanying most of the tips and how to’s. The text contains valuable information on how certain mechanism works, what impact changing a setting can have and field experience of using certain settings. Added bonus is addressing the possibility of using third-party tools such as Dell expart, EMC powerpath VE, vwire and many others, confirming that this book is written by authors with true field experience.
I really recommend this book to anyone who is using VMware ESX. It doesn’t matter if you are a novice administrator or a seasoned consulting architect, you WILL learn something new by reading this book. During the ESX 2.5 era, anyone who was serious about his job owned the Advanced Technical Design Guide, in the current vSphere era it’s clear that this book must be on your desk.
VMware updates Timekeeping best practices
A couple of weeks ago I discovered that VMware updated its timekeeping best practices for Linux virtual machines. December 7th VMware published a new best practice of timekeeping in Windows VMs. (KB1318)
VMware now recommends to use either W32Time or NTP for all virtual machines. This a welcome statement from VMware ending the age old question while designing a Virtual Infrastructure; Do we use VMware tools time sync or do we use W32time? If we use VMware tools, how do we configure the Active Directory controller VMs?
VMware Tools can still be used and still function well enough for most non time sensitive application. VMware tools time sync is excellent in accelerating and catching up time if the time
that is visible to virtual machines (called apparent time) is going slowly, but W32time and NTP can do one thing that VMware tools time sync can’t, that’s slowing down time.
Page 15 of the (older) white paper: Timekeeping in VMware Virtual Machines
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmware_timekeeping.pdf explains the issue.
However, at this writing, VMware Tools clock synchronization has a serious limitation: it cannot correct the guest clock if it gets ahead of real time (except in the case of NetWare guest operating systems).
For more info about timekeeping best practices for Windows VMs, please check out KB article 1318 http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1318
It appears that VMware updated the Timekeeping best practices for Linux guests as well.
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006427 (9 december 2009)