Third post in the Top 5 Planet V12N

More or less by coincidence I discovered that one of my posts had made it to the weekly V12N top 5 blog posts at the VMTN blog - which to me is quite an honour. It means, I guess, that someone else finds your writings useful to some extent.

This is the third post I have on the Top 5 list:

Week 5, 2011

Capacity Planner 2.8.0 released - A new version of VMware Capacity Planner v2.8.0 build 46460 has been released (only available to partners). The most notable new features are support for desktop assessments and that multiple assessments can be grouped under one company. The collector interface is more or less unchanged.

Week 51, 2010

P2V pre-migration checklist - and considerations - My previous post was a P2V post migration checklist. This post is a pre-migration checklist which is about all the information that should gathered and checked before doing any P2V conversions. I have been involved in a number of larger P2V projects (+50 P2V's) and, in my experience, proper planning is a key element for a successful project. Typically, you, as a VMware- or P2V person, have no real knowledge of the Windows servers to be converted - their just another server.

Week 48, 2009

VLAN testing in ESX 3.5 - The traditional way of testing is to create a vSwitch with only one vmnic connected. Then connect a VM on that vSwitch with one of the VLANs. Configure an IP address in the address space of the VLAN and ping the gateway. Do this for all the VLANs, and then connect the next vmnic to the vSwitch and start over. The following method speeds up VLAN testing significantly (in this case from 100 to 16 test cases). It is not totally automated, but I have found it very useful nonetheless.

Top VMware blogs and sites - in short

If you're new to VMware it can be a little overwhelming to figure out what and where to get info to get started. The web is full of excellent blogs and sites with VMware stuff, not to mention the VMware communities. I've come across numerous sites that list top blogs and sites and they are very rich on info but maybe it's a little too much if you're just starting out. So in stead of going full throttle, I will list just a few of the most popular blogs and sites. If you follow these, then you'll get a good picture on what's going on. I recommend using an RSS reader like Netvibes for keeping the overview. Here's the sites I recommend:

Blogs

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/ - Duncan Depping, VMware Employee. One of the most popular VMware blogs.

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/ - Eric Sloof, has his own consulting firm. Dutch guy. The Netherlands is probably one of the most advanced European countries in regards to VMware.

http://vmetc.com/ - Go ugly green with Rich Brambley

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/ - EMC guy. Writes some very technical an in depth posts

Communities

VMware Communities - an account in the communities is a must. People here are very fast to respond and very helpful. Try google before you post, though...

Sites

vSphere Land - this site has two very cool subsites. vLuanchpad is a comprehensive list of top blogs and sites. Use this if you want to get further inspiration. And then the Top 10 lists where I especially like the one with Tools.

Keep track of the information flow - RSS reader

There's a lot of new information being published everyday. And it can be hard to keep track of it all. If you want to stay up to speed you have to follow quite a few web sites and blogs. To easen this task a bit, I'm using the RSS reader, Netvibes ( http://www.netvibes.com/ ). It has easy to use web interface and it gives a good overview.