Archive for the ‘Misc.’ Category

Announcement:

Effective March 1st 2010, I am joining the PSO team at VMware as the first Senior Consultant covering the Middle-east region.

Now that the word is out, I guess everyone reading these lines will say something like: “Here we go again, another blogger joining another vendor. The trend continues.”

Well, you might be right at some level. I am a blogger. VMware is a vendor. What else would be different?

What is different here, at least in my opinion, is the timeline and circumstances that this whole story developed through. My original plan was to write a pretty huge post and tell you everything about it. How the dream started when I was watching the VMworld 2008 opening keynote. How the opportunity represented itself from the least expected way. How I went through the longest, most challenging and exciting interview process I have ever experienced throughout my career.

I said “my original plan” because I had to come up with an alternative. Unfortunately I’m just being hyper-sensitive now towards anything that I want to say or disclose about VMware. You know this feeling when you start in a new place, where you don’t know initially what you can and can’t talk about in public? Hopefully it will be a short period before I start getting the essence of the VMware internal culture and be more comfortable to share with you my experience in this great place. Until then, all what I can tell you is that I was approached by Duncan Epping back in July 2009 for an opportunity in the PSO team.

Yes, it was July 2009, before there was even a trend in the first place. This huge gap between now and then wasn’t really up to me or to VMware. It’s the complicated system of sponsorship that we have in this part of the world and all its related formalities. I was crazy patient, and they were very determined to have me. But I’m not here to bore you about these details. What I want to do instead is to acknowledge the huge efforts by Duncan throughout the process. I would have loved to talk in details about that, but again, I find myself in the same situation where I don’t know if I can elaborate more or not. Regardless of all that, let me take a quick moment here to tell you about this true legend, and why I pride myself on being referred to VMware by him.

I don’t look at Duncan as the number one blogger in the community (three times in a row and counting), or as someone who has an unmatchable visibility and influence (check his IOPS post for example), or even as someone who has a great deal of respect and admiration from everyone I’ve known in (and outside) the community. It’s something completely different than all that. It is simply his “passion” for the technology that really differentiate him from the crowd. This is the one thing that always stands out to me about Duncan.

I know brilliant people, I mean literally “brilliant” people in our community with an incredible experience and knowledge that I might never even achieve any time in my future career. But I have never (I repeat: never) saw someone among those people whom I thought for one second to have more passion than me for the virtualization technology in general or VMware in particular. Duncan was (and still) the only exception to that. Every little blog post, email or even tweet I see from him, I always see someone who has passion and dedication for what he does more than anyone I have ever known.

That is why I will always look up to him for inspiration, and that is why he will always be my number one in VMware.

Now that I’m approaching the end of my post, I’d like to take this chance to thank Deepak Narain for his continued support and for sticking up for me. I wouldn’t have reached this place without all your help, even for the very little logistic things that you were voluntarily taking care of to get me on board as soon as possible. I’d like also to thank Vegard Sagbakken, Frank Denneman and Aaron White. They were among the people in VMware who knew about my delayed recruitment process, and were very kind to follow up with me on its progress.

Lastly, and most importantly, to my dear blog readers: it was through your encouragement and positive feedback that I was able to keep this blog running, and it was through this blog that I got the visibility and exposure for VMware to hire me. With that said, I will always do my very best to keep my content here as unique, informative and educational as possible. Everything you’ve seen and liked on this blog up till this moment was completely gathered on my own, I didn’t even have a partner access or any source of information other than what was available to the public. Imagine the giant leap that I’m taking now where I get to read, learn, try and witness everything directly from the source. I am so excited to start this new journey, and I promise you that I’ll always deliver higher quality posts to you.

Oh, and in case you didn’t get the joke in the subject, the VMware employees are not entitled to the vExpert award!

P.S. This was a last minute thing, and it’s just for fun: (click here)

I was going to just tweet this news, but I thought it is too exciting for 140 characters to handle!

I'm a big believer in everything visual as you know, and I think that this kind of video based training is the way to go for anyone learning about something new for the first time. The next step, of course, would be reading full-blown books and product manuals, but again: it is way too easy to start your knowledge journey with this kind of CBTs to get you up to speed with the main concepts and most importantly to see the whole thing in front of you without worrying about setting the labs and related prerequisites.

With that said, I was really excited to know about this new releases coming soon from Trainsignal, and even more excited when I knew about the great instructors of the series: David Davis, Hal Rottenberg and Rick Scherer!

Without further ramblings, here are the main highlights of the videos included, and you can read the full details on the official site here:

VMware View & ThinApp – David Davis

• Video 1 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Overview – Understanding the Options
• Video 2 Introduction to VMware View
• Video 3 Installing VMware View 4
• Video 4 Deploying Virtual Desktops with View
• Video 5 Automated Virtual Desktop Deployment with View Pools
• Video 6 Adding a Terminal Services Pool in View
• Video 7 Understanding View Composer Linked Clones
• Video 8 Introduction to ThinApp 4
• Video 9 Installing ThinApp
• Video 10 Virtualizing Applications with ThinApp

Managing VMware vSphere with PowerCLI – Hal Rottenberg

• Video 1 Introduction to Power CLI
• Video 2 PowerShell Basics
• Video 3-1 PowerCLI Concepts – Part 1
• Video 3-2 PowerCLI Concepts – Part 2
• Video 4 Power CLI in the Real World
• Video 5 PowerCLI Cmdlet Deep Dives

Cisco Nexus 1000V VMware vSphere Third-Party Virtual Distributed Switch – Rick Scherer

• Video 1 Getting Started with the Nexus 1000V
• Video 2 Integrating the Cisco Nexus 1000V with vCenter Server
• Video 3 High Availability Option for the Cisco Nexus 1000V
• Video 4 Configuring Port Profiles on the Cisco Nexus 1000V

I'm definitely getting a copy of this as soon as it will be released!

Okay, so I'm probably the last person who wrote his VCP-410 exam on the planet, but at least I've done it with an awesome score! 481 out of 500!

I've been rescheduling this exam since November 2009 due to many factors, but mainly because of the lack of time! Today I had to sit the exam anyways to get the certificate without sitting the ICM course, and voila!

As I see from the VMware community forums, this is not an easy score to achieve, and that it also qualifies me (along with other requirements of course) to become a VMware Certified Instructor! Well, I never considered that before, but after a very recent discussion with one of the VMware'ians in my region, I was kind of enthused about this idea.

Now, I can't tell you anything about the content itself – as per the agreement that you accept at the beginning of the exam – but I can at least share with you some thoughts about my preparations and the materials I used. I always find these kind of blog post an inspiration and encouragement for me to sit my exams, so I hope it will motivate you in a way or another:

My thoughts:

• The overall exam was way easy than I expected. I remember I had a quite hard time in my VCP-310 exam, but for this one I felt very comfortable.
• The diagrams that I've been designing till date gave me an incredible knowledge about the very specific details in the subjects, and consequently helped me a lot to nail down many questions in the exam related to vDS, memory management and HA.
• The blog posts from my fellow bloggers are also very useful; I can tell you that I answered one question about the PVSCSI from Scott Sauer's awesome article here.
• If you are new to these kinds of IT exams, you have to read the questions extremely careful, especially if English is not your native language. You will get so many tricks in the wordings, and you may also be miss-directed to points that are not essential to the question being asked.
• I saw many blog posts talking about horror stories related to the config maximums questions, but I can tell you that I got only one or two of them, and they were related to information everyone should be aware of. I found Simon Long's practice tests very useful in that regard and definitely better than reading through a boring flat PDF file.
• I can tell you that 99% of the exam will come from the official VMware documentation. I can't stress enough on the importance of reading these documentations.

The Materials/facilities I used:

• Hands-on experience on vSphere since its early Beta (lab + production).
• VMware vSphere Documentations (a must, must, MUST read from a-z)
• Scott Lowe's Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0 book.
• Forbes Guthrie's vReference Card.
• Uncountable number of VMworld 2007-9 sessions

Congrats to all my fellow VCPs, and good luck for all the candidates. Don't hesitate to email me if you need any help!

First and foremost, special thanks must go to Eric Siebert for his great efforts to organize this much awaited voting of the top virtualization blogs. I'm truly honored to make it to the list, and I appreciate all the votes from my readers and for their valuable trust.

Congratulations to everyone, and especially the 10 new bloggers who made it to the list: Vaughn Stewart, Alan Renouf, Frank Denneman, Simon Long, Simon Seagrave, Forbes Guthrie, Scott Drummonds, Maish Saidel-Keesing, and Chris Wolf.

The top 25 in order are listed below, and the complete voting statistics can be found on vSphere-Land.com here.

• Yellow Bricks – Duncan Epping
  
• Virtual Geek – Chad Sakac
  
• Scott Lowe's Blog – Scott Lowe
  
• NTPro.nl – Eric Sloof
  
• RTFM Education – Mike Laverick
  
• Virtualization Evangelist – Jason Boche
  
• VM/ETC – Rich Brambley
  
• Gabe's Virtual World – Gabrie van Zanten
  
• Virtual Storage Guy – Vaughn Stewart
  
• Virtu-Al – Alan Renouf
  
• Virtualization Pro – Eric Siebert
  
• vCritical – Eric Gray
  
• VMware Tips - Rick Scherer
  
• Frank Denneman – Frank Denneman
  
• The VM Guy – Dave Lawrence
  
• Planet VM – Tom Howarth
  
• The Slog – Simon Long
  
• VMGuru.nl
  
• Mike D's Virt. Blog – Mike DiPetrillo
  
• HyperViZor – Hany Michael
  
• Techhead – Simon Seagrave
  
• vReference – Forbes Guthrie
  
• Pivot Point – Scott Drummonds
  
• Technodrone – Maish Saidel-Keesing
  
• Chris Wolf
  

I can't finish this post without mentioning my favorite bloggers who didn't make it in the list this time, but I'm most confident that we will see many of their names in six months from now:

In no special order:

• Massimo Re Ferre'
• Arnim van Lieshout
• Scott Sauer
• Barry Coombs
• Simon Gallagher
• Joep Piscaer
• Luc Dekens
• Vladan SEGET
• Daniel Eason
• Kenneth van Ditmarsch

What a wonderful start of 2010! Yesterday I was truly honored to make it to the Planet V12n Top 5 bloggers of the year! I do understand that it's Duncan Epping's personal view, but that is by itself something to be proud of! Besides, just being there in one list with these incredible bloggers like Chad Sakac, Eric Siebert, Alan Renouf and Ken Cline, is another thing that makes you feel so proud and honored!

Hany Michael – If there is anyone who managed to create unique articles then it is Hany. His diagrams are insane. The details that he puts into every single diagram are just unseen. The following were my favorite, and let's hope Hany keeps up posting these excellent diagrams

Surprisingly, today morning I woke up to find myself considered for the Top 25 bloggers arranged by Eric Siebert (are you serious??!!):

There are also many new bloggers out there producing some great content who could make the list like Hany Michael, Scott Sauer/Aaron Sweemer, Maish Saidel-Keesing, Scott Drummonds, Frank Denneman and Steve Chambers.

Again, I simply can't believe that I'm being considered to be placed in this list, and I still see that there are so many things to be done for improving my blog to reach the high level and quality of the other blogger's contents. Your votes will be truly appreciated no matter what the results will be, and I promise all my dear readers that I'll put more efforts in 2010 to make my blog worth your valuable trust & appreciation.

Unfortunately, I don't have the plugin/statistics that list down the most viewed articles of the year (I really needed to steal this idea from Duncan & Gabe!), so I'm going to list down the posts that I've been constantly getting positive feedback about. This may help you position my very humble blog in the top 25, or let's say: help you decide whether I should even make it to the top 25 in the first place!