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)

Losing my last chance to become a vExpert! written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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Motivation

I was having a discussion with one of the large enterprises here in Qatar lately, and I was quite surprised to know from them that they are hesitated to migrate their VI3.5 environment to vSphere because of the associated downtime. What surprised me was not the fact that they can't afford a downtime, I've spent 6 years of my career working in the Telecom sector and I know for a fact that 1 second of downtime could mean a disaster, or even translate to a loss of thousand of $$. What surprised me was that they didn't know that it is possible to do this migration without any downtime!

In this blog post, I will not only show you (and them) how I was able to perform my upgrade without even this single second of downtime, but I will also show how we were able to migrate our storage from one array to another without any service interruption whatsoever in our equally critical environment. To make things even more exciting, what I'm about to show you here is completely achievable using vSphere's built-in features like VMware Converter, EVC, vMotion and Storage vMotion. There was no third-party tools used in this entire migration.

A brief environment overview

There is nothing better than diagramming this for easier follow-up. In the diagram below I'm illustrating a small portion of the environment showing the main components of the old ESX 3.5 hosts as well as the ESX 4.0 hosts. In our case, we decided not to go with in-place upgrade, and preferred to have a fresh install for the ESX hosts in the new vSphere environment.

You might have noticed that I included a video inside the diagram, and probably wondering why on earth would someone do something like that? The answer is simple: I'm showing-off! No seriously, I know many people (from VMware and specific storage vendors) who use my diagrams in their internal meetings with customers (really I'm not showing-off), and I thought it would be nice to have such small clip in the diagram that shows both the vMotion & SvMotion easy point-and-click approach.

Note: This is just an illustration not an S/vMotion architecture diagram! Wait for my A3 if you are interested to see the technology behind this…magic!

The Process

Step 1: We are running here vCenter on a physical server, and we want to utilize the same hardware for the new upgrade. The easiest way to achieve that is to P2V the existing vCenter 2.5 to another standalone ESX host in our environment. After the VM is migrated successfully and all the clean-up is done, the switch over from the physical to virtual can happen in a matter of seconds by disconnecting the physical server from the network, and connecting the VM (which has the same IP address of course) to the same subnet.

Step 2: Now that we have the vCenter 2.5 migrated, the next step is to perform a clean install on the freed physical server. Starting with the OS deployment, all the way to the vCenter 4.0 installation, initial configuration and licensing.

Step 3: The third step is to connect the new vCenter 4.0 to the old vCenter 2.5 licensing server. This part is important because the ESX 3.5 hosts do not leverage the new and improved licensing model that was introduced in the 4.0 release. This step is quite easy: you go to the "Administration" menu on your vSphere client, select the "vCenter Server Settings", and then enter your old vCenter 2.5 hostname into the field as shown in the example below.

Step 4: Now we are ready to create a new cluster for the existing ESX 3.5 hosts on the left side of the diagram. The thing to note here is to create the cluster with the EVC mode enabled as shown below because we will be migrating the VMs between two deferent hardware/CPU generations:

Step 5: We create here a second cluster (EVC enabled as well) and add the new ESX 4.0 hosts to it as shown in the right side of the diagram.

Step6: Now, the trick here is to have one ESX 4.0 host in this cluster connected to both arrays in the environment – the EVA and the V-Max. We achieve that by connecting one HBA to the HP SAN fabric, and the second HBA to the EMC SAN fabric. Once this is done, and all the associated zoning and masking is configured, we can scan the HBAs and have all the datastores/LUNs available on this server that we will call it "Gateway".

Step7: The fun begins. Since the gateway server is having the same shared storage with the ESX 3.5 hosts, all what you need to do here is to drag and drop your VMs from the old cluster to the new one. The vMotion will kick-in and do it's magic to live migrate the VMs to the new gateway server. That's right! We are live migrating virtual machines from ESX 3.5 to ESX 4.0 on the fly.

Step 8: Now to my favorite part in the whole migration process. Here we get to experience one of the most amazing features in vSphere – the Storage vMotion. It has been actually re-written with significant performance improvements that made it one of the most powerful tools for any VMware administrator in my opinion, and the best part is that it's done now with a few mouse clicks through the GUI (checkout the diagram video, or this detailed post). As I mentioned above, we were migrating our workloads from the HP EVA to the EMC V-Max, and we felt quite confident (after intensively testing this in the lab for a week) that the SvMotion would be the best choice for our storage migration. The other reason for using SvMotion was the ability to thin-provision VMs on the fly. I'm not talking here about everything of course, but rather the development VMs that are hardly ever touched. We had so many VMs for our development department with quite huge space requirements, while in fact they are neither actively used all the time, nor they consume the disk space allocated to them. The thin-provisioning for these VMs saved us literally TBs of storage on the new expensive V-Max SAN.

Things to note:

• After you complete this migration you are not quite done yet. You should typically have your VM tools updated, and also the VM hardware upgraded from v4 to v7. While you will still run fine without these upgrades, it's always recommended to be up-to-date in that regard, and to also leverage many of the new vSphere featuers like for example memory hot-add (my personal favorite!). The trick here is that you will need a VM reboot to perform that. In our case, for the less critical VMs we scheduled a planned reboots on weekly basis for the upgrades, and for the high-critical VMs, we just wait for the first possible OS reboot and we perform our upgrades along with it.
• Any storage vendor will tell you to do the thin-provisioning on the array directly, and I kinda agree with them on that, but this is not an option to everyone. Not all arrays come with this feature, or even if they do, not everyone can afford the licensing part. In our case, I simply couldn't rely on the SAN admins for monitoring and maintaining these thin-provisioned LUNs on the array side, and from the other hand, there were some technical limitations associated with that in terms of SRDF replication or FAST v1 (but that is something specific to EMC, and relevant only to the time of writing this post).

Conclusion:

I will finish this post from where I started. The VMware vSphere is a very powerful and a true enterprise class virtualization platform. You've seen here how I was able to migrate the entire VI3.5 environment without one single second of downtime, and also how it was an extremely easy process to migrate our complete storage from one array vendor to another without any interruption in the servers/services whatsoever. There is nothing extraordinary in this scenario (except maybe the embedded video in the diagram), and you've seen how easy the steps are, and how everything we've done here is built in vSphere itself. Just know your requirement, plan your migration ahead, and you will be just fine!

vSphere In Motion: A Real-World Live Migration Scenario written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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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!

VMware vSphere Pro Series Training: View, ThinApp, Nexus 1000V, and PowerCLI! written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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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!

Passed the VCP-410 with a 481 score! written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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• This is the first diagram of more ESX blueprints to come. Previously I was focused more onto the vSphere architectures as a whole, but there will be more granular diagrams on ESX itself as a hypervisor very soon.
• The colors play a major role in this diagram. I thought I should stick with the original colors used in the vCenter Server Recourse monitoring box (on the top right of the diagram) instead of reinventing the wheel. As an example, if you want to scan through the swapping memory reclamation technique, all what you need is to focus your sight on the red colors. Whether it’s in the VMs, hypervisor, esxtop or vCenter, the red color will always relate to the swapping activity, and so forth.
• In the MMU virtualization I did not put much detail (as I was hoping to) because of the diagram limited space, but I'm planning to make more detailed diagrams about this topic in the future, along with other technologies like NUMA and EPT/RVI for example.
• In the memory reclamation techniques, you might have noticed that the "idle memory tax" is not there. I intend to illustrate that in a deferent topic related to shares and resource management.
• The Memory compression and swapping to SSD are future features coming soon in the vSphere generation. This information was mentioned in the VMworld 2009 session TA2627 so it's public.
• The most interesting part for me while creating this diagram was the ESXTOP. I have a wild idea of creating a crazy huge diagram (poster-like) and add the deferent screens and options for ESXTOP along with real-world numbers and descriptions to show the beauty of this incredible tool. I might also use Duncan's esxtop section as a reference for the thresholds, I urge you to go there and share your experience!
• For some reason, the PDF converter kept converting the ESXTOP text box into an image and then down-sample it, which ended up not looking as sharp and clean as in the original Visio diagram. I'm trying to figure out why the Acrobat is giving me this grief, so I will probably update the PDF later on (check the version numbers).
• I've received a number of emails asking for some descriptions accompanying my diagrams (like the admission control calculations in the HA diagram), and I believe you are right about that, especially for the newbies entering the fascinating world of VMware. I'll revisit these diagrams in the future with detailed descriptions and write-ups, so stay tuned.

I hope you'll like this diagram and see the real beauty of the ESX memory management (well a glimpse of it at least). If you have any corrections or suggestions please drop a comment or email and let me know your thoughts.

Recourses:
- Book: Operating System Concepts (Part Three – Memory Management)
- Book: Modern Operating Systems 3rd Edition (Chapter 3 – Memory Management)
- Documentation: vSphere Resource Management Guide
- WP: Understanding Memory Resource Management in VMwareо ESX™ Server
- WP: Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server – by Carl A. Waldspurger
- VMworld2009 Session: TA2963 “esxtop for advanced users”
- VMworld2009 Session: TA2627 “Understanding "Host" and "Guest" Memory Usage and Related Memory Management Concepts”
- Blog: Arnim van Lieshout (Part-1 , Part-2, Part-3)

Diagram: ESX Memory Management and Monitoring v1.0 written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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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

The Top 25 blogs announced – Thank you for voting! written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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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!

Top 25 blogs – Vote for your favorites! written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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Confession: The photo embedded in this post is inspired by a Jason Boche's 'tweet'.

It's been a wonderful year full of great news and developments in the virtualization space. The lunch of vSphere was by far the most exciting event for me personally, and I couldn't find any better idea to close of the year with, other than this photo:

These were the best books I managed to get since the lunch of the product back in May 2009, and in fact, that's pretty much everything that was published with the "vSphere" name in the title.

Speaking of which, the book titles – in no specific order – are as follows:

• Mastering VMware vSphere 4 by Scott Lowe
• VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference by Scott Lowe, Jason W. McCarty, and Matthew K. Johnson
• VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment by Edward L. Haletky
• VMware VI and vSphere SDK: Managing the VMware Infrastructure and vSphere by Steve Jin
• VMware vSphere 4: Install, Configure and Manage (Student Manual P1&2)
• vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide: Shortcuts down the path of Virtualization by Duncan Epping, Alan Renouf, Bernie Baker, and Thomas Bryant

Now, I'm not going to make the horrible mistake that everyone would normally do by pointing out my favorite book (seriously, why would anyone do something like that?!), but I'll give you some hints instead:

• It's the smallest in size.
• It's the longest in title.
• It's the fewest in pages.
• It's the brightest in contrast.
• It's the lightest in weight.
• It's the yellow'est in color.
• It's .. dammit .. the 'vSphere Quick Start Guide'.

Goodbye 2009 – it's been an incredible year of knowledge and experience. Hello 2010 – it's going to be .. well, that is something to look forward to.

Happy holidays, everyone!

VMware vSphere 2009 book library. written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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In these similar days back in December 2008, I officially lunched my very humble blog. There are really lots of things to talk about in such occasion, but I decided to pick up two main aspects. In the first part I'll talk about the three persons who made this place a reality, and in the second one I'll list down my happiest and most memorable 10 moments throughout this incredible 365 days blogging experience!

Deepak Narain:

Deepak is one of the VMware super geniuses working in my region. The first time I saw him, was back in summer 2008 in my corporate when he was visiting us along with one of the local VMware partners. I remember I asked Deepak in that meeting about VMware's Site Recovery Manager (SRM) which was not released yet, and he started right away talking fluently about it. I was truly impressed, not just about his incredible presentation skills, but also for the fact that he was ready to talk technically about it without any sales nonsense. Few hours later to that meeting I got an email from him with some technical documents on how to make an SRM PoC with the Lefthand VSA, which by the way after few months led to one of my most successful posts of all time over here.

I kept exchanging emails with Deepak back and forth after that meeting, and one of those times I mentioned to him that I'm thinking to start blogging, and that I was not sure if it's a good idea! I told him also that I've registered a cheesy domain name (hypervizor.com) although I was originally thinking of VMcrowd.com (you know, after the British show "the IT crowd"). I got a reply from him few minutes later saying that he loves my domain name, and that he can't wait for me to start blogging! I didn't listen to him right away as I thought he was just being polite and diplomatic, but he kept reminding and encouraging me many times later!

I did listen to him eventually although I had no clue what on earth would make my blog anything special next to the hot-shot blogs out there at that time like NTPro.nl, Yellow-Bricks.com & Boche.net/Blog!

The story normally ends up here saying: ".. and I blogged happily ever after."… well, here is a shocker:

In April 2009, when the vSphere was officially lunched, the bloggers in the private beta were finally allowed to start talking freely about vSphere. I started myself a series of posts/videos I called "vSphere 4 Unleashed" and I've put lots of time and effort in these posts. Although I've got good response, I was expecting for some reason much more! I was a bit frustrated to tell you the truth, and this frustration kept growing and growing until I started thinking that maybe it's not worth it, and that it's time to stop blogging!

At that time, and when I was having this frustration at its peak, I suddenly got an email from Deepak out of the blue saying in a hurry that he's sitting in one of the internal VMware presentations back in the US given by one of the VMware higher executives, and that one of his slides had my name and blog URL! – I was in shock! He didn't give me much details, and I learned not to ask him about anything internal in VMware because he's always very conservative about that (so is anyone I knew from VMware, and I highly respect that in them BTW), but I was incredibly happy and extremely excited. As you may have guessed, all my frustration and black thoughts were gone at that point, and I had instead a huge energy that pushed me further to take my blog to the next level with more professional and advanced posts.

Many of my discussions and meetings with Deepak have been an inspiration for many of my blog posts over here. For example, I was having a coffee lately with Deepak during one of his visits to Doha, and somewhere in our discussion the VMware HA topic came up. I told him, while I was showing-off: "did you know that this technology was originally developed by a company called Legato?" .. he smiled back at me and said: "did you know that I used to develop that code myself?" … and then the discussion went on with some incredible details about the origin of this software, which completely blew my mind away. When I checked Deepak's Linkedin profile later that day, I knew that he was actually the "Software Development Manager" at Legato before he joins EMC, and from there to VMware. The very next day, I started designing my HA diagram with much more passion and admiration to this great technology.

Of course Deepak has no idea about all these stories, and in fact, he goes and tells everyone he knows about my blog and how I publish some good stuff out there about VMware! The funny thing is that I've been trying to convince him to start blogging (with no luck so far), but I'm telling you, if he decided to do it one day, he will be a force to reckon with in our blogosphere!

Eric Sloof:

When I first started my blog, I used to publish some normal news just to get my first steps into this blogging world and have the sense of it. After nearly one month, I decided to shift gears and publish something interesting. At that time the vCenter SRM 1.0 was a quite hot topic, but it was also somewhat advanced and rarely talked about in the blogosphere. I was up for the challenge and started doing a compete lab between two physical sites/datacenters with dark fiber connectivity to simulate a real-world SRM scenario. After I published my first posts of this series I was very interested to see the reaction but I had one little problem, I simply had no visitors, or let's say a very, very few of them. Somehow, Eric Sloof over at http://NTPRO.NL picked up my posts, and published a very nice post about them on his blog. I was really happy to see that, not just because of his very kind words, but also for the fact that he emailed me and told me that he mentioned my posts on his blog. This personal approach really stood out for me, and I knew right away that he's someone who really has a passion about the technology, and cares about what he's doing. As you can imagine, he simply brought thousands of visitors between a day and night to my blog because his site is widely popular and very well known in the blogosphere. As a matter of fact, the next day Eric posted his article, I got an email from Deepak with a subject saying "Ok, you are famous now!" and in the message he mentioned that Eric's blog is one the most respected and popular ones across the community!

Eric didn't even stop at that point, he actually kept updating his post with the new tutorials that followed and appeared on my blog. It's worth mentioning here also that later on, Tom Howarth & Roger Lund mentioned my SRM tutorials on their blogs, and I'm very grateful to them as well.

One last thing I want to mention here. In the Top 20 Bloggers poll arranged by Eric Siebert, the NTPRO.nl was my number one vote. I simply asked myself this: what would be the one blog that I would never stop reading? And I realized right away that it's Eric Sloof's. He has the exclusivity (sometime we call him Eric Scoop!), the news and also he can get down and dirty with deep technical stuff about any technology/product you can think of. I wasn't really surprised when I knew from the last Dutch VMUG that VMware's CTO himself is following and reading Eric's blog!

John Troyer:

If Eric Sloof brought thousands of visitors to my blog, then I believe John Troyer brought the entire virtualization planet's attention to my blog when he added me to the V12n RSS feed! It even happened faster that I can imagine. I originally knew about this great RSS feed, and I was following it myself, but I didn't expect to be added that quickly to it. John also has an incredible attention to the very small details that can pass infornt of anyone. I remember one of my posts had this small sentence – "May be also we can start thinking of automating and managing individual labs using the new and long awaited Lab Manager 4.0, expected sometime this month.", and the very same day that post was published, I received a DM from John on twitter telling me that he read my post, and he can arrange a brief for me with one of the Lab Manager product marketing group if I'm interested! Despite the fact that it was really tough to find a slot for me at that time, he kept exchanging emails with me being CC'ed until he finally got my slot scheduled. He was even putting extra efforts and went through lots of hassle to get me the best timing due to the time-zone deference between the US and Qatar. Few days later the Lab Manager 4.0 came out, and few days after that I blogged about my crazy idea of automating and provisioning ESX inside itself using LM4, which was, and still, one of my personal favorites here, and also driving insane traffic to me through Google with keywords like "vSphere in a box" / "esx inside itself" ..etc

I also learned overtime (and through more than one experience) that John is the best, and most trusted person, to get back to if you have something important that you think VMware should know about or be aware of. I actually used to joke and say that John Troyer is the "God Father" of VMware whenever his name comes up in any discussion, but if you really look at his tremendous efforts and dedication, plus the exceptional and unique community he was able to build for VMware, you would really see how lucky VMware (and us, the community) to have a person like him.

The top and best 10 moments throughout my 1 year blogging experience:

 10  When I started getting loads of emails from 1) visitors asking me about deep technical aspects; 2) VMware local partners taking my advice on design best practices; 3) local and international companies offering me various and interesting job opportunities, driven explicitly from ideas/articles they read on my blog!

 09  When I won the very first vSphere blogging contest among the best and most brilliant contestants in the blogosphere.

 08  When my blog posts started to appear in the VMTN weekly Top5 Planet V12n entries.

 07  When I received Deepak Narain's email as mentioned above.

 06  When I came to know that VMware used in their VMworld 2009 Labs a setup based on a special build of LM4 to run and automate the ESX inside itself, which was very similar to my "vSphere in a box" Lab Manager Automation blog post.

 05  When I was attending one of the vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 private betas WebEx sessions, and all of a sudden the presenter (who's one of the great BCDR/SRM specialists in VMW) messaged me in private and told me that he likes my blog, and thanked me for my efforts.

 04  When I started having brilliant technical minds following me on twitter like Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac, Duncan Epping, Massimo Re Ferre' (just to name a few).

 03  When I received an email from one of the VMware Systems Engineers telling me that my diagrams are the stuff that he and his colleagues like to circulate internally and wallpaper in their "cubes".

 02  When my AppSpeed blog post was listed in the
product's official page on the VMware corporate website, and was mentioned in two of the VMworld09 sessions.

 01  When I received an email on Wednesday, Jul 29^th , 2009 at 7:27 AM that simply made one of my biggest dreams come true. Unfortunately I won't be able to elaborate more on that (at least for now) but I can tell you that it was by far "the" best moment throughout my entire blogging experience.

The 365 days blogging experience! written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

» Related posts:

1. » vSphere 4.0 vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) – Video Demonstration + Architecture Diagram
2. » Finally! Running ESX as a VM inside a physical ESX host!

For a reason I still don't understand, nearly 70% of the referring sites to my blog are either based in Russia or speaking Russian language!

Of course I'm not complaining here! I'm just making a very interesting observation (well, at least for me), and trying to tell them "thank you" for all their kind words (I hope!)

These are "some" of the sites I'm referring to..err…i mean, the ones referring to me:

• http://www.vsphere.ru/
• http://vsphere.vm4.ru/
• http://vmind.ru/
• http://vm.pro-it.kz/
• http://www.vmgu.ru/

And in case you are curious about the other traffic sources, the top list in order would be as follows:

• Google.com
• communities.vmware.com
• blogs.vmware.com
• vmware.com
• vsphere-land.com
• twitter.com

Thanks to everyone!

From Russia with love! written by Hany Michael @ HYPERVIZOR.COM

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