Unbelievably having only just announced their second generation triumvirate of models just 2 months ago (and due out in a couple of weeks), they’re at it again, announcing a third generation already! The new models include a pair of Haswell-based “Wilson Canyon” Core i3 / Core i5 processor options, featuring up to 4 USB 3.0 ports and a full size SATA connector and are expected to land some time around Q3 this year.

I have updated the CPU table with the currently available info on the new models, and will add CPU benchmarks once available on www.cpubenchmark.net (for consistency). This also includes the recently leaked specs for the new Gen 8 HP Microservers based on Intel Pentium / Celeron processors.

IMHO you cant beat the NUC for its price / performance / noise features mentioned above. In an ideal world I would be happy to give up 2-3cm of extra board size to get some extra RAM slots and a second gig port on the VMware HCL in there, but as a tidy home lab solution they’re hard to beat!

As regards this latest batch of models, I personally still think the sweet spot is with the Intel Core i5-3427U DC53427HYE 2nd Gen model, which includes vPro for remote access, and will turbo to a handsome 2.8GHz for as little as ~£235 when I last checked. More than enough for most home lab requirements!

One of the ways in which VMware maximise VM consolidation ratios when virtualising is through a technology called Transparent Page Sharing (or TPS for short).

I was only running a relatively small number of VMs on my environment but was starting to run out of RAM and was disappointed with the levels of memory sharing I was seeing. What I had completely forgotten was that large memory page support is enabled by default, and these large pages will only be split down into 4k chunks in the event that my cluster was in memory contention.

I decided that as I am not running any particular high performance apps in my lab, I would prefer the visibility of how much RAM I actually still had available, instead of gaining maximum application performance through large page support. Enabling this was very simple, and simply required changing the advanced setting Mem.AllocGuestLargePage to 0 and waiting for TPS to kick in later that day.

My memory utilisation before was as follows:

After it was as follows (you can see that not only can I see the RAM savings, but I have also added several more VMs in between screenshots):

Assuming you have a large number of similar VMs within your home lab, disabling large memory page support can allow you to gain easy visibility of your maximum memory savings and actual available RAM. Implementing this in your production environments may not be ideal based on your specific workloads, however if your production policy is to be reasonably aggresive with memory overcommitment, I recommend you highlight this issue to your capacity management team to ensure they don’t go out buying extra servers or RAM unnecessarily early!

Further reading:

• http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/large-pages-transparent-page-sharing-and-how-they-influence-the-consolidation-ratio/
• http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/memory-overcommit-in-production-yes-yes-yes/
• http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/memory-management-and-compression-in-vsphere-4-1/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/11/07/how-many-pages-can-be-shared-if-large-pages-are-broken-up/
• http://www.vreference.com/?p=1065
• http://frankdenneman.nl/2011/01/25/re-impact-of-large-pages-on-consolidation-ratios/
• http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/01/26/re-large-pages-gabvirtualworld-frankdenneman-forbesguthrie/

Last January, I started studying for my VCP5 and VCAP-DCD4 exam. The latter was actually the most studying I have done for any exam I’ve ever sat (including my degree exams, by quite some way if I’m honest!). Along the way I realised just how many different sources of information I was using. Having used some amazing resources from guys such as Gregg Robertson, Simon Long and Paul McSharry, I thought it might be worth publishing the list I had compiled to save others time in scrabbling about for resources on Google etc.

As time went on, the blog just kind of grew almost by itself and I found myself posting as often as my studying, my new job role and my family life allow! (Not as often as I’d like though… I have quite a few half written / researched posts which need some time to finish up and get out there, even as I write!)

Just 18 months later, I have been very fortunate enough to be named among this year’s VMware vExpert awardees. To say I was chuffed would be an understatement, and I can’t thank John Troyer and the team enough!

As if the title was not reward enough in and of itself, vExperts get access to a host of additional resources and opportunities. These can only help to increase my knowledge and spur me on to create and publish more (hopefully) useful content over the coming months. In the mean time I will be digging straight into the amazing free training from Trainsignal, while waiting patiently for my vExpert polo courtesy of the very kind folks at Tintri, which I look forward to wearing to my next London VMUG along with the other 20+ #LonVMUG vExperts!

If you’re thinking about becoming a blogger, I say just give it a go and see where it takes you. In my case I’ve learned loads, met a tonne of great people in the virtualisation community and beyond, and maybe even helped my career into the bargain!

Thanks again to VMware, all the great vendors who support the VMware and vExpert communities, and most importantly to all the other vExperts who spend their free time producing superb content for the rest of us to consume!

As you can see from the screenshot below, the main symptom is that it effectively causes the storage spaces UI not to show all of the available disks in the primordial storage pool. There are actually 3 1TB physical drives in the server below, however only a single drive appears (which can be any one of the three drives in slot 2/3/4 when I refresh the view):

Primordial storage space only showing a single physical drive

This is caused by the RAID controller presenting all disks with the same UniqueID. You can list your UniqueIDs by typing the following command into a PowerShell window:

Get-PhysicalDisk | ft FriendlyName, UniqueId, ObjectId, BusType –auto

The result looks something like this:

3 identical UniqueIDs

This is an annoying bug, but a simple workaround is available for Microserver users, and I’m sure a similar approach could be taken on other platforms. Simply load up the AMD RAIDXpert UI (or boot into the BIOS) and configure each individual drive as a single RAID Ready device as follows:

Use AMD RAIDXpert to create individual RAID Ready drives

Complete RAID Ready Drive List

This causes the RAID controller to present an individual UniqueID for each drive through to the OS:

Actually unique UniqueIDs!

You can then go ahead and create your storage space as normal from the primordial pool:

Primordial Storage Space now shows all 3 physical drives

Hope this helps a few people as it drove me potty before I worked out what was going on!

Bonus Tip: Another wee tip I read recently is that storage spaces are NOT supported inside a virtual machine. I know you would need a quite specific (read: odd) use case to even consider doing this, just don’t!

In essence, for people who have held out from buying either an Intel NUC or even an HP Microserver for your home lab due to the lack of CPU grunt, good news is on the way! The specs were leaked last week for the new range of Intel NUC boxes due out in Q2, featuring Intel Core i5 and i7 processors. The specs were published by Computer Base and are as follows:

D53427RK – Rend Lake

D53427HYE – Horse Canyon

D73537KK – Skull Canyon

Looking at the new models the best (and most feature rich) for me is the i5-3427U D53427HYE (Horse Canyon – includes enclosure). This model includes vPro / AMT support, a superbly useful feature if you plan to run these machines headless, as I currently do. It seems strange not to include this feature with the i7 version (Skull Canyon – DC73537SY). The i5 is likely to be a little easier on the pocket than the i7 whilst still allowing turbo to 2.8GHz, and with a basic clock speed of 1.8GHz it will hopefully run a little cooler than the i7 (even the i3 chassis can get very warm indeed!). Both models come with USB 3.0 which is unfortunately of limited use, unless you plan to mount a USB drive into your VMs via VT-d which is now also included with both new CPU models.

Comparing the CPUs via their CPU Benchmark scores, we can see that the i5 gives a great performance leap from the older i3 line (DC3217IYE), but not such a great jump to the i7, which also doesn’t include vPro. I have included the scores for the HP Microserver line for comparison:

My guess is that two things will probably happen when it comes to pricing. The current line of NUCs will drop their prices a bit, and the new line will probably come in at a higher price bracket. This means a premium for people wanting the extra grunt, but better prices for everyone else! Personally I have not found any issues with the grunt I get from the 1.8GHz i3, especially when running off SSDs (where your bottleneck usually lies in a lab or production!) so I will probably stick with my i3 pair for now… at least until the i5 range become so cheap I feel compelled to buy a couple!

If I hadn’t already invested, I would be sorely tempted to start my Intel NUC lab with the i5 range, but if a key decision driver is cost, the i3 won’t let you down!

Other NanoLab articles may be found here:
NanoLab Articles

Prior to the NanoLab, I have always gone for a vInception type of setup, i.e. everything running inside a single powerful workstation with plenty of RAM. This limits your options a bit, in my case it meant simply using local SSD & SATA storage, presented either as iSCSI from my Windows 2008 R2 server  or a nested FreeNAS 7 VM. For a bit of extra capacity I also had a couple of spare disks in an HP Microserver N36L presented via another FreeNAS 7 VM under ESXi.

The most frustrating thing with running your VMFS storage from a Windows host, is the monthly patching and reboots, meaning you have to take down your entire environment every time. In my case this also includes this blog, which is hosted as  a VM on this environment, so moving forward I wanted to have something a little more secure, flexible and robust, which also adhered to the cost, noise and size requirements you might expect for a NanoLab.

Storage

Speed of storage can make or break you experience and productivity when running a home lab. My requirements for a storage device / NAS were:

• Minimal size
• Silent or as near silent as possible
• Low power consumption
• Minimum 4 disk slots and ability to do RAID 5 (to minimise disk cost and provide flexibility for later growth)
• Reasonable price

Optionally:

• VAAI support
• Decent warranty (if not a home build)
• Reasonable component redundancy
• USB3 support in case I want to add any external drives later for some speedy additional storage / backup

After going back and forth between a home-made solution based on another HP Microserver, or a pre-configured NAS, I decided that the additional features available in the Synology “Plus” line were too good to pass up. These include:

• VAAI support for Hardware Assisted Locking (ATS), Block Zero, Full Copy, Thin Provisioning
• iSCSI snapshot and backup
• Link aggregation support for the dual gigabit NICs
• 2-3 year warranty depending on the model
• iSCSI or NFS (VAAI on iSCSI volumes only)

They were also recommended by a number of vExperts such as Jason Nash, Chris Wahl and Julian Wood, which is always a good justification to go for one!

The 1512+ was very tempting, but I in the end I chose the DS412+ due to its near-silent sub-20db operation (thanks to an external power brick and 2 hot-swap silent cooling fans), low power consumption (max 44w under heavy load),  minimal footprint and reduced cost. I was tempted to wait and see if a DS413+ comes out any time soon, but Synology are being cagey and I needed the lab upgrades to be done and dusted in a short period. I already have a DS413j which I use for backups, so I can confirm they are very well built little machines, and the noise level claims are indeed accurate!

Into the 412+ I have loaded a pair of 240GB SANDisk Extreme SSDs using SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid). This is effectively just RAID1 mirroring when only two drives are installed but gives me the ability to expand out to RAID5 equivalent as I need more space and the price of SSDs (inevitably) comes down. Eventually the box will have around ~720GB or more of useable SSD storage, more than enough for a decent bunch of lab VMs! Another alternative would be a pair of SSDs for VM boot partitions / config files, and a pair of SATA drives for VM data partitions.

Networking

Although you can easily build a great home lab on a flat network with any old cheap switch, the ability to experiment with more advanced features is highly desirable. My requirements for a managed switch were:

• Minimal size
• Passive cooling (for silent operation)
• Low power consumption
• Minimum of 8x 1 gigabit ports (or preferably more)
• Link aggregation
• QoS
• Security – VLANs, PVLANs, ACLs, & Layer 3 switching
• SSH access for command line management

Optionally:

• I am studying for a few Cisco exams over the next year so a Cisco branded router would be preferential
• Decent warranty

After a great suggestion from Jasper and reading an article by Vladan I ended up going for the ten port Cisco SG300-10.

This 10-port switch will allow for:

• 1-2 ports per NUC (for 2-4 NUC boxes)
• 2 LACP enabled ports for the Synology lab storage
• 2 ports for my personal data storage server (might replace this with a second mid-range Synology NAS later)
• 2 uplink ports (In my case for a router and a second wireless access point)

This switch is passively cooled, only uses around 10w power, and as an added bonus Cisco include a limited lifetime warranty! Great if you are going to invest that much in a switch for home!

“As long as the original End User continues to own or use the Product, provided that: fan and power supply warranty is limited to five (5) years. In the event of discontinuance of product manufacture, Cisco warranty support is limited to five (5) years from the announcement of discontinuance.” http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/warranty/English/LH2DEN__.html

If I had been going for a switch purely on cost I would probably have chosen one of the HP models as these have some great bang for your buck, but I did want to stick to a Cisco branded one. I would also have loved to go for the PoE model so I could plug in a VoiP phone later, but the cost for the SG300-10P / MP was at least 50% more, and power consumption would be higher, even when idle.

WAF

The entire NanoLab setup above of 2 NUC boxes, DS412+ and SG300-10 in total take up about the same volume of space as a large shoe box, are virtually silent, and combine for an idle power level of 50-60 watts, and under 100 watts even under load. That’s less than a couple of halogen light bulbs!

In my next post I will go through the process of configuring the network and storage, including link aggregation and suggested VLAN configuration.

Earlier parts of this article may be found here:
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 1
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 2
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 3

These are just a couple of very quick tips for your NUC lab which I came across throughout the week. They will also apply to any other single NIC configuration for a vSphere cluster (e.g. HP Microserver with no extra PCI card), and for booting your cluster from a USB pen drive.

The tips are both simple fixes to remove the (slightly annoying) warning messages you get on each ESXi host in your cluster after you do your initial config.

Single Management NIC Causes Warning in vCenter

The host currently has no management network redundancy.

To get rid of this (assuming you dont plan to add further NICs), simply follow KB1004700, which is summarised as follows:

To suppress this message on ESXi/ESX hosts in the VMware High Availability (HA) cluster, or if the warning appears for a host already configured in a cluster, set the VMware HA advanced option das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning to true and reconfigure VMware HA on that host.

To set das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning to true:

1. From the VMware Infrastructure Client, right-click on the cluster and click Edit Settings.
2. Select vSphere HA and click Advanced Options.
3. In the Options column, enter das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning
4. In the Value column, enter true.
   Note: Steps 3 and 4 create a new option.
5. Click OK.
6. Right-click the host and click Reconfigure for vSphere HA. This reconfigures HA.

Booting from USB Pen Drive Causes Warning

System logs on host <hostname> are stored on non-persistent storage

This is caused by booting from the USB device. It is very simple to remove by redirecting logs to a syslog server. A prime example for your home lab would be the syslog server which comes as standard with the vCenter Server Appliance, but commonly your home NAS may have this functionality, you could run a Linux VM to collect the logs, or alternatively you could use a great product to centralise logs called Splunk (free for up to 500mb of logs per day!).

To point your ESXi hosts to any syslog server, simply:

1. From the VMware Infrastructure Client, select the host.
2. Select the Configuration tab, then click Advanced Settings.
3. In the left column expand Syslog, then click global.
4. In the right panel, in the Syslog.global.logHost box, enter the IP or hostname of your syslog server.
5. Click OK.
6. Your host is now configured to forward all logs to your syslog server and the non-persistent storage error will be suppressed.

Once you have enabled the redirection you also need to open the outbound port on your ESXi hosts (thanks to Sam for the reminder).

1. From the VMware Infrastructure Client, select the host.
2. Select the Configuration tab, then select Security Profile.
3. Next to Firewall, click Properties…
4. Scroll down to syslog and tick the check box to open ports 514/1514.
5. Click OK.

If anyone else comes across any useful NUC related homelab tips, please feel free to comment or mail them to me and I’ll add them to the list.

Other parts of this article may be found here:
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 1
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 2
VMware vSphere NanoLab – Part 4 – Network and Storage Choices

It’s also worth mentioning at this point that most ESXi features are supported on the platform, including FT. The key features not supported are VMDirectPath I/O, and DPM (due to the lack of iLO / IPMI). They do support WoL so you can manually bring nodes online as required, using any standard WoL tool.

I am currently investigating possible options for additional NICs, and it seems that most of the Mini-PCIe NICs are based on a Realtek chipset which is fully supported in ESXi, so happy days! I will post further updates on this subject should I go ahead and expand the NUCs with extra ports.

Requirements

• A USB Stick. This should work on anything over 1-2GB but personally am using 8GB PNY Micro Sleek Attache Pendrives as they’re tiny, so less likely to catch on anything as they stick out the back of the NUC box, and they cost less than £5 each.
• A copy of VMware Workstation 8 or newer.
• ESXi-Customizer (created by Andreas Peetz)
  http://v-front.blogspot.com/p/esxi-customizer.html
• The ESXi driver for and Intel® 82579V Gigabit Ethernet Controller (created by Chilly)
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27246203/E1001E.tgz

Process Overview

• Install the RAM into your NUC (I maxed mine out with 2x8GB sticks).
  
• Create a customised ISO with the additional Intel driver.
• Install ESXi to your USB stick using VMware Workstation and the customised ISO.
• Plug in your NUC, insert the USB stick, boot and go!

Detailed Steps
I wont go into the detail of installing the RAM, suffice to say you unscrew the four screws on the base of the unit, carefully take it apart, install the two SODIMM modules, ensuring they click firmly into place, then screw the unit back together… simples!

Part One – Create the Custom ISO

1. Run the ESXi-Customizer-v2.7.1.exe (latest version at time of writing).
2. This will extract the customer to the directory of your choosing.
3. Navigate to the new directory.
4. Run the ESXi-Customizer.cmd batch file. This will open up the GUI, where you can configure the following options:

• Path to your ESXi Installer
• Path to the Intel driver downloaded previously
• Path where you want the new ISO to be saved

5. Ensure you tick the Create (U)EFI-bootable ISO checkbox.

This will output a new custom ESXi installer ISO called ESXi-5.x-Custom.iso or similar, in the path defined above.

Part Two – Install bootable ESXi to the USB stick.
I stress that this is my preferred way of doing this as an alternative is simply to burn your customised ISO to a CD/DVD and boot using a USB DVD-ROM. That would however be a whole lot slower, and waste a blank CD!

1. Plug your chosen USB stick into your PC.
2. Open VMware Workstation (8 or above), VMware Fusion, or whatever you use, ideally supporting the Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI option (allowing you to nest 64-bit VMs).
3. Create a new VM, you can use any spec you like really, as ESXi always checks on boot, but I created one with the same specs as my intended host, i.e. 16GB RAM, single socket, 2vCPU cores. This does not require a virtual hard disk.
4. Once the VM is created, and before you boot it, edit the CPU settings and tick the Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI checkbox. This will reduce errors when installing ESXi (which checks to ensure it can virtualise 64-bit operating systems).

5. Set the CD/DVD (IDE) configuration to Use ISO image file, and point this to the customised ISO created earlier.
6. Once the above settings have been configured, power on the VM.
7. As soon as the VM is powered on, in the bottom right of the screen, right click on the flash disk icon, and click Connect (Disconnect from Host).

8. This will mount the USB stick inside the VM, and allow you to do a standard ESXi installation onto the stick. At the end of the installation, disconnect the stick, un-mount and unplug it.

Part Three – Boot and go!
This is the easy bit, assuming you don’t have any of the HDMI issues I mentioned in the previous post!

1. Plug your newly installed USB stick into the back of the NUC.
2. Don’t forget to plug in a network cable (duh!) and keyboard for the initial configuration. If you wish to modify any bios settings (optional), you will also need a mouse as the NUC runs Visual BIOS.
3. Power on the NUC…
4. Have fun!

That pretty much covers it. If anyone has any questions on the process, please don’t hesitate to ask!

References
Thanks to Ivo Beerens who originally detailed the ISO customisation process here:
http://www.ivobeerens.nl/2011/12/13/vmware-esxi-5-whitebox-nic-support/

Other parts of this article may be found here:
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 1
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 3
VMware vSphere NanoLab – Part 4 – Network and Storage Choices

1. Silent or as quiet as possible (the lab machines will sit behind the TV in our living room where my current whitebox server sits almost silently but glaringly large!).
2. A minimum of 16GB RAM per node (preferably 32GB if possible).
3. A ‘reasonable’ amount of CPU grunt, enough to run 5–10 VMs per host.
4. Minimal cost (I haven’t got the budget to go spending £500+ per node, trying to keep it under £300)
5. Smallest form factor I can find to meet requirements 1–4.
6. Optional: Remote access such as IPMI or iLO.

I have previously invested in an HP N36L, which while great for the price (especially when the £100 cashback offer was still on) is a bit noisy, even with a quiet fan mod. Its actually also fairly big when you start looking at buying multiples and stacking them behind the telly! Even so I was still sorely tempted by the new N54L MicroServers which are just out (AMD Dual Core 2.2GHz) and max 16GB RAM) and are within my budget.

Similarly I looked into all the Mini-ITX and Micro-ATX boards available, where the Intel desktop / small servers ones seemed to be best (DBS1200KP / DQ77MK / DQ67EP are all very capable boards). Combined with an admittedly slightly expensive Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2, these would all make brilliant white box home labs, but for me they are still limited by either their size or cost.

In late November, Intel announced they were releasing a range of bare bones mini-PCs called “Next Unit of Computing”. The early range of these 10cm square chassis contain an Intel Core i3 i3-3217U CPU (“Ivy Bridge” 22 nm, as found in numerous current ultrabooks), two SODIMM slots for up to 16GB RAM, and 2 mini-PCIe slots. It’s roughly the same spec and price as an HP MicroServer, but in a virtually silent case approximately the same size as a large coffee cup!

Even better, when you compare the CPU to the latest HP N54L, it achieves a benchmark score of 2272 on cpubenchmark.net, compared to the AMD Turion II Neo N54L Dual-Core at only 1349, putting it in a different class altogether in terms of raw grunt. Not only that, but with the cashback offer from HP now over, it’s about the same price or less than a MicroServer, just £230 inc VAT per unit!

On top of the above, there is an added bonus in the extremely low power consumption of just 6-11 watts at idle, rising to ~35 watts under high load. Comparing this to the HP MicroServer, which idles at around the 35 watt mark, spiking to over 100 watts, the NUC shows a marked improvement to your “green” credentials. If you are running a two node cluster, you could conservatively save well over £30 per year from your electricity bill using NUCs instead of MicroServers. Add to that a 3-year Intel warranty and I was pretty much sold from the start!

This all sounded too good to be true, and in all bar one respect it is actually perfect. The only real drawback is that the Intel 1gbps NIC (82579V) is not in the standard driver list currently supported by ESXi. This was a slight cause for concern as some people had tried and failed to get it to work with ESXi and held me off purchasing until this week when I spotted this blog post by “Stu” who confirmed it worked fine after injecting the appropriate driver to the ESXi install iso.

I immediately went to my favourite IT vendor (scan.co.uk) and purchased the following:

Intel ICE Canyon NUC Barebone Unit – DC3217IYE
16GB Corsair Kit (2x8GB) DDR3 1333MHz CAS 9
8GB PNY Micro Sleek Attache Pendrive

Total cost: ~£299 inc vat… bargain!

IMPORTANT: You will also need a laptop / clover leaf style kettle cable (C5) or your country’s equivalent. In the box you get the power block, but not the 3 pin cable. These can be picked up on ebay for next to nothing.

With very little time or effort I was able to create a new ESXi installer with the correct e1000 drivers, boot the machine and I am now happily running ESXi on my first node.

I should add that as part of the install I discovered a bug which Intel are looking to resolve with a firmware fix soon. This was the fact that I was unable to press F2 to get into the bios (it just rebooted each time I pressed it). Another symptom of this same bug was ESXi getting most of the way through boot and coming up with an error saying “multiboot could not setup the video subsystem”. This is not a VMware fault. I resolved this by simply plugging the HDMI cable into a different port on my TV (ridiculous!). You might also try a different HDMI cable. Either way it was not serious enough to stop me ordering a second one the same night I got it running!

Disclaimer: Mileage may vary! I will not be held responsible if you buy a b0rk3d unit.

In Part 2 of this article, I will expand on the process for installing ESXi to the NUC, and my experiences with clustering two of them (second unit arrived in the post today so will be built and tested this weekend).

Other parts of this article may be found here:
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 2
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 3
VMware vSphere NanoLab – Part 4 – Network and Storage Choices

I used to be fortunate enough to work from home 80% of the time, which meant that it was relatively easy to keep up with all the different streams, feeds, etc by simply having a second machine and screen up and running when in the house. Since starting a new role as a Solution Architect, I am lucky to be at home one day every few weeks, so I have been forced to rethink my strategy.

Devices
I have always been a bit of a fandroid, however after starting the new role, I was presented with a shiny new iPhone! After I got back from gagging in the loo, I had to think about how to integrate the Apple app ecosystem into my current Android (tablet and phone) setup, so the number one requirement moving forward was that apps should be able to communicate, access and share information outside of their walled gardens!

Having done some fairly in-depth research on different free and paid apps available on both Android and iDevice, I have re-jigged my setup for each information stream as follows:

Blogs / RSS Feeds

My old method for keeping up with blogs was to simply add them into Outlook’s built-in RSS reader. This was brilliant as you can then assign Outlook rules to feeds, to remove any junk articles, or move articles you wish to highlight into other directories –  a superb feature! Unfortunately this doesn’t have any feasible remote access / sync options (other than RDP which I already use if I am online) so I decided to move all my feeds up to Google Reader to track instead. The migration was really simple as I just exported all my feeds (over 50 of them!) from Outlook as an OPML file, which I was then able to import into Google Reader. Much quicker than having to add each manually! The only thing you lose at this stage is their folder structure, but you can then go to Options\Subscriptions and add the blogs into a single layer of subdirectories. I choose to separate mine by subject, e.g. Virtualisation / Networking / Storage / Tech News / Training etc.

Filtering the Junk –  FeedDemon Pro
To get rid of any articles you are / aren’t interested in, you need the ability to mark them as read / unread in your Google feed. After testing a few different apps, the best I found (for now) is called FeedDemon Pro (currently version 4.1). The free version is a a simple RSS reader with tagging, podcast sync, etc but the pro version (paid for) allows you to filter articles as either “mark as read if…” or “mark as read unless…”. The biggest bugbear with this app is that you can only do a positive or a negative filter on each feed, but not both. I would love to see this ability added in future versions, for example I follow the HotUKDeals feed, where I like to keep any post with tags like “SSD”,”Kindle” etc, but I want to remove any posts with the word “Win”, “Competition” etc. This was possible with Outlook, but not FeedDemon, which is a shame.

This app is left running 24/7 on my workstation VM at home, as it is only able to filter content whilst running (obviously). There have been a number of sites which have come and gone over the past few years offering filtering of Google Reader content, but I can’t see there being an easy way to monetise them, which probably explains why they have virtually all gone offline within a year or two. For now I will stick to the local filtering option but if a clear SaaS-type google reader filter emerges and sticks around (such as perhaps FeedRinse), I’d happily take their service (and even pay a couple of quid a year for it!). Frankly I don’t know why Google don’t just add this functionality natively?…

Once the feeds have been filtered, I needed a way to access them on each of my devices. For that I use the following apps (which each mark items read / unread in the feed so they all stay in sync, irrespective of vendor and device!).

Android –  gReader
Not the prettiest interface, but a great app which works on my phone and tablet, and provides all the usual sharing options, plus the ability to offline cache whole articles should you wish to do so. It also has generated voice options so you can listen to blogs if you so wish (e.g. in the car).

iPhone –  Reeder
I really like the nice clean interface, and the huge array of sharing / integration options. For me, this is the app to beat when it comes to mobile RSS reading. If it came to Android I would be first in line to purchase!

PC –  Outlook integrated Google Reader
This takes advantage of Outlooks ability to display whole webpages within Outlook folders. As per this article on Lifehacker “Just right-click on the folder, choose Properties, enter the URL to Google Reader on the Home Page tab, and then check the box for “Show home page by default for this folder”. You can even use the full URL to a specific folder in Google Reader, or create extra folders in Outlook and use a different URL for quick access to different views.”

Podcasts

Many of the above applications will support auto podcast downloading, but to keep things simple and seperate out this high storage requirement (average podcast is 30–100mb in size), I prefer to have a dedicated app. My preference is to listen to podcasts in the car as it passes the time a little quicker on my 35–45 minute journey to and from work, and you can generally listen to a podcast a day that way.

Android –  BeyondPod
My preferred app (which I use solely on my Android) is BeyondPod. This app has been designed brilliantly and integrates perfectly with my car’s audio system via bluetooth, auto playing the current podcast playlist as soon as bluetooth connects, pausing for phone calls, and saving my place when i turn off the ignition ready to continue where it left off on my next journey! In addition it will auto connect my phone to my wireless network overnight and download the latest podcast episodes I have subscribed to, ready to play at my convenience.

I have also just noticed time running away with me, and this article doing the same, so I think I will split this out into a couple of pieces covering Twitter, email and offline reading / Pocket next time. Please feel free to comment on how you manage your feeds or anything else related? More next week!…