Monday,Tuesday and Wednesday this week I was fortunate enough to attend the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security course. The course is one of the recommended courses for the VCAP: DCA exam so I was looking forward to learning quite a few things and get some of the questions I had built up while doing my preparations for the VCAP: DCA exam.
The course started a little slow on the Monday morning,as to no fault of the lecturer the first two modules were him giving best practices and recommendations and covering a lot of things I had learnt before either in my VCP courses/studies or via real world experience. The course material is very well structured and the extra explanations and examples in the study materials will be great reference documents for my VCAP preparations and for my design one day when I’m hopefully prepared to put my design up for the VCDX certification. The afternoons material was a lot more engaging and started to get into the kinds of things I was hoping the course was going to cover in teaching good design practice and fixing and preventing common problems in todays virtual environments. The day finished off with a few labs helping you visually fix common design errors and problems.
Tuesday we got into protecting the the management environment and Protecting your ESX and ESXi hosts. These were some of the topics I was really interested in especially for learning good design practices for my current job and for my future VCDX design. The biggest take away from this section had to be learning all about how you can use vMA to retrieve and store all your individual ESX hosts log files and how to add and use SSL certificates to secure the login into the Virtual Centre server. I’ve even already started looking at implementing the vMA log retrieval and storage into my own environment I was so impressed with it. Tuesday finished off with some labs learning how to setup vMa to retrieve and store the logs and had a really great lab for someone like me that hasn’t done it before on how to request and add an SSL certificate to your Virtual Centre server.
Wednesday consisted of finishing off learning about how to protect my ESX/ESXi hosts and then covered all the ways to harden my virtual machines and learning about configuration and change management. We were lucky to have a VMware employee in the course with us who had actually written parts of the vSphere Hardening Guide and therefore could give us great tips and additional resources to help learn more about securing our VMware environments. The two things that were the most interesting from what he told us was all about a product by HyTrust which “offers IT managers and administrators of virtual infrastructure a centralized, single point of control and visibility for hypervisor configuration, compliance, and access management” It comes in a virtual appliance and there is a community edition for me to play with in my test environment . Hopefully I can write up a posting on my experiences with the product for anyone interested. The next very informative tip he gave us was all about a document created by Horst Mundt a Technical Account Manager at VMware Germany on the VIOPS.VMware.com site detailing all the alarms and what they do in vCentre 4 and vCentre 4.1. The document is frighteningly thorough. The course finished covering the remaining topics and then we got to finish off our labs which were really good compared to a few courses I have been on as they really did teach you some in-depth skills and tips.
I would highly recommend the course to anyone wanting to strengthen their knowledge on securing their VMware Environment and it really is a great course if you are planning on doing your VCAP: DCA exam as there was loads and loads of pages and resources i marked down for me to study before I sit the exam.
Just a very quick posting to remind those around the London area this Thursday (October 28th 2010) that after the London VMUG there are the customary vBeers happening.If you don’t know about vBeers then the below is just for you 🙂 I’m hoping to make an appearance at vBeers even if for just one beer as unfortunately work commitments mean that I cannot make the VMUG on Thursday.
Also while fiddling around today I noticed the VMworld sessions are now available to view for VMworld Europe attendees like myself. If you are one of the people writing the VCAP-DCD Beta exam then some of the sessions are a brilliant learning resource. If you went to the US one then you should have had access for over a month already. I wasn’t selected as a beta exam writer but when I do start preparing for the exam (after my VCAP-DCA exam) then I’m sure these resources will be brilliant.
vBeers
Is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT. It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.
Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers!
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.
The London vBeers meet-up is held at the Pavilion End Pub. Details and directions below:
When & Where
The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month or after a VMUG meeting starting at 6pm in the ‘pavilion end pub’
Recently we decided we needed to take the plunge and start the upgrade process of our Virtual Centre,ESX hosts and Update Manager to Version 4.1. The upgrades were fairly straight forward due partly to us having to rebuild our Virtual Centre Server recently and therefore had already completed the pre-requisite of the virtual centre OS being x64 and the ODBC requirements.
The point of this posting is to summarise all the resources i used to prepare and make sure that the upgrades would run as smoothly as they did to my relief.
The VMware ESX 4.1 Release Notes were the first resources I used to fully understand all the new features of version 4.1 and to make sure all of our equipment met the Hardware, Software, and Guest Operating System Compatibility Lists
Next I went through the Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCentre Server 4.1 best practices to make sure I was obviously following the best practices for the upgrade 🙂 This was a really great resource for the upgrade and covered all the things I needed to tick off in my preparations.
The other resource that was amazing for reference and preparations was the vSphere Upgrade Guide for ESX and vCentre to version 4.1. It covers everything needed and i had it printed out beside me during the upgrades just in case.
This next resource was brilliant as it had a great table to make sure everything I needed to have done was done and the video in it showing how to do the upgrades via VMware Update Manager(the way I did my hosts)
Even though everything did go to plan I also looked around and read different blogs by people who had done the upgrades already and any snags they may have hit in the process. The best three that covered everything was
Duncan Epping’s small but so important posting all about the ODBC problems due to the VMware Update manager and vCentre needing to be installed on a x64 OS.
Well that’s everything I followed for my upgrade. Thankfully mine was really straight forward but with all the above resources I knew that I had covered everything i could to make sure I didn’t hit any problems during the upgrades.
Sadly today was the last day of VMworld. It really has been personally an amazing experience and I hope I can come back for many years to come. My day started off early again as I wanted to get in at 8am to be able to do a lab or two before it got really busy. The lab I did was the VMware vCenter vShield lab which was recommended to me to do before I did the vCloud Director Networking lab. The lab was top class and was a really great follow on from the vCloud Director: Install and Configure I did yesterday. I’ll definitely be looking through all the documentation of vCloud Director and be deploying vShield in my home lab when I get back to the UK .
While leaving the labs I spotted the infamous Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks fame. Who else is a better person to meet and chat to about your vCloud Director oriented lab than Duncan who was more than happy to chat with me about it and gave me some nice tips of how to get my head around all the vCloud technologies and features. Duncan and I then made our way to the bloggers lounge but due to it being empty still he made his way back to the labs and I sat around for a bit to quickly complete yesterdays All Things VMworld Europe – Day 2. Within half an hour I was surrounded by some of the top people in the industry such as Frank Denneman,Nick Weaver,Maish Saidel-Keesing ,Chris Dearden ,Duncan Epping(who made his way back),Vladan Seget and Scott Lowe to name but a few. I also nabbed myself a vWife shirt for the missus in the process from Scott via his wife’s Spousetivities. If you aren’t on twitter or the VMware Communities or blog have a look at this video from VMworldTV all about the social media side of VMworld and VMware. I gained so much this past week never mind over the months I’ve been using these resources and would highly recommend getting into it if you wish to gain knowledge from the top people in the industry.
After an amazing amount of knowledge transfer from so many VCDX’s in the bloggers lounge I went and did my second lab of the day VMware vCloud Director – Networking. As I stated this was the third bit to completing my vCloud Labs plan and the lab did just that. Even though it was very in depth and technically daunting the lab gave me loads of knowledge on how everything merges together and left me with a much stronger understanding of the technology.
From here I had some lunch and then went right back into the labs as I wanted to complete two more labs before the 4PM closing time. The lines were massive and at one point the waiting list to be seated was over 65 people. Once I got in I decided to do the VMware vSphere Performance & Tuning lab. The lab was very interesting and due to my only having upgraded my home lab to ESX 4.1 I hadn’t had any experience in SIOC and Memory Compression. The new features for resource management in vSphere 4.1 look to be really great and I’m looking forward to enabling SIOC in my work environment as soon as I have it upgraded.
Seeing as I had just enough time I quickly exited the labs and went straight back in for my last lab of the conference VMware View 4.5 – Install and Configure. I really wanted to do this lab as I haven’t had the opportunity to use VMware View very much at all and with the massive demand for VDI I felt it was something i needed to gain some knowledge in. the lab was good but obviously very simple and due to the large amount of people trying to get one last lab in like myself the installations of the instances need for View 4.5 meant that a large amount of my time was sadly used up waiting for each bit to install but I did gain a good base knowledge of the product.
At the end of the day I made my way back to the bloggers lounge and a whole bunch of us gave our feedback to John Troyer about what we enjoyed and what we hoped to see next year. The main talking point of the week and one of the big conversation we had in the bloggers lounge was enabling the ability for VMworld delegates to gain access to the labs. Early this morning I noticed a promising statement by the VMWorld twitter account “@vmworld: VMware is looking at how and when we could host labs in the cloud throughout the year. We have a team investigating options. #vmworld” i really hope this is true as it would be amazing to be able to do all the labs as they are such great resources.
Day two started off early as I decided to not hit the massive parties so that I could get into the labs as they opened at 8am. The Bella centre was empty and I was one of five people in the labs at opening time. I went to the VMware vSphere PowerCLI lab and got a really good foundation of PowerCLI commandlets and it was a great starters lab for a point and click person like myself.
I then made my way around the solutions centre and spoke to Alan Renouf about the lab and all other general things and got a great picture of him at the booth.I then hung out with a number of the top bloggers at the bloggers lounge and got to meet John Arrasjid (@vcdx001),Bas Raayman (@BasRaayman), the vNinja Christian Mohn (@hobbel) ,Steve Bruck (@vColossus) and the Chad Sakac (@sakacc).
Next on my schedule was Kendrick Coleman and David M Davis’ Ten Best Free tools for vSphere. The session was packed but I had made my way in early so ended up being in the second row due to them not allowing you to sit wherever you wanted. The session was brilliant and seemed to go down extremely well with the audience. I would highly recommend you check out Kendricks Top 10 Free vSphere ESX Tools and Utilities posting here and have a try with all the tools as I use a large amount of these tools already and they are brilliant and will make your daily role a lot easier while not costing your department anything.Also go vote for your top ten free tools of 2010 on David’s blog here.I also managed to nab myself a vNerd shirt from David Davis from his employers Trainsignal. Yes it’s sad I really wanted a shirt saying vNerd but I love it 🙂
I then attended the Project Horizon session which was really informative and the concepts covered were really exciting but obviously due to it being in development still the talk wasn’t vastly different from what was covered in the keynote yesterday morning. I’m hoping to get myself some more hands on experience of the product once it is available as the the product does look to be one that is going to become massive with all it’s features and the push of people to be able to do their work through iPads,iPhones and Android devices.
From there I made my way to a VMware vSphere Troubleshooting lab which was highly informative and the best lab I had done yet as it was great to test my own troubleshooting skills and learn a few new ones/perfect them. It was also very refreshing to work on an environment that was broken yet not mine as then the obvious pressure you normally have wasn’t there 🙂 The lab was also a great introduction to the official course being run and I’m looking forward to doing the course and learning all of it.
From here I had to catch up with some office work and then made my to the VMware Party. The party was really impressive with great food, loads of drinks, some crazy performers from circus performers to break dancers and then the bands Bjorn Again (an ABBA tribute band) and MADHEN (the house band). ABBA had broken up before I was even born so I enjoyed playing table football (foosball) against some VMware employees more than the bands but I do have to say the crowd was absolutely loving them and my wife and parents would have been front row of the performance.
Due to my wanting to get into the labs at opening time again I left around half eleven. The second day was really great as I got a good amount of time with fellow bloggers for some knowledge transfer,the sessions to learn the new products and features and the labs to be able to play around and gets some hands on experience of the new products and strengthen my knowledge on technologies I have been using for a while.
Well I made it to my first VMworld and have already met a massive number of the people I speak to on twitter and whose blogs I follow at last nights VMUG party. The highlight of the party for me had to be David Davis of train signal fame saying that he really enjoys my All Things Virtual postings 🙂 .
The first real day of VMworld started today with the opening keynote. It took a lot for me to try drag myself out of bed for it but the efficiency of the Danish public transport system meant that I got in really quickly. I got into the keynote fairly early and made my way to the bloggers area but decided to sit on one of the more comfortable chairs beside the bloggers area as all the bloggers area seats had little tables attached which was irritating to me. The keynote then started with the very funny “what is the cloud” video and even though I had seen the video before seeing as it was shown in San Francisco also it is still a great simplistic way of explaining the cloud to people.
The keynote speeches were pretty much exactly the same as the ones from San Francisco so I won’t go over it all again as most people will have either seen or read about the keynotes so if you haven’t watched the keynote I would recommend watching it here . The main announcements that were new for VMworld Europe was the announcement that the vCentre iPad app will be available to download at the end of this month as well as the VMware View 4.5 iPad client. I’m sure not many people need a reason to get an iPad but I’m sure the releasing of these clients will be a number of peoples reasons for buying themselves one in the near future. Another of the big announcements was Project Horizon. The application looks really exciting and is going to be a firm favourite with a lot of people I am certain. I am really looking forward to learning more about the product in the coming weeks and months. Here is an excerpt form the VMware site about the product “Project Horizon: Architecting the Next Generation End-user Computing Model:At VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, VMware will preview a cloud-based management service – codenamed Project Horizon – that will securely extend enterprise identities into the cloud and provide new methods for provisioning and managing applications and data based on the user, not the device or underlying operating system. Project Horizon will establish a user’s “Cloud Identity,” securely extending on-premise directory services between private and public clouds and enabling customers to take advantage of the flexibility and new services in the public cloud while maintaining the security and control from their private clouds. “
After the keynote I made my way to my first session which was VMware vCloud Director Technical Overview which was a highly interesting and informative session especially seeing as I may need to roll it out in the coming months. The big let down as a large amount of people have also stated though is the need for an oracle database for the implementation. There are rumours and don’t hold me to this that in the next realise that there will be support for MsSQL.
Next I went to the VMware View Technical Overview session. This session is one I added as like vCloud Director there is a big push for this kind of technology and so I needed to gain a bit more knowledge of the product as I haven’t had the chance to play around or fully read up on the product. The session was good and covered a fair amount of the features I was hoping to learn. The only downside to the session personally was that the session was finished in half an hour.
Next I made my way to the bloggers lounge where I got to do some serious people spotting of more people whose blogs I read and who I follow on Twitter. The notable ones have to be John Troyer (@jtroyer), Maish Saidel Kessing (@maishsk), Gabrie van Zanten(@gabvirtualworld), Simon Long (@simolong_) and Eric Sloof(@esloof). I also got to chat to John briefly which was really great as last year I watched religiously his videos from VMworld US and now I’m attending a VMworld and chatting to him.
I then made my way around the solutions exchange and watched a couple of the presentations being run all of which were highly interesting and from the amount of questions they got asked seemed to go down very well with the crowd. From here I decided to get some lab time down and went to the lab section and did the vCloud Director Install and Configure lab. I’m really pleased with the amount of information I learnt and how much I was able to see and do. I’m hoping to do quite a few more labs before the week is done.
The day finished off for me with a relaxing free beer with a few free beers with a few Twitter friends and a few pass and present colleagues. I was nicely invited to the Veeam party but opted out as I want to do some labs early tomorrow morning.
Yep it’s already time for another vBeers and from the amount of vBeers kicking off around the world it is now becoming the place for all virtualisation geeks to meet up, have a few drinks, talk shop and anything else and stagger home at the end of the night (obviously safely). It is happening TONIGHT so if you are near the London area I would highly recommend trying to make it to the evening, sadly I won’t be able to make it due to pre- VMworld preparations meaning I’m in another office with my car. If you’ve never heard of vBeers before here is the “official” definition of vBeers:
vBeers is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT. It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.
Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers!
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.
The London vBeers meet-up is held at the lovely ole English pub, ‘The Cittie of Yorke’. Details and directions below:
When & Where
The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month starting at 6pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks.
There has been an unbelievable amount of news in the past week and a half since my last All Things Virtual. Also i came across one or two blogs in the past few days that were a bit older but have so much great information in them I’ve added them to this list also.
First is the announcement of the next London VMUG meeting. It is happening on Thursday the 28th of October with some really awesome sessions by Xsigo and Gabrie van Zanten of www.gabesvirtualworld.com/ fame. If you are near the London area I would encourage you to mail the address and book your spot and come join all the attendees for vBeers afterwards and hear how we can all talk about not just VMware stuff but all things geek 🙂
I’m very fortunate to have become a part of a very current and global company like EMC due to the company I worked for being bought by EMC. If you are like i was and always wanted to join a big international IT company at the forefront of the industry then Chad Sakacc’s posting about the more than 200 open positions at EMC,EMC partners and VCE will be of interest to you. There are some amazing roles open especially in my opinion the latest vSpecialist roles to be filled as the vSpecialists are definitely one of the “elite” teams of Virtualisation professionals which I hope one day soon I can become a part of.
Chris Dearden has done an in depth blog posting all about Kaviza VDI in a box V3. If you haven’t heard about Kaviza they won the best of VMworld 2010 Desktop Virtualisation award and has been rated very highly by a lot of top people in the virtualisation industry. Chris has done a great posting all about the features and also just posted about the latest release of it version 3.1.
If you didn’t read my last All Things Virtual then you wouldn’t know that the registration for the VCAP-DCA exams were due to be opened on September the 13th as mentioned by Scott Vessey on his blog. You can register here for the exam. A few of the guys I follow on twitter have already registered. I’m personally waiting quite a while until i feel confident enough in my knowledge and having got through and confidently ticket off all the things on the VCAP blueprint with links as created by by Kendrick Coleman. Eric Sloof posted all about test questions for the VCAP-DCA exam on his site, which will be a nice way of doing some practice before the exam even though a large part of the exam is doing labs. Cody Bunch has started registrations for the VCAP-DCA brown bags consisting of 18 sessions run on a bi-weekly basis starting next week Wednesday (30th of September). I have been through quite few of Cody’s VCP and VCDX brown bags (recorded due to the times they have been running) and they are going to be a brilliant resource in my preparations for the exam.
David M Davis of the Trainsignal vsphere training materials fame has done a very interesting video all about VMware ESXi 4.1 Lockdown and New Total Lockdown Mode. this video is great for someone like me who is having to build and strengthen their knowledge all about ESXi seeing as I’m an ESX only user so far and with the next release not having ESX included.Eric Siebert has posted a great posting all about Upgrading hosts from ESX to ESXi in seven steps. This is brilliant for the exact same reasons of learning ESXi die to ESX being discontinued.
Eric along with David M Davis and Simon Seagrave have also covered his blog posting along with HP microserver and cool vSphere iPad apps on their latest vchat episode. If you haven’t watched any of theses vChat’s before I would highly recommend them as the guys cover all the latest and greatest things coming out and a personal bit of enjoyment is seeing how remarkably happy David is in every single vChat episode 🙂
The talk and blogging about VMware vCloud Director is still going strong since VMworld and there have been some top class blogs all about features,fixes,lab builds and hardening guides. William Lam has done a posting all about automating the installation of vCloud director and the oracle database. Duncan Epping has posted about the vCloud Director security hardening guide. From what a number of people have been saying on twitter this is a must read before using vCloud Director. I am yet to get round to it as I’m still trying to finish building my test lab of the product but as usual the guide looks like a brilliant resource.Duncan has also posted about creating a vCD lab on your Mac laptop. I’m not an Apple Mac person myself but I’m sure a substantial amount of people will find this posting very interesting.
Mark Vaughn has posted all about a challenge he has made for someone to try make a mini version of the VMware Express truck. If you haven’t heard about the VMware Express tuck then read about it here. Mark is challenging someone to create a smaller version and try put it into a Mini Club-S. I along with a large number of people judging from the talk of it on twitter would love to see this achieved so if you feel up to the challenge then check out his blog and please tell me when it being started and keep me up to date on it’s progress as this is a brilliant idea and highly interesting concept.
Frank Denneman has done another brilliant posting all about Resource pools and simultaneous vMotions. I’ve posted a few of franks previous postings on the topic and i would highly recommend reading through his latest posting on the topic as i know a large number of people and see a very large number on the VMware communities still believing setting values and limits for resource pools as well as using resource pools for organisation.
Duncan Epping has also done a posting all about the misconceptions of the amount of memory allocated to the service console and how it is actually calculated. a nice little bit of information possible for someone writing their vcp or VCAP soon as they love these arbitrary kinds of questions in the exams.
Alan Renouf has posted all about the latest PowerCLI 4.1 Poster and Quick Reference Guide. This guide is very useful to me due to my trying to teach myself Powershell/PowerCLI and the learning of these commands for my usage due to the removal of the COS soon. Alan is obviously one of the top guys for PowerCLI and as I’ve mentioned loads of times before if you aren’t using his vCheck program then you need to start using it ASAP.
The next one is an amusing one for anyone working in the virtualisation field who is asked by someone what they actually do for a living and having to try explain it to someone who doesn’t work in IT. Gabrie van Zanten wrote the posting and it’s a great article especially the comments of what other people say 🙂
Next is all about the latest release of the vReference card by Forbes Guthrie. The reference card is an amazing amount of information you could even need to look up on one very easy sheet. I always have the pdf saved to my desktop so i can access it whenever i need to do a quick lookup of any information or values
Next is the availability of the schedule builder for VMworld Copenhagen for all the attendees. I’ve already started playing around with my schedule trying to get in the sessions and hands on labs I want to attend and do ,as well as leave some time for social networking as one of the big things about the conference for me is meeting all the people who I follow and chat to on twitter and whose blogs I have and still learn so much from.If you are a blogger or social media contributor and are attending or will be blogging about VMworld Copenhagen then remember to add your information for the VMworld Europe 2010 Social Media Contributors.
Duncan Epping of yellow-bricks fame has a contest to win yourself a free VMworld Copenhagen ticket so if you aren’t attending and wish to attend but for whatever reason couldn’t afford it then go check out his posting on the contest here and hopefully I’ll meet you there at one of the events.
Talking of events at VMworld the Danish VMUG have taken on a crazy task and have opened up a VMUGParty for all VMworld Copenhagen attendees with free beer and cold drinks sponsored by EMC, Trend Micro, Magirus, IBM and Veeam. I have a feeling this pay get out of hand with the amount of people invited but I’m planning to make it myself and hopefully i can meet you.
Chris Dearden has come up with a very clever idea of instead of exchanging information and business cards at VMworld to exchange self created t-shirts and maybe by the end of the week you’ll have yourself a couple of very cool shirts with your fellow VMware bloggers websites on them.
Just a very quick posting of the two VMKernel problems I noticed in my VMware environment this morning and the very simple fix i found for it.
The errors I was receiving was “ScsiCore: 1119: Invalid sense buffer: error=0x72, valid=0x0, segment=0xb, key=0x0” , “SCSILinuxAbortCommands Failed, Driver ata_piix, for vmhba3”
I noticed these problems was happening when one of my vm’s became unresponsive for a few seconds also. So I checked the settings of the vm and noticed that the vm had the CD/DVD Drive setting set to a hosts device location. Once I changed this back to Client Device the problems stopped appearing and the vm hasn’t become unresponsive again 🙂
As I said a very simple fix but thought I’d put it out there just in case someone isn’t as lucky as I was in noticing the errors came at the same time as a certain vm became unresponsive.
Due to my being away last week I’m already a week behind my “Campaigning”. If you read any of the top VMware related blogs I’m sure you’ll know that Eric Siebert is running his Top 25 Virtualization Blogs.
Since I only started this blog in earnest in February I am obviously one of the new kids on the scene but as I’ve stated in my last blog postings my viewership and community visibility has grown an impressive amount(I believe impressive). So if any of my blog posting have helped you fix a problem,linked you to the top blog postings on the week/fortnight or you feel I deserve a vote if i have helped you via twitter or the VMware communities please cast a vote for my blog.I don’t believe I’m anywhere near the top but at least if it gets me in the top 50 or even 75 I’ll be happy.
If anything at least cast a vote for the blogs you do enjoy even if it isn’t my blog as getting onto Eric’s list is a very high honour for a VMware related blogger and there are some amazing blogs out there that deserve your votes.
Gregg
*Update* Hmm it seems you can only select the blogs that Eric feels are worthy of the votes and therefore kills any newcomers like myself actually getting a vote or even being on the list. Personally I think a bit where you could insert a blog which Eric could then approve is legit would have been a fair and obvious option but it seems not so.
. Hopefully I can write up a posting on my experiences with the product for anyone interested. The next very informative tip he gave us was all about a document created by Horst Mundt a Technical Account Manager at VMware Germany on the VIOPS.VMware.com site detailing all the alarms and what they do in vCentre 4 and vCentre 4.1. The document is frighteningly thorough. The course finished covering the remaining topics and then we got to finish off our labs which were really good compared to a few courses I have been on as they really did teach you some in-depth skills and tips. 
![vBeers[7]](https://i0.wp.com/www.techhead.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/vBeers7.jpg "vBeers[7]")
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
TheSaffaGeek 