Conference Fun with WiFi

Its always interesting to look at some of the things people do for their personal devices. At the VMworld conference I found these wifi points. So we have someone who feels something is overweight and apparently someone that believes they work for the Mob.

Continue reading »

VMworld 2011 - Its on

After much work and challenge, I have been able to get a VMworld Pass, a Plane Ticket and by the generosity of some wonderful VMware Peeps, a room to crash in. At this point I'm digging into and attempting to find sessions that I'd like to try to go to and getting packed to go. The late entry obviously will make getting into some of these great sessions nearly impossible, and I'll just have to make due.

After it's all said and done, this trip will still be worth it all. I look forward to seeing all the vExperts, Wizards, Stalkers and vEverything folks that I've met and look forward to meeting new ones. See you there.

Continue reading »

Vendor Minimum Requirements

Recently I was pulled into a slow performance issue with a VM. After looking at the standard metrics of value and seeing that none of them were really bad, I started asking some more questions. We contacted the vendor and they asked a bunch of questions back. Of course we responded being very transparent and the vendor came back and said your performance problem is due to the fact that your CPUs aren't 3.0Ghz or better. Now since we use AMD, this doesn't surprise me though none of our testing matched up to the claims the vendor made around 30% increase by using this new functionality. Our numbers say zero change in performance. So I pushed back and started reading on the requirements and this is what they list.

Vendor Minimum Requirements

This is great to say and is a wonderful cop out by the support team.

"Oh wait, you don't have a 3.0Ghz box"
"Ok, what model?"
"Doesn't matter, must be 3.0Ghz or faster"
"Alright, so will my 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 that's 5+ years old be fast enough?"

Try again vendor. Be accurate and precise with your data and information at time of document creation with the expectation to deliver the right information to deliver a functional, quality product.

Continue reading »

VMware still supporting DOS

Just saw the release of the 28 July 2011 patches for ESX(i) and in the list fixed is this little nugget.

When you use Altiris DOS boot disk and PXE boot a
virtual machine running on ESX 4.1 with flexible
adapter, the virtual machine might fail to start when it
attempts to load MS‐DOS LAN Manager NetBind.


VMware is still supporting DOS long after Microsoft has sent it to the curb. I know several Fortune 1000 companies that still have DOS applications that they need to run that are critical to the business processes. What other top notch hypervisors support DOS still?

Continue reading »

John Troyer - A Leader by Example

One of the challenges any leader has is how to motivate and encourage people to contribute their time and energy to a cause. This can be done a variety of ways and a company that wants to foster a community needs someone that can use all of them. Often a community forum is setup early on to help create a hangout location for their customers to share successes. These forums will start out strong and then peter out after a short period of time. The initial contributors don't feel thanked for their work, get discouraged and leave. People stop coming to the forums since their questions don't get answered and its a vicious cycle. VMware's community has managed to avoid this downward trend and is the strongest I've ever seen.

John Troyer is one of the great leaders at VMware who has helped foster the vExpert community and kept it alive and well. He encourages, thanks and helps supply these Experts with the recognition that a strong community needs. A ground breaker who connects with the community through podcasts, Twitter, forums and emails showing that our work is not ignored. He is out there responding to questions, posting challenges to start a new meme on Twitter and podcasting about the topics on people's minds constantly. He helps show that our efforts are one of the things that makes VMware stronger day by day. He brings to light that VMware appreciates our work and ultimately appreciates us.

Thanks John for the tons of work you do day to day helping connect with the VMware evangelists and die-hards. Thanks for all the work you've done to make the vExpert program reward those that spend their free time making VMware better for everyone.

Thanks.

Continue reading »
Top