Update – where have I been?

It has been a nearly two months since I last posted blog updated in a regular fashion, which is kind of unusual for me. Unfortunately for the blog, I have had a lot going on, and blogging has had to take a hit. There is a good reason for that though, my wife and I recently purchased our first property, so we have been busy with the move, but also with completely renovating it.

We have done all of the renovation work ourselves and so far are quite proud of what we have managed to achieve!   Much more to do though, but hopefully there will be more blogging in the near future!

Here is a start to finish progress log of one room we have managed to renovate…

lounge-transformation-low

Cloud Credibility challenges – blogging about my team members

So there is a fun website called “CloudCred” that allows individuals or teams to participate in various tasks and challenges –  everything from technical challenges to social and fun are covered and it is quite a good team building exercise, apart from the leaderboard challenge aspect!

One of the tasks is to blog about my team members and include links to their own blogs. We have quite a few team members so I can’t cover all of them, but here goes:

Of course this task is for our team – Xtravirt Limited, so we also have a company blog you can go and visit for some excellent content around the Cloud and Virtualisation industry.

Announcing vMetrics for WordPress

vMetrics is a small plugin for WordPress that works in conjunction with a PowerCLI Updater Script. You install the plugin, add the Widget to your sidebar in WordPress, configure which stats you would like to show, then run, or schedule the PowerCLI script against a standalong ESX/ESXi host, or vCenter server.

 

 

I have been working on this in my evenings whenever I find spare time over the last couple of weeks. It is based off Nicholas Weaver’s excellent WP-vSpherestats plugin, but has been re-worked to be more customisable, offer more metrics and statistics about your vSphere environment, and offers a PowerCLI Updater script, meaning you can easily change or customise the information that is brought back into the plugin.

You can find out more, or download the plugin over here.

 

Nominate your top VMware & Virtualization blogs for 2012

 

This morning I came across a link to vsphere-land.com regarding blog nominations for the top Virtualization (look at that, I spelt Virtualization with a “z”!) blogs of 2012 happening between 23/01 and 07/02. I missed out on the blog nominations for the list earlier on in January, but will still be voting of course. It will be a tough choice, as there are so many talented and deserving bloggers out there. My voting strategy will involve choosing five well known blogs that I enjoy reading and think deserve a vote, along with five other blogs that deserve more attention that what they get (in my opinion). I’ll try spread the votes out one by one, so that there is a good mix of points for both sets of blogs.

 

Best of luck to all the bloggers nominated! I see there are some nice TrainSignal VMware View and vSphere training DVDs up for grabs to voters, so make sure you get in there and cast your votes before the cut off time.

 

Cast your votes

Original post by Eric Siebert over at vSphere-Land discussing the nominations