It is that time of the year again, the last voting was over a year ago where we made it, thanks to you!, to the 13th place. Voting is now open again for the top VMware & virtualization blogs.  It would be nice and a great honor to get us in the Top 10 this year. So if you like our blog please vote VMGuru.nl (Various) using the BIG button on the left.

We all know Eric Siebert from his vLaunchPad were he publishes his VMware Top blogs. Your votes will help determine the new top 50 bloggers on vLaunchpad. Votes are weighted so a #1 vote counts as 10 points, #2 vote counts as 9 points etc down to 1 point for a #10 vote. The total points for each blog will be added up and will determine the top 50 order.

New this year there will be voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.

The past year has been great. The VMGuru.nl-crew posted 105 articles and 7 videos which have and been read by many visitors. This all resulted in 1.3M webpages served,  400.000 visits, 240.000 unique visitors and 556GB of traffic.

Great numbers and steady growth over the whole year.

Here’s a list of the 5 best read article and the 3 best viewed videos of 2011.

Articles:

1. How to: Upgrade to vSphere 5 (27.166);
2. How to license Microsoft Windows 7 for VMware View deployments (13.215);
3. Rumors on vSphere 5 (8.412);
4. Waiting is over – download vSphere5 now! (7.792);
5. How to setup the vSphere client for the iPad (6.353).

Videos:

1. VMworld Europe 2011 trailer;
2. vRoadtrip v2;
3. Designing vSphere Platforms for maximum tier 1 application performance.

Have you ever wondered how I rolled into the IT business, when I got involved with VMware, why I started VMGuru.nl and was rewarded vExpert 2009-2011?

Today I’m in the vExpert Spotlight on the VMware Communities VMTN Blog.

Check out: http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2011/11/vexpert-spotlight-erik-scholten.html

VMworld – Day Three – Wednesday 19th October

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VMworld – Day Two – Tuesday 18th October

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This year VMworld has attracted more than 26000 attendees to visit the largest virtualization event in the world. VMworld Las Vegas had 19000+ attendees and VMworld Copenhagen has 7000+ attendees, which is 1000 more attendees than last year. Lets see if the event reaches the 8000 mark next year on VMworld Barcelona 2012. The exact number of attendees for Copenhagen will be released soon by VMware Press and it will be above 7100.

VMworld – Day One (Partner Day) – Monday 17th October

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VMworld – Day Zero – Sunday 16th October

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This week our fellow blogger, Sander Martijn, felt he had to vMotion  to a new career opportunity. After working for Centric for 8 years, he has accepted a new challenge and signed a  contract at Nspyre in the Netherlands.

Sander, congratulations from the rest of the VMGuru.nl crew.

Although Sander is going to switch employers, he will continue blogging at VMGuru.nl.

VMware Next Step in End-User Computing roadshow June 2011 from Ton Hermes, Senior SE VMware on Vimeo.

The Future of End-User Computing goes much further than just delivering a vDesktop and vApplications to users. Users today are demanding more and more that functionality is available 24/7, where new functionality can be immediately obtained when needed and that they can use a device of their choice to work with.

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After a busy and hectic weekend VMGuru.nl is back online.

During the first two years of VMGuru.nl Alex provided the hosting services. He was a member of a co-locating club and owned a personal web server with adequate bandwidth. But during the years our demands grew and we got ourselves a new server and Alex and Anne Jan build a SMB infrastructure on ESXi to host our website.

But with the new server our power consumption grew and our demands skyrocketed but the co-locating club had a few limitations. Limited public IP addresses and only Linux operating systems.

So we decided to search for a new hosting service and found VDA Hosting in Amsterdam. A good co-locator with good bandwidth, IP addresses to spare and a good price/performance ratio.

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VMGuru.nl is going strong! A bit too strong for our current colo. So, we will be moving to a new co-locator this weekend. Moving to a new co-locator also means that we will be moving to new IP addresses. We hope we can make the transition as smooth as possible, but you might experience an outage starting Saturday. This should be limited to Saturday only. If we still can’t be reached beyond that, please notify us via twitter

Stay tuned for more news and insights here at VMGuru.nl!

We’re less than twelve hours away from 2011 and we’re bombarded with Top 2010 rankings.

And with a great 2010 behind us I can’t resist to do a VMGuru – Best of 2010.

My personal highlights for 2010 are my new job at Imtech, the trip to VMworld Europe in Copenhagen and of course the interview with John Troyer on VMworld TV.

For VMGuru the articles which were best appreciated and visited are (in random order):

• Edwin’s article on Oracle and things they don’t tell you;
• My article on our new enterprise hypervisor comparison;
• Edwin’s article on deciphering the Cisco product code;
• My article on adding additional drivers to an ESXi installation;
• Edwin’s series on licensing Microsoft Windows in a virtual environment (and part 2);
• Anne Jan’s article on recovering from a lost snapshot;
• My series on how to upgrade to vSphere 4.1 and View 4.5;
• Anne Jan’s article on database mirroring as an alternative to clustering and FT;
• My article on choosing the VMFS block size with vSphere 4.1;
• My article on Exchange CCR clustering on VMware with iSCSI.

Besides the articles two other highlight are of course the awesome 13th place in Eric Siebert’s blog contest and the vExpert 2010 for Edwin, Anne Jan and myself.

We at VMGuru hope you enjoyed our website in 2010 and hope to see you again in 2011.

On behalf of the complete VMGuru.nl-crew I would like to wish you all

a happy, healthy and virtually insane 2011!

This is one of the last articles for 2010 and what a beautiful year it has been.

• A lot of new products like vSphere 4.1, Zimbra, View 4.5, ThinApp 4.5.
• The vExpert 2010 achievement for three of the VMGuru.nl bloggers.
• A great VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen and a packed VMUG event.
• A new job for Edwin, Anne Jan and myself.

But 2011 also promises to be a great year with the expected release of vSphere 5, many improvements in View and maybe more job opportunities for VMGuru.nl-crew members.

On behalf of the complete VMGuru.nl-crew I would like to wish you all

a very Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy and virtually great 2011!

After 12 years it was time for something new, something
exciting, something fresh.

From the 1st of January 2011 I will also be working for
Imtech ICT Infrastructure  Services & Solutions.

I will join Edwin and Erik at Imtech ICT, building the virtualization
solutions they sell.

Of course I will continue blogging at VMGuru.nl, now with real life experiences from Imtech ICT. The main story will still be ‘virtualization’ but the ingredients will differ, NetApp/IBM N-series instead of Dell EqualLogic, IBM servers instead of Dell.

A week ago, Arjan, initiated a VMworld Great Prize Draw giving away some of the items he collected at VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen. Because we had some extra items we introduced an additional fourth prize.

I got the honors of naming the winners, so I pulled the numbers 15, 7, 3 and  5.

Matching this with Arjan’s list of registrations resulted in the following four prize winners.

• First prize, the original VMware World Lab Staff Shirt, goes to Giuseppe Guglielmetti.
• Second prize, the original VMworld Backpack, goes to Jason Robinson.
• Third prize, a original VMworld Surprise, goes to Richard van der Sligte.
• And the fourth prize, the original VMworld Virtual roads, Actual clouds t-shirt, goes to Darrin Jones.

The four winners will receive an e-mail shortly from Arjan for their address data. Thanks for participating!

Because we experienced more and more problems with the placement of our content we decided to give the website an overhauling.

We changed the theme we started with two years ago and replaced it with a cleaner and fresher look with two sidebars.

I hope you all like the new layout and keep visiting us. If you have any hints, tips and/or complaints don’t hesitate to contact us using comments, e-mail or even twitter.

Due to VMworld 2010, my job interviews and the problems with our Zimbra mail server we haven’t had the time to ‘celebrate’ our 2 year anniversary. So a bit late.

Two years ago, in October 2008, we started our website/blog called VMGuru.nl and we had an amazing first year. But our second year was even better….

First year
In our first year we managed to write 355 articles, generating 192.465 visits and 8.1M hits by 29.193 unique visitors.

Second birthday
During our second year we’ve tried to exceed our first year and despite some issues with the stability of our new server we succeeded.

We want to thank everybody who visited, supported us and gave us feedback. We hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did and we hope we can keep you informed for another few years.

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VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen is over.

It was a huge success as far as us here at VMGuru.nl concerns. We had a fantastic time. Although it was very demanding at times, the team pulled through together. During VMworld, we generated more than 20 posts here at VMGuru.nl. Edwin’s dairy posts gave a bit of an insight in what we did every day. In general, we were on our feet from 7:30 AM up to 01:30 AM. During these long days, we shot a huge amount of photo’s and video’s. Most material has already been posted and we hope we have made a difference with our posts.

Our goal was to give you, our visitor,  an idea of what was shown at VMworld 2010, the keynote sessions, the solution exchange and the overall experience. If we did it right, you might even have had the feeling you were there with us at the conference. We tried to interview the interesting people and show new products you might want to hear about and look at. Nevertheless we hope to see more of you in person at VMworld 2011, wherever it may be. Wouldn’t it be great if VMworld Europe got bigger than the US version?

On a personal note ….

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We are now one week from the start of VMworld Europe 2010 in the Bella Center in Copenhagen.

We’ve started packing our bags, preparing all photo-, video cameras and laptops and charging all batteries. This to make this a trip to remember as we will be awake from 6 AM to late in the evenings so we will not miss a thing and to give you all a sublime ‘live’ report from Copenhagen.

Our trip to Copenhagen will start on Sunday October 10th so we can attend the Partner Day of Monday. Throughout the week we will bring you articles, photos and videos ‘live’ from the breakout sessions, the labs, off course the solutions exchange and maybe some parties but we don’t want to give you the wrong impression

So check out VMGuru.nl from October 11th – 15th for ‘live’ reports from THE European virtualization event, VMworld Europe 2010!