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.

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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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!

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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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!

We are very proud and honored to tell you that VMGuru.nl finished 13th in Eric Siebert’s blogger contest on vSphere-land.com which was won by Duncan Epping!

Last week we all asked you to vote for us if you appreciated our blog and apparently a lot of you did.

We appreciate your votes and want to thank all who voted for us and of course Eric Siebert.

Select the Vimeo video below to watch the vChat episode where Eric, David, Simon and Special Guest, John Troyer count down the Top 25 VMware Blogs as voted by you. The fragment where VMGuru.nl is awarded 13th place is at 25:35.

We are finally going to VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen! No thanks to our employer but many many thanks to Richard Garsthagen who provides us blogger invitations.

So we are counting down the days as we are very exited to attend VMworld again this year. I’m looking forward to Sunday October 10th as we drive to Copenhagen the day before the Partner Day.

To get in the mood here’s a video of the highlights of VMWorld Europe 2009.

Check out www.VMGuru.nl from 11 to 14 October  for ‘live’ reports from VMworld 2010 Copenhagen!

It is time again for a new top blogger voting survey. Eric Siebert started the second competition of this year and again your votes will decide the winners and help decide the Top 25 VMware bloggers.

Last time we, at VMGuru.nl, were very honored to enter the list on a respectable 18th position but we want to climb the chart. Our goal is to enter the Top 15!

Since the last blog competition we published 72 articles and our website is visited by approximately 13.500 unique visitors per month. Because of our efforts VMware awarded us the vExpert status for the second year in a row.

So I hope you appreciate our time, effort, quality and content and vote VMGuru.nl #1 at  vSphere-land.com.

The VMGuru.nl crew wishes you a merry Christmas.

One year ago, October 13th, we announced our new website/blog called VMGuru.nl and October 15th we posted our first article ‘No guest customization after upgrade to Update 2′. Much has change since then….

The birth of VMGuru.nl
When, in August 2008, I changed my Internet provider I had to look for a new place to host my personal website. Luckily a colleague, Alex, has a web server on-line and offered to host it for me. The only thing I needed was a domain name, so I registered at NederHost and tried some domain names. Most were already taken but my first good one was VMGuru.nl, however I discarded the idea because my personal website has nothing to do with virtualization. After registering Motor-Freak.net I decided to keep VMGuru.nl just for the fun of it. Maybe in the future me and some colleagues could do something nice with it.

When I mentioned the domain name again in the beginning of October 2008 Alex grabbed the opportunity and quickly deployed a website using WordPress. The idea was to use it to  share our knowledge and experiences with colleagues as we don’t have a good enough Intranet to do that. Quickly the idea broadened and we decided to share with the VMware/virtualization community which required us to write in English.

My first steps
From the start reactions were positive, with 851 visits and 80.316 hits for the remaining two weeks of October we were very surprised. In November the number of visitors grew to 4.538 and in December we had almost 10 times the number of visitors we had in October, 7.059 . In these first two and a half months we wrote 72 articles with subjects like ‘What if life was a virtual machine..‘, ‘VC Upgrade went haywire‘, ‘Faulty HP ESXi 3.5 USBs‘ and ‘Hyper-V, not in my datacenter!‘.

My first fight
In the beginning of February we ran into a nasty comment in the community claiming that we ‘stole’ someones domain name. It turned out to be a comment of Scott Herold (VMGuru.com) who, after finding out a colleagues had registered ‘vmgu.ru’ just to annoy him, discovered VMGuru.nl. All ended in a fizzle, after explaining our intentions and the idea that we could both contribute to the community, each in our own way, all was well. Scott turned out to be a decent guy and we planned to meet up at VMworld in Cannes at the end of the month. We even did a video with him on VESI.org!

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Today we added a new blogger to VMGuru.nl!  Arjan van ‘t Hoff is a colleague from another division of Centric, Centric ITS.

Arjan is a great addition to VMGuru.nl because he works for another division of Centric which main focus is to sell hardware and software and hopefully this will add a new and fresh view.

We all hope to spot content from Arjan soon.

‘ello Folks!

Today we’ve updated WordPress to its latest version. There was a serious bug in a previous version and we already had some nice people testing our security. So, from this spot, I’d like to thank them all for their work of probing our site about 5 to 10 times on a daily basis for securityholes, as well as testing our spamfilter for postings for 1.836 times.

Anyway, we’re up-to-date again and we hope to stay safe!

Cheers,

Froos

We all know Eric Siebert from his vLaunchPad were he publishes his VMware Top 20 blogs. Yesterday Eric started an election to determine the Top 5 in VMware blogs.

VMGuru.nl is not on the list yet and I doubt if we could enter the Top 5 but if you like our blog, vote (Other) VMGuru.nl.
It would be nice and a great honor to get us in the Top 20.

Here’s Eric’s original post.

I have a hard time picking the top blogs from the many great ones that are out there. I initially started with a top 10 and recently expanded it to the top 20 as more and more blogs have started. In this post I outline my blog selection criteria for the top 20 and it’s no easy task for me to pick them and rate them in order. Well here’s the chance for you to pick the top 5 of my top 20 blog list using this new survey form that I created. You can pick from the current top 20 which you can see on my vLaunchpad,or choose other and add one that is not on the list. The survey will be open for 2 weeks, afterwords I’ll announce the results and update my vLaunchpad accordingly.  Duncan Epping from http://yellow-bricks.com has been the reigning number #1 for a while now and is a tough one to beat. So head on over to my survey and cast your vote, each position will have a weight assigned with it and they will be added up accordingly for the final results.

As Froos announced earlier we moved to a new IP address today. It seems that the site is up and running fine but it is possible that some folks get a “host not found” due to DNS record replication. We hope all will be updated as soon as possible but this is beyond our influence, so please be patient.

- update -

It seems most dutch ISPs have replicated the DNS records correctly already, so you should get the page there. Oversees it might take a wee bit longer. I hope that it will be fully replicated by tomorrow evening.

Cheers,

Froos

Due to an IP address change at our hosting service this website may be temporarily unavailable during the coming two weeks. We will try to limit the disruption as much as possible. Because of the DNS replication time this may take a maximum of two weeks to sort itself out.

Sorry for the inconvenience,

the VMGuru.nl-crew

It is now April and in October 2008, 6 months ago, we started our own virtualization blog. I registered a funny domain name when applying for a private domain name and Anne Jan, Edwin, Alex and I started this website just for the fun of it.

In the beginning the blog was intended to share our knowledge and experiences with colleagues who work throughout the Netherlands but very soon we attracted the attention of VMware enthusiasts all over the world.

At the end of December the number of hits grew from 80.000 (October) to almost 200.000 hits per month and we started getting positive responses. We then decided to try to walk and talk with the big boys like Erik Sloof, Gabrie van Zanten, Mike Laverick, Scott Herold, Duncan Epping, Richard Garsthagen, etc. The plan is/was to post our real life experiences and bring you as much VMware related news as possible. A part of this was to do a live report from VMworld Europe in Cannes with photos and videos.

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