VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

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.

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.

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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