VirtualMachinery

It’s a triple point Tuesday (well, it was when I wrote this and it’s OK, they are all triple point Tuesdays) so what better day to take a look at CloudCred and see what it’s all about? This is another post as part of the vDM30in30 series that I am trying to keep up with. CloudCred was launched by VMware early in 2013 as a learning site, with a pretty solid gamification angle to it, which is what a lot of people were doing at the time.

Maybe this is a bit of a #vDM30in30 cheat, but I updated the “About Me” part of this blog to include a whole lot more stuff, as I have not had a lot of time recently to do more with the whole #vDM30in30 thing. Sometimes they make me do stuff at work and sometimes that stuff goes on for a while. This is Tuesdays post, I have another in the can for tomorrow.

Every so often, the question gets asked - what are the good tech podcasts that I should be listening to on my commute? (or while dog walking, on the plane back from Barcelona, whilst downhill skiing etc.) OK, I couldn’t help it, we’re talking about podcasts so bonus points for knowing what podcast that kind of journey related stuff comes from. When thinking of 30 posts to do in a month for #vDM30in30, this was one of the first ideas I jotted down and started work on.

I’ve just had to recover virtualmachinery.co.uk from an outage. Fortunately, this was my first experience of my blog being unavailable since I added the custom domain on to the front of it a couple of years ago, but non the less, it’s left a sour taste in my mouth. Repairing it has also bitten into my blogging time somewhat, but has also given me fuel for a blog post. I’m right in the middle of blogging for the #vDM30in30 challenge, so I am giving my site a lot more attention than normal so I spotted the problem and set out to investigate.

So this is a post that comes on the back of a promise made in Barcelona this year to spread the word about TAM Customer Central, an easy promise to keep given that I think it is such a great resource. First off, what’s a VMware TAM? Well, he or she is a Technical Account Manager who is dedicated to your Enterprise (this is usually a big company thing) from 1 to 5 days a week, depending on what support level/cost you engage at.

It seems like everyone and his dog has written a post about this already, so here’s mine. The biggest buzz at VMworld Europe was actually about an announcement that came out the week before, which is quite something, considering that a lot of nice announcements were made over the duration of the show as a whole. If you’ve been living under a rock for a while, VMware and AWS are planning to co-operate so that by the middle of next year you can run your VMware VM’s natively on the AWS cloud.

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be attending my fourth UK VMUG UserCon, which is set to be the biggest VMUG event in the UK this year. As usual, the UserCon is being held at the National Motorcycle Museum, close to the NEC and Birmingham Airport. This years date for the diary is Thursday 17th November. With the demise of the physical vForum event, this should be the biggest VMware related gathering in the UK this year.

As a confirmed Homelab freak and a#vDM30in30 participant, I guess that a post on the content of my lab would be pretty much expected. I’m a permanent member of staff in a large company, so I do have access to a considerable amount of kit on different continents within which I can play around at times, but I’m still of the opinion that having something to mess around with at home is viable.

As if my November isn’t going to be manic enough, I thought I would have a pop at this years #vDM30in30 challenge and do my very best to create 30 at least moderately sensible and decent blog posts in 30 days, whilst also sharing and reading the content created by other folks engaged in the same challenge. “Why?” you may ask, well, I’m not sure, it certainly wasn’t my idea, but it sounds like a lot of fun and, well, it’s there.

The last day of the show is always the quietest day. Some people are travelling home early, there’s less sessions around, certainly no parties after hours to plan for, the solutions exchange gets torn down and basically, everyone’s knackered. My Thursday was relatively gentle, as a reflection of all of the above. I did have a few sessions booked, but in the end, I ducked most of them, other than the mandatory TAM session, as everything is available online afterwards and there were still some vendors to see, some conversations to have, some people to catch up with, generally some time to be sociable.