General

This category contains general posts about blogging or this site.

Some Projects for 2012

Monday, January 2, 2012 in General, Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 13 comments

Rather than posting some sort of “2011 in review” article where I talk about how many visitors the site had or how many RSS subscribers there are, I thought I’d instead focus on the upcoming year and some of the projects in which I’ll be involved. By describing some of the projects that I’m undertaking this year in 2012, that gives you—the readers—a rough idea of some of the types of content that will likely appear in the coming year.

Here are some of my 2012 projects (some of these I’ve already tweeted about):

I’m going to learn to script in Perl. Many people have asked why Perl and why not Python or Ruby or something else. Honestly, I don’t have a really good answer for you. I tried (unsuccessfully) to teach myself Perl a couple of years ago, so I still have the O’Reilly Learning Perl book. Rather than spending money to learn some other scripting language, it seemed reasonable to revisit Perl again and just leverage the resources I already have. You might see a few Perl-related posts here and there as I work through Learning Perl, but I’ll try not to bore you with elementary stuff.
I’m going to learn German. Same scenario here—many people have asked why German and why not Spanish or French. I do have an answer this time: I seem to be spending a fair amount of time in Vienna, so German seemed to make sense. I also have a series of customer meetings planned in Germany in the first quarter of this year. Plus, German is completely new and different than anything I’ve learned before, and I wanted to challenge myself to learn and think in new ways. It’s unlikely that this will find its way into any blog posts, but you never know…
I’m going to become much more familiar with the Xen hypervisor. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll focus strictly on the open source version of Xen or Citrix XenServer; I’m open to suggestions there. No, this doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning VMware or anything like that; I just want to expand my knowledge. You can’t simply discount Xen; after all, Amazon EC2 is built on Xen. Along with this dive into Xen, I’ll also be looking very closely at Open vSwitch and OpenStack. I’d expect that a great deal of this education will eventually end up in various blog posts here.
I’m going to pursue my CCNP. I “re-achieved” CCNA last year, and this year I’m pursuing my CCNP. As with Xen, I’m confident that the learning curve required to move closer to (or even achieve) CCNP will result in a number of related blog posts on various networking technologies or concepts.

I do have a few other projects planned for this upcoming year, but I’m not quite ready to discuss those publicly yet. At least one of these other projects will be something new that I haven’t done before. Stretching myself and my skills/experience in new directions is a bit of a theme this year.

If you have any tips/tricks/advice to share on any of these upcoming projects, or if there are specific things related to these projects that you’d like to see blogged about here, please let me know in the comments. Thanks, and I hope that 2012 is going to be as exciting for you as it will be for me!

Tags: Certification, Cisco, Networking, Virtualization, Xen

Giving Thanks on Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 in General, Personal by slowe | 6 comments

Here in the United States we are preparing to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, and it’s a time of reflection. It’s a time to be thankful for what we have and what we’ve been given. This past year has been a tremendous year for me, both personally and professionally, with lots of things for which to be thankful:

Along with Forbes Guthrie and Maish Saidel-Keesing, in March we launched VMware vSphere Design (available here from Amazon). Even now—as far as I’m aware—it’s the only book on the market to comprehensively address vSphere-related design considerations.
In May, my oldest daughter gave birth to her first child, a girl.
I relocated from Raleigh-Durham, NC to Denver, CO. I’m very thankful for this relocation—my family and I are really enjoying the new area.
In October, Mastering VMware vSphere 5, still one of the only vSphere 5 books on the market (and the only comprehensive look at the new virtualization suite from VMware), became widely available.
In November, my 1998 Chevy Suburban (still with its original engine) rolled past 300,000 miles. Now that’s something for which to be thankful!

While I can thank a number of people who have helped me this year—people like Forbes and Maish, for allowing me to join them on the Design book; my editor, Agatha; my co-workers at EMC on the vSpecialist team; my wife, Crystal, for her never-ending support and tireless cheerleading; Forbes, Gabe, and Glenn for their help with the last version of Mastering—my greatest thanks is reserved for the Lord. All my successes and all my triumphs come from Him.

So, in this Thanksgiving season, while I extend my thanks to my family, my friends, and my co-workers, I’d also like to extend my thanks to the Lord. Thanks for blessing me, thanks for providing for me, and—most importantly—thanks for saving me.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Tags: Personal

Spousetivities at HP Discover Vienna

Tuesday, November 8, 2011 in Collaboration, General by slowe | No comments

As many of you probably already know, my wife Crystal (@crystal_lowe on Twitter) runs something called Spousetivities, which organizes activities for spouses traveling to conference cities with conference attendees. (You can learn more about Spousetivities by visiting the About page.) In the past, Spousetivities was limited to VMworld. This past year, it expanded to include EMC World as well. And now it’s expanding again to include HP Discover Vienna!

As usual, Crystal and her team have organized some pretty awesome activities. These activities include:

A trip to Viennese wine country
A visit to the world-famous Vienna Christmas markets
A trip to Melk Abbey (this event looks very cool)
Lunch on the River Danube
A visit to Schönbrunn Palace

If you’re headed to Vienna for HP Discover and bringing your spouse, or if you’re a spouse going to Vienna with a conference attendee, I’d recommend taking a look at these activities. It’s a great way to safely and easily see some of the great sights around this fantastic destination.

For more information on any of these activities, stroll over to the Spousetivities site and read this detailed post. You can also get more information and register at the registration page.

Tags: Collaboration

The Move to Colorado: Day 3

Wednesday, September 7, 2011 in General by slowe | 2 comments

Day 3 of our road trip to Colorado completes our trip and puts us in Denver. The trip today was pretty straightforward. We left Kansas City this morning and just followed I-70 across Kansas into Colorado. When it was all said and done, it took about 9 hours of driving to go from Kansas City to Denver.

Now that we’ve arrived in Denver, we’re in a hotel for the next few days until our house in Castle Pines North is ready for us to move in. In the meantime, I’ll be handling all the various move-related issues that need to be addressed—change of address forms, insurance, driver’s licenses, etc. That also includes buying some furniture, a task we got started on tonight with a quick trip to the new Ikea store here in Denver.

I have a couple of blog posts in the works that I’ll try to get published over the next few days, but with all the move-related tasks that need to be handled I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to get them finished and posted. I’ll do my best!

Tags: Personal

The Move to Colorado: Day 2

Monday, September 5, 2011 in General by slowe | 1 comment

I’ve just wrapped up Day 2 of my road trip to Colorado. I started the day in Nashville, TN and ended the day in Kansas City, KS (actually Overland Park). If I had two words to describe today, those words would be windy and corn.

Why those two words? Well, if you’ve ever driven across Missouri, you’ll understand why I chose “corn” because you’ve already seen the fields upon fields of corn, as far as the eye can see. And why “windy”? Well, simply put: it was very windy today. Yesterday we had to deal with some pretty heavy rainfall getting to Nashville; today, we had to deal with lots of wind as we made our way out of Tennessee into Kentucky and across Illinois and Missouri. Fortunately, the wind died down as we approached Kansas City, and driving became a lot easier.

Those of us who live in the US have a pretty good idea of how far the distance is between Raleigh, NC, and Denver, CO, but for readers outside the US I thought a few comparisons might be handy. The driving distance between the two cities is about 1,677 miles, or approximately 2,700 kilometers. That distance is:

roughly comparable to driving from London to Edinburgh and back again—twice
about the same as the driving distance between Gibraltar on the southern edge of Europe and Amsterdam, The Netherlands on the northern side of Europe
greater than the driving distance from Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia to Melbourne, on the southern coast of the continent
about the same as the driving distance from Cape Town, South Africa to Johannesburg and back again

Hopefully this gives the readers an idea of the distance we have to cover. All in all, it’s quite a road trip (and quite a move). Granted, not as significant a move as some international relocations of which I’ve heard, but significant nevertheless.

Tomorrow, we’ll leave Kansas City bound for Denver, shooting to make the entire distance in a single day. If all goes well, we will arrive in Denver tomorrow evening around dinner time or shortly thereafter. From there, we’ll have a couple of days to prepare, then we move into the new house on Friday.

I’ll have more updates tomorrow!

Tags: Personal

The Move to Colorado: Day 1

Monday, September 5, 2011 in General, Personal by slowe | 3 comments

The move to Colorado has begun. I’m typing this from a hotel in Nashville, TN, where we wrapped up our day 1 travel just a short while ago. We’ll be here only one night, leaving in the morning to get to Kansas City for our second night.

The last few days have been a whirlwind. Crystal and I got home from VMworld 2011 on Friday night; Saturday we jumped in with both feet on getting our Chevy Suburban (nicknamed “Big Red” because it’s a big red Suburban; I’ll post a picture at some point) packed and ready for the trip to Colorado. Today (Sunday) we made our last visit as regular members to our home church in North Carolina so we could tell everyone bye. Saying good-bye was harder than I had anticipated. There were so many people that we’d grown close to over the years, and we’re really going to miss them. Of course, we know we’ll make new friends in Colorado, but that doesn’t change the fact we’ll still miss the old friends.

After attending church and saying our good-byes, we headed back to the house in Knightdale, did the final packing, and then finally hit the road around 4 PM Eastern or so. Our goal was Nashville, and we while we did make our goal (about 1 AM Central) it would have been easier if it hadn’t started raining before we even got to Knoxville. The rain slowed us down a fair amount, and I’m hoping that we’ll leave the rain behind tomorrow as we turn north toward St. Louis and then west toward Kansas City. Tomorrow night we’ll stay over in Kansas City (I need to take Crystal to eat some KC barbecue); if any KC-based friends are home and want to get together, let me know.

And that’s it for Day 1…another summary tomorrow after the end of Day 2.

Tags: Personal

Have You Registered Yet?

Monday, April 11, 2011 in General, Storage by slowe | No comments

This is a very short blog post. In fact, it’s probably less of a blog post and more of just a question:

Have you registered for Spousetivities at EMC World 2011 yet?

If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to surf over to the registration page and sign up now!

For more information on some of the planned activities, have a look at Crystal’s Spousetivities post here.

Tags: EMC, EMCWorld2011

Spousetivities at EMC World 2011

Monday, March 7, 2011 in General, Storage by slowe | No comments

Heading to EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas in May? Cool, I’ll probably see you there. What’s even cooler, though, is the fact that my wife, Crystal (@crystal_lowe on Twitter) will be, for the first time, organizing spouse activities for EMC World!

If you’re a regular reader of my site you know that Crystal first launched spouse activities at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, and since that time her spouse activities—now known as “Spousetivities”—have become enormously popular. So, this year she’s taking them to EMC World in Las Vegas!

For more details, head over to Crystal’s Spousetivities site (and follow @Spousetivities on Twitter) and check out her announcement.

Tags: Collaboration, EMC, EMCWorld2011, Storage

Don’t You Just Love It?

Sunday, February 6, 2011 in General by slowe | 8 comments

Recently…

Facilities: “We need to do some power load testing in the lab where your equipment is housed. You need to shut down your equipment.”

Me: “OK, no problem. I’ll shut down my equipment.”

So, I go to the lab and shut down all my equipment: eight servers, four Fibre Channel switches, two Nexus 5010 switches, a fabric extender, two older (pre-CX4) CLARiiON arrays, two VPLEX clusters, and two small AX arrays.

Me to Facilities: “OK, all the equipment is shut down; you’re ready to proceed with the power load testing.”

Facilities: “Oh, never mind. We decided not to do the testing.”

Don’t you just love it?

Tags: Hardware, Networking, Storage

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Friday, January 7, 2011 in General by slowe | 16 comments

Everyone else is doing it, so I figured I might as well also: publish something about how the site fared during 2010. I’m going to do that, yes, but I’m also going to talk a little bit about my commitments to the site (and to the readers) for 2011.

Looking Back: 2010

The site ended the year with just shy of 1.2 million views during 2010. That’s a pretty impressive number (at least to me), but it’s barely unchanged since last year. I guess I’m going to have to find new ways of driving visitors to my site!

Here are the top 10 articles on the site (these articles could have been published anytime, not just in 2010):

The top 10 articles published in 2010 is interesting as well; I found that all of the most popular articles on the site were published in previous years. I don’t know if this means my content is getting worse (so older content is better than newer content) or if it just means the older content shows up better in search results. Anyway, here are the top 10 articles published in 2010:

The thing I found interesting about this list is that some of the posts I expected to be on there—like some of the FCoE-related posts—are nowhere to be found. Interesting…

Looking Forward: 2011

For 2011, I have a few commitments to the site and to the readers:

One thing that I haven’t done a good job with over the last year or so is responding to readers’ comments. So, this year, I’m committing to do a better job of responding to readers’ comments here on the site. If you post a comment, I’m going to do my absolute best to respond to your comment, even if that means simply saying “Thank you”.
I am committing to continue to provide full RSS feeds and not just summaries. I’m also committing to not include advertisements of any sort within the RSS feeds. That being said, I might end up switching to excerpts or summaries on the home page in order to draw more readers deeper into the site.
A lot of readers have asked for the return of search functionality. So, this year, I’m committing to bring back search functionality to the site.

I do appreciate every single person who visits the site, subscribes to the feeds, or posts a comment. To each and every reader: thank you! I will strive to provide solid, useful, pertinent technical information that will make it worthwhile to continue to be a reader!

Tags: Blogging

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