vinternals is Dead, Long Live vinternals!

Alas people, it's been an unbelievable ride but I'm afraid it has come to an end :'(.

For a little while now, I have been building something. It's not finished yet, but I have had to learn (and re-learn) so much, that my focus on VMware technologies just isn't as laserlike as it used to be. And while that doesn't mean I know less about the VMware stack now than i did a year ago, it means I'll likely be focusing solely on the hypervisor itself and less on everything else until I don't need to point the majority of my focus at these other things. But given those things are *nix internals, JavaScript, MongoDB, and a lot of web technologies surrounding these, don't hold your breath :).

Soon all the content from this site will move to vinternals.blogspot.com (the content on vinternals.wordpress.com will remain where it is today). Now you know why I put 'search vinternals' on the back of my novelty business cards - I guess subconsciously I have known for a while that this day would come.

The other thing I am going to do is start writing under my real name. This is something that I have been a little hesitant about for a while, despite advocates of real identity like my good mate Mark Pollard making persuasive arguments to do so.

So if you're interested in a plate of everything that comes with large infrastructure (which of course includes some virtualisation) and web technologies (plus a side of philosophy), I encourage you to follow my new Twitter account, @sturadnidge. Absolutely no offense taken if you choose not to. And yes, I'll be writing at a new address in the very near future (but you'll have to follow @sturadnidge to find out when).

Thanks to all of you for tuning in over the years, I'm flattered that you thought I was (and hopefully still am) worth listening to, and I hope you learned something along the way - I know did.

London VMUG Session

Wow, can't believe there is some new content up here? Neither can I :). In all seriousness though, I've been working something I think is pretty cool (and has nothing to do with virtualisation) which has been chewing up a lot of my time. Although it has nothing to do with virtualisation, I'm hoping it will be something a lot of you will find useful. More on that in the near future ;).

Yesterday the London VMUG team put on a full day event, with labs, different content tracks in the afternoon and even food! It was a great day, even without the usual motley crew of regulars like Alan Renouf, Mike Laverick, Tom Howarth, Stevie Chambers, Dan Eason and Simon Long. I hope everyone who attended (more than double the regular number of attendees I would guess) had a good day too.

I was lucky enough to have a spot in the afternoon, right before the great Massimo Referre. The room was pretty full, I'm guessing people wanted to get in early to see Mass as our sessions were in the same room :D. But seriously, thanks to everyone who came along - I was stoked at the turnout and hopefully I didn't fuck up the message I wanted to deliver too much.

New Year, New Job!

It is with great relief that I can finally tell you all the real reason things have been so quiet around here of late, and why you haven't seen much action on the @vinternals Twitter account either - I've been buried in documentation and labs in preparation for my new role, which I am starting today!

Many of the big vendors, especially EMC, have been snapping up people from the blogging community over the past year or so, and I always said to myself that I wouldn't tie myself to a single vendor but sometimes opportunities come along that are just too good to pass up. And earlier this year, one of those opportunities came my way, and I grabbed it with both hands. So starting today, I will be the new Cloud Technical Evangelist (EMEA) for... Microsoft!

Yes I know it's hard to believe, but Hyper-V has been making great advancements over the past few years, and when you dig deeper into the technology it clearly is superior - Microsoft's main problem has been a complete lack of evangelists on the level of Epping, Denneman, Gray or Laverick and so the level of technical detail in the public domain has been admittedly a little light. I mean try searching for information about the Windows scheduler on the level of something like this from Denneman - it's just not there. The funny thing is, as I was not an employee until today I too didn't have access to any internal Microsoft documentation, but I just _know_ that the deep technical information is there somewhere, to finally prove that Microsoft products absolutely kick the shit out of anything VMware could ever produce. My job will be primarily to spread that technical information, and show how innovative features like Dynamic Memory, Live Migration,... well I'm sure there are others, oh yeh just Cloud in general like I have seen on all those TV ads... well my job is to really show them off to the world and win customers over from VMware platforms. I mean no one is really happy paying the VMware tax, are they! Consolidating tax down to a single company makes great business sense, and in any case Hyper-V is FREE!!!

So I hope you all continue to read my blog and follow me on Twitter, these are going to be interesting times!

UPDATE: I've been wanting to do this April Fools post for years, finally I remembered :). Hope you all got a laugh!

Not Just Another Fucking 2011 Prediction Post

In fact, it's not a prediction post at all - it's just a list of things I would like to see happen or at least start happening this year. I'm not making any guesses as to whether they will or not, you can decide for yourselves what the likelihood of each is.

I'm Baaaaaack!

Heheh. Well after a few years of dedicated hosting, it was clear that I didn't need it. So here I am back at Blogger, hopefully to stay this time :)

New vinternals Site, Burning Feed...

I really need to bite the bullet on this one and move to my new wordpress based site. In the next few hours I will revert the current site to it's default vinternals.blogspot.com address, so the RSS feeds should still work. Then later this evening I'll point the vinternals.com domain at the new site. Finally, in the next day or 2 I'll burn the feeds from this site. If you haven't seen anything from me by next Sunday, either it's all gone horribly wrong or you need to update your RSS bookmark.

Hmmm, it seems putting the word burn all over the place has resulted in ads for "sexy singles" to temporarily appear on the site. Will have to use that word more often :D

Interpol Release Travel Advisory for Cannes in Late Feb

That's right, in an uncanny (and unfortunate for VMware) coincidence, Interpol have issued a travel advisory for anyone in the Cote d'Azur region in late February. All travelers and residents are advised to be on the lookout for 2 males apparently involved in an ongoing London-based criminal enterprise. One male is described as 186cm, shaved head, blue eyes, dashing good looks and a strange accent. The other is described as even taller, of Indian descent, and speaking only in the near unintelligible Jafaican slang that is native to East London.

Well that's just bloody typical. Only yesterday did Shyam and I get our travel approval for VMworld Europe 2009, and this happens.

Next London VMUG - March 10th

As announced by Al Davies and reported by others, the next London VMware User Group meet will be on March 10th.

Come along to hopefully learn something, and say hi to some of the big names in the Virtual blogosphere such as Mike "RTFM or STFU" Laverick, Alan "Oui Oui, Poo Poo" Renouf, and the lads from Xtravirt. There's always the chance of Tom Howarth dropping by, as well as any number of people from VMware UK. The "bloggers attempting to get fame by association" from vinternals, Shyam and I, will also be there.

And if none of that interests you, then the pub session afterwards should. Pint of Peroni, thanks!

VMworld Europe 2009 - Boche Will Be There, Will You?

Hot in off the intertubes - bench pressing maniac Jason Boche, who also has a popular virtualisation blog (that's right people, it's spelled with an 's'. Sometimes I wonder where the "English" in "US English" went) has announced he will be attending VMware Europe 2009. This is great news, because it's more likely that my as yet unannounced 'US vs EU Bloggers Sumo Challenge' will go ahead if more US bloggers actually get to the event :)

Oh, those lowly bloggers from vinternals will be there as well, but who cares.

UPDATE Legendary Scott Herold will also be there to represent Team USA! Thank god Oglesby doesn't blog!

VMware 2009 Product Lineup

I was under the impression that some of these products were still in super secret squirrel status, but as they're now appearing on the VMware Products homepage, I guess that's no longer the case!


Since you're all going to go and check out the VMware spiel anyways, I won't bother repeating it here.

What I will say though is that I'm not sure how wise it is for VMware to simultaneously spread themselves even thinner by releasing more products, and eat into the opportunities for ISV's. 2009 is going to be a tough year for everyone, and a healthy ISV market is good for a software company. The last thing VMware should be doing is try and offer everything themselves, thus driving ISV's like Veeam, Quest and the many others into Microsoft's camp where they will no doubt be welcomed with open arms!

... and have a Happy New Year!

Well thankfully I've returned from my stint over 200 clicks north of the arctic circle with all my fingers and toes! Mind you, we were lucky to catch some unseasonably warm weather - the coldest it got was a toasty -3 (celsius) instead of the average -20 at this time of year.

Anyhou, I've been working on a bit of a special rant philosophical post to end the year, so I'll get my well wishes out of the way now.

I hope you've had a great 2008. I had almost zero expectations when I started this blog back in January, and have been completely blown away at the level of readership and attention in the community that I have received. So to that end, thanks everyone for reading, thanks to the guys in the community I talk to / know (they're listed in the "linkage" section down the right there). Thanks to John Troyer at VMware for helping to get me on the map and for being so tolerant with the profanity ;-), and thanks to all the other people at VMware who have helped along the way... Lance, Carter, Steve, the account team that handles my company (you think I give VMware a hard time as a blogger... that's nothing compared to what I put them through as a customer). And a special shout out to all those who took the time to email me over the year - I really appreciate the time anyone takes to give me their angle or experiences with regards to a post, keep it coming.

In the new year I'll be moving to dedicated hosting, so hopefully I can start doing some more stuff like hosting a few whitepapers and small utilities / scripts. And get a bit more of a custom theme going (the green ain't going nowhere though ;-).

The coming year is going to be interesting for many people on many fronts, and I don't expect it will be an easy one. But as Albert Einstein said, "In the midst of difficulty lies opportunity". Here's wishing that you all make the most of those opportunities should they arise, and have a great 2009.

Boche, Lowe - You Got It All Wrong!

About this Mohamed Fawzi bloke. He's talking about _music_ fellas, more specifically para-metal. I don't mind the odd bit of thrash, maybe I can find some of these Hyper Wii's (or whatever they're called) on iTunes.

Check out Martin Ingram on DABCC...

While I'm a little insulted that Martin didn't tell me he is now contributing to Doug Brown's excellent site (j/k Martin :-), he is and you should keep an eye out for his posts.

Martin is Strategy VP for AppSense. I and others have been saying for a while that user environment virtualisation is the final piece of the virtualisation pie to fully realise statelessness, and let me tell you now there is no better product on the market for this than Environment Manager. No I'm not getting paid to write this, but in the name of responsible disclosure I will say we have a long standing and excellent relationship with AppSense at the place I work. We have stacked them up against their competitors many times over the years and on the technical / feature side they have blown the competition away every time. They are the VMware of the user environment virtualisation space.

So welcome to the blogosphere Martin, and to make up for you not telling me about the blogging I'll be expecting a ticket to get onboard the AppSense yacht at VMworld Europe 2009 :-D. And while I'm here, shout outs to Sheps and 6 figures at AppSense.

Symantec reverts to normal, well done. And well done community!

Unfortunately I couldn't break the news when I heard it as I was at work (no way I'm blogging from there, my boss reads this - hi Mark :D), but Symantec has updated the original KB article to something much, much more reasonable (although it seems to be offline at the minute).

No company is immune from the odd premature / alarmist KB article, and however this happened doesn't matter as much as the outcome. I'm sure a lot was going on behind the scenes before I broke the news, but still I'd like to think we all played some part in getting it cleared up so quickly. Power to the people :-)

Transcript of Best VMTN Community Roundtable Yet!

Hooo-rah! to Rod Haywood for transcribing VMTN Community Roundtable #22, which was in my mind the best roundtable yet (you got Krusty sized shoes to fill next week Chad :-). Bill Shelton was bang on point with just about everything he said. If you've spent any time with the guts of the SDK you'll know just how inconsistent it can be. In fact a while back I asked Carter and Steve how come the API was so quirky with guys like them working at VMware who clearly know better (otherwise they wouldn't have felt the need to write their respective wrappers). Their answer? "We've only been here for about a year." Bill Shelton falls into that category as well. Knowing how people think in those kinds of positions at VMware is very comforting indeed. I wonder what the Windows Azure API will look like. Actually no, I don't even care.

Vinternals Doubles in Size!

Over the past few months I've been working away in the secret Vinternals coding labs on a virtual appliance with an esteemed colleague and virtualisation extraordinaire, Shyam Madhavan. What we've managed to put together is something we reckon is pretty amazing, and we hope to have something ready for you all in the next few days.

And here's the best part - it will be completely free.

After putting in such a monumental effort, it is only fair that he be rewarded with the massive fame and money that one can expect as a 50% partner in vinternals (needless to say, Shyam won't be quitting his day job). Keep your eyes peeled for some postings over the coming months / years, and be sure to check the site later in the week for more information on the appliance!

New(ish) blog by Chad Sakac - bookmark / add feed NOW!

Quite a few things of note happened while I was away, but one thing that didn't seem to be widely reported was the launch of Chad Sakac's blog. Chad has bolted from the gate with some great posts which I won't bother linking because you should just hit his blog and read everything.

I also owe him a public apology - a while back I posted about storage stuff and made a flippant remark about "some marketing guy" in an EMC video on You Tube, which was Chad. We've had a fair bit of correspondence since then, and he is obviously about as far from a marketer as you can get. Sorry about that mate, and welcome to the blogosphere :-)

Firefox 3 Release today!

Oh and I'm back from holidays :-)

What a time to be going offline...

Jeez I dunno... Citrix XenDesktop 2.0, the final Hyper-V RC, the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta, ESX guest support back in the latest Workstation 6.5 beta build... and here's me going on holiday!

Still, given the choice of checking these products out in detail or roaming around Italy, I think I'll stick with the later :-)

See y'all in a few weeks...