Blog

This blog will mark its 10th anniversary in January 2024. A decade ago, I embarked on a new blogging journey with the domain vcloudnine.de. Some of you might have known my former blog before I made the switch to vcloudnine.de. I’d been running blazilla.de for over 7 years. However, by the end of 2013, I grew weary of Serendipity, a PHP-powered weblog engine. I craved a shift to Wordpress, but back then, a seamless migration path wasn’t available. So, I made a fresh start with vcloudnine, built on Wordpress.

Its been four month since my last blog post, and the blog frequency was quite low before that. This blog is, to be honest, a giant pile of stuff that has not worked as expected. Okay, some random thoughts or howto’s, but most blog posts are about stuff that failed in some way. That’s a bit “depressing”. I should write more about the fun things in my life

For a pretty long time my focus was on infrastructure. And my focus _is_ on infrastrucutre - Networks, lots of storage, virtualization with VMware. And always full stack: Networking, Storage, Servers, Operating System, always with a little focus here and there. Sure, products shifted over time, but in the bigger picture, my focus was always on infrastrucutre and datacenter stuff. No client devices, no end user support, no managed services/ admin tasks, no leadership. Technical stuff and projects. But my focus continued to shift. Microsoft Exchange for example. A product I really hate. Not really infrastructure. But I’m good at it and so I got projects and stuff to do. Or Office 365. Or Microsoft Azure. And since 2013 more leadership tasks. And since January 2020 I held some kind of a higher management position.

As a frequent reader of my blog, you might have noticed that vcloudnine.de was unavailable from time to time. Reason for this was, that my server was running out of memory at night.

Jan  1 05:22:16 webserver kernel: : httpd invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0x200da, order=0, oom_adj=0, oom_score_adj=0

Running out of memory is bad for system uptime. Sometimes you have to sacrifice someone to help others.

It is the job of the linux ‘oom killer’ to sacrifice one or more processes in order to free up memory for the system when all else fails.

The year 2016 is coming to an end (thank god…). 2016 was a difficult year. One of my goals for 2016 was to write more PowerShell code and to learn Python. I missed both goals. But hey, at least I cleaned up my Git account.I renewed my VCP by passing VCP6 in the first attempt, and I took the VCP7-DTM beta exam (no results yet). Since I am not the guy who attends conferences, I was not attending VMworld in Barcelona or HPE Discover in London. In fact: I was no at no conference or vendor roadshow, because I had an ass full of work.

What a great show by Eric Siebert, David Davis, Simon Seagrave and their special guests Scott Davis from Infinio and John Troyer from TechReckoning! If you missed it, watch the recording!

First, I want to thank Eric for his work. If you read tweets like these, you will get a bad conscience.

https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/579867795833233408

https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/578746970753269761

This is the seventh year that Eric has organized and conducted the annual Top vBlog contest. He put so much work into this contest and this should be be recognized. I also like to thank the sponsor Infinio for supporting this contest.

If you are a frequent reader of virtualization blogs, then you may have heard about the vLaunchPad. It lists hundreds of VMware & virtualization blogs, as well as links to resources and other material. The vLaunchPad is managed by Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert, vsphere-land.com) and he organizes year for year the annual Top vBlog voting contest. This year the Top vBlog contest is sponsored by Infinio.

In the 2014 voting my “old” blog was voted on place 292 of 320. I should mention that blazilla.de had only german-language content. In a community, where english is the predominating content language, this result may not surprise. If you are interested in last year’s results, you can find them here. In 2014 I have started vcloudnine.de, but I didn’t nominated it for the 2014 voting. Instead, I nominated blazilla.de for the Top vBlog 2014 contest. This year the tables turned and I have nominated vcloudnine.de for the categories:

The days at the year’s end are usually the time to look back and to draw a resume.

I blogged on blazilla.de for nearly 7 years, but in December 2013 I decided that it was time for a new beginning: New blog platform, new content, another language, but the same topics. In January 2014 I started vcloudnine.de.

Some statistics

Until today, I wrote about 100 blog posts. According to Google Analytics, these are my Top 10 most visited blog posts for 2014:

… about virtualization, storage, networking and IT infrastructure in general. Is that really necessary? Yes! To be honest, this is my second attempt. I’m blogging for nearly seven years on blazilla.de. It’s a well-frequented german blog with a strong focus on HP, Storage, DataCore, VMware and other technical topics. Blogging about technology you’re working with is a good way to share, recap and internalize knowledge. Sharing knowledge is a main driver of the scientific and IT community. If you’re writing about something and you share it, you can give something back to the community. So why the hell do I start a second blog? Because I can. ;) blazilla.de is a blog that is mainly focused on the german IT community. This blog is my attempt to get more visible to the international community and give something back to it. I’m not a native English speaker. But I will try my best. I hope you enjoy this blog. :)