Planet vSphere-land

Next Monday, May 20, the OpenStack Denver meetup group will gather jointly with the inaugural meeting of the Infracoders Denver meetup group for a talk titled “Infrastructure as Code with Chef and OpenStack.” The joint meeting will be held at Innovation Pavilion in Centennial/Englewood (location information here). The event will start at 7PM. Giving the presentation will be none othe...

Regular readers of this site know that my wife, Crystal, runs something called Spousetivities. Spousetivities originated out of boredom, essentially—Crystal was traveling with me to VMworld and wanted to find someone to hang out with while I was at the conference. That was VMworld 2008, and since that time she’s had activities at VMworld 2009, VMworld 2010 (including VMworld Europe 2...

I’m very excited to announce the inaugural OpenStack Denver meetup, scheduled for 7 PM on Wednesday, January 9, 2013—only 6 days away! If you haven’t already joined the meetup group, please head over to the group page on Meetup.com and join, then RSVP for the inaugural OpenStack Denver meeting. Cisco Systems was kind enough to sponsor the event, both by hosting us at their Engl...

Today I had the opportunity to speak at the Midwest Regional/Kansas City VMUG User Conference in Overland Park, KS. Below is the presentation I delivered, as hosted by SpeakerDeck. If you’d like a PDF version of the deck for direct download, it is available here. As always, courteous comments are both welcomed and encouraged! Feel free to speak up below. This article was originally posted...

At the request of a few individuals, I’m posting my presentation from the Portland VMUG here. It’s my first presentation on OpenStack, and hopefully I didn’t mangle things too badly. Feel free to provide any corrections, clarifications, or other feedback in the comments below (courteously, of course). Here’s the presentation as hosted on SpeakerDeck: For those that would...

Earlier this month (November 2012), I had the honor of presenting the closing keynote at the 2nd annual UK National VMUG user conference. I was thrilled to be able to support the worldwide VMUG community, and a number of attendees asked if I would make my presentation available. So, in addition to providing a copy of the deck to the VMUG leaders, I’m also publishing it here via SpeakerDeck...

It’s been quite a while since I first posted about Infrastructure Coders Denver, and—much to my dismay—I haven’t made the time to really push this forward as much as I wanted. So, in order to help move this forward a little bit, I’ve established a meetup group where interested parties can join the meetup and we can share information about when and where we’ll ...

I tweeted earlier today that I managed to achieve “Inbox Zero” (an empty e-mail inbox) while at a major industry conference (I’m in Spain for VMworld EMEA). A follower on Twitter asked if I would share my “inbox secret”. It’s not a secret, really, but I thought I’d share it here just in case others are interested in trying to emulate a similar methodolog...

It’s that time of the year again—time for VMworld! As I’ve done in years past (although I’m late getting this information published this year), I’m posting my VMworld schedule here. I do this for two reasons. First, it may spur someone to look at a session that perhaps they hadn’t considered before (or it may spur me to look at a different session due to feedb...

In case you hadn’t already heard, this past Tuesday, July 24, Train Signal officially released my Designing VMware Infrastructure video training course! If you’re interested, you can view a sample video from the course on YouTube. This is my first video training course, and I’m really excited to see it officially released. I hope that the video training course is as helpful to...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this to Twitter: I need to find (or maybe start?) something like @infracoders here in the Denver area. The @Infracoders (or Infrastructure Coders) Twitter account is for an “infrastructure as code” meetup group in the Melbourne, Australia, area (here’s their website). Shortly after that post, Matthew Jones—one of the co-founders of the orig...

So the “good news/bad news” that is the VMworld submission acceptance/denial notifications happened today. As is typically the case, lots of very talented people submitted proposals for what I’m sure are very informative and useful sessions were turned down. As a result, a lot of ideas were being tossed around about some sort of “unconference” where speakers whose s...

As you probably already know, I’ve been working extensively with Markdown (and MultiMarkdown) over the last few months, and it has rapidly become my preferred format for content creation. To help me more extensively leverage Markdown for all my content creation, I came across this OmniOutliner plug-in by Fletcher Penny that allows me to export outlines as Markdown. The instructions on how ...

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. An...

If there’s one thing I miss about trying to avoid Microsoft Word and stick with more “open” file formats, it’s styles. Yes, styles. See, I’m a long-time Microsoft Word user, and in a previous life I worked in a role where it was my job to provide consistent formatting for some very large documents (300, 500, or more than 700 pages sometimes). In situations like that...

In conjunction with my shift to more “open” file formats such as Markdown (MultiMarkdown, to be specific), RTF, and OPML—a shift described a little bit here—I’ve also had two other shifts in my content creation process that I think are worth mentioning. First, I’ve started using a new and different method to create presentations. So what is this “differe...

I’m very fortunate this year to have the opportunity to attend Cisco Live in Las Vegas. This will be my first year at Cisco Live and I’m really looking forward to taking in a lot of new information. I do plan on live-blogging and live-tweeting (is there any other kind of tweeting?) the event to provide as much coverage as possible for my readers. With that in mind, here’s my sc...

I’m not sure this post will be useful to many readers, but I do know that there are a fair number of readers who are also Mac users, and some have expressed interest in AppleScript and how I use it to “glue” some of my daily applications together for a more seamless workflow. If you’re one of those readers, then read on. (If you’re not, you can still keep reading. I...

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 tha...

This is a joint post of three prominent writers in the virtualization community: Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe, and Maish Saidel-Keesing. For the past 6 months we have been working on a joint project. It has actually been kept pretty quiet, and it is now time to make this public. Previous VMware vSphere books have focused on how to master the technology, deep-diving into certain elements and giving...

I’ve been invited to participate in a couple of upcoming podcasts and thought I’d post something here in case you are interested in listening in. First up is the Packet Pushers Podcast, hosted by Greg Ferro, Ethan Banks, and Dan Hughes. Joining me is Ivan Pepelnjak of Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks. We’ll be discussing areas of intersection between networking and virtualization and...