vExpert

VMware is thanking me for my contributions to the community of VMware users and my willingness to share my expertise with others.  They have presented me the VMware vExpert Award for 2011.

The vExpert program is a way for VMware to acknowledge and help those who 'go the extra mile' and give back to the VMware user community by sharing their expertise and time. vExperts are bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise.

I think you can imagine how proud I am with receiving this award.
 

VMware is thanking me for my contributions to the community of VMware users and my willingness to share my expertise with others.  They have presented me the VMware vExpert Award for 2010.

The vExpert program is a way for VMware to acknowledge and help those who 'go the extra mile' and give back to the VMware user community by sharing their expertise and time. vExperts are bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise.

I think you can imagine how proud I am with receiving this award.

http://twitter.com/maishsk/vmware-vexpert-2010

You can imagine how honoured I felt when I received an email from the famous Mike Laverick asking me if I would do one of his chinwags. I responded immediately and after some testing the record button was pushed.  Before I’m going to reveal the URL, lets first take a moment and look at the history of Mike’s chinwags. At the end of January Mike announced:

Hey, fellow virtualization blogger. Perhaps your on Eric S list? Well, I have proposal for you. Once a week I want to Video Skype with you and have a good old chinwag. What is a chinwag? Well, it’s defined as ” light informal conversation for social occasions…” but I want our chinwags to be about virtualization. Your challenges, problems, solutions, opinons – hey, maybe you just want to shoot-the-breeze and get something of your chest. Well, you can do it with me via the RTFM ChinWag!

The past weeks some very famous people have appeared on stage:

[Episode 01] Chris Dearden
[Episode 02] Jay Rogers
[Episode 03] Gabrie Van Zanten
[Episode 04] Al Renouf
[Episode 05] Vaughn Stewart
[Episode 06] Mr “Eric” Sloof

We had a great conversation about how I winded up into virtualization, why I became an instructor and of course my little vmClient tool :-) We continued about writing PowerShell code and what a future version of the vSphere client should have. Please visit Mike Laverick’s RTFM Education website to watch a 45 minute show of two 40 year old vExpert instructors talking about their Commodore 64.

Eric Siebert over at vSphere-Land has published the first results of the best VMware/Virtualization blog election. The winner is Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks.com, followed by Chad Sakac from Virtual Geek at second and Scott Lowe at the third place. I’m maintaining my position at the fourth place. I want to thank all the voters and Eric Siebert in special for all his hard work. I’ll do my utmost to get higher into the list so keep watching my blog.

One last mention, congrats go out to Gabrie van Zanten over at Gabe’s Virtual World, the third Dutch guy in the top ten, maintaining his position at the eight place. But don’t forget two other Dutch blogs at the 14th place you’ll find Frank Denneman and at number 18 vmguru.nl.

I just wanted to send everyone a bit of Christmas Cheer!

Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! or Zalig Kerstfeest
English: Merry Christmas
German: Fröhliche Weihnachten
French: Joyeux Noel
Flemish: Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar
Greek: Kala Christouyenna!
Russian: Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom
Spanish: Feliz Navidad
Thai: Sawadee Pee Mai or souksan wan Christmas
Turkish: Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Farsi: Cristmas-e-shoma mobarak bashad

Just used http://twilk.com to put my friends' faces on my Twitter background. Check it out!

The name Twilk is a combination of Twitter and milk. Milk has nothing to do with the service other than the creator of Twilk really likes milk. It helps that the domain name is short, and was available.

How are people arranged on the background?

People are sorted by how much you mention their user name ( @ replies, retweets, etc ) in your Twitter feed. It goes from top to bottom starting in the first two columns on the left. If you mention people the same amount (or not at all), the order of those people will be random.

With this blog post title I’m following the footsteps of my virtualization friends Jason Boche and Duncan Epping. I’ve passed the VMware VCDX Design exam yesterday with a score of 362.

I’m not the only one who has passed the exam this week. Congratulations go out to Scott_lowe, FrankDenneman and VirtualKenneth.

I’ve used WIKI to prepare for this exam, just look up every interesting word you can find in the exam blue print.

The next public defenses will be offered at Partner Exchange in February in the US. More information will come out Mid November.

Virtualization World 2009 offers you a new platform to learn and develop your knowledge of this key IT trend in a non-partisan environment supported not only by the leading names in the industry today but also by SNIA Europe, the leading industry association and its wide base of members.

The two-day conference program will address not only the hottest topics and trends but also help you navigate through the jargon with a series of vendor-neutral tutorials and real-life customer experiences.

Co-located with SNW Europe – now in its sixth consecutive year in Frankfurt, and Datacenter Technologies. Another brand-new conference and expo, Virtualization World brings you the power of three events, over two days under one roof.

Duncan Epping became one of the first VMware Certified Design Experts, congrats to Duncan.

The news was already published on twitter by my friend @stevie_chambers anyway so half of you already know… During the VMware vSummit award dinner I was awarded the VCDX certification. I’m officially a VCDX and I’m number 007! I’m really excited about this as you can imagine!

Congratulations! Eric Sloof, we would like to thank you for all the work you’ve done giving back to the virtualization community and sharing your expertise with others. We are pleased to present you with the VMware vExpert Award for 2009. VMware is giving this award to individuals who have contributed significantly to the community of VMware users over the past year.

Viktor van den Berg interviewed me while we were standing on the keynote stage . He also published a list with the Dutch vExpert’s. Here are the links :

http://www.vmug.nl/cms/index.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNwnV9pT8j8

John Troyer over at VMTN Blog reports:

The VMware vExpert Awards will be given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the overall community of VMware users over the past year, either online or offline. You might be contributing online to blogs, forums, wikis, or other online sites. You might be organizing VMUG meetings or otherwise getting the word out to local IT professionals. You're helping spread the word about virtualization and making people successful in deploying this game-changing technology. VMware wants to thank you.

Here is the nomination form. You can nominate yourself or someone else. We're also taking nominations from people and programs within VMware, so you actually don't even have to nominate yourself and you still could wake up one day with an award. You might want to fill out the form anyway, because we may not be aware of everything you're doing.