Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Patch Email Subscriptions

JohnTroyer — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:03:00 GMT

Did you know that VMware is now offering email patch notifications for all of its products? From that page:

With this service, you will immediately be sent an email alert as soon as a patch or maintenance release becomes available on the VMware products you’ve purchased.

How does this work? You can initiate this activity by selecting the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link from our Support home page, providing your email address, and then, after verifying that we’ve got the right contact, you can select the product/s you would like notification on by selecting “Confirm Subscription” from within the email confirmation we will send you.

So click on the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link. From there, you put in your email address. You'll soon get an email from vmwareteam@connect.vmware.com sent to your email where you click through to a form. There you can select different VMware products like so:

Note that you won't get announcements about major releases, only about patch releases and maintenance releases. (We send out major release announcements to large swaths of our ecosystem. Let me know if it would be convenient to get major release announcements coming out through these patch mailing lists as well.)

Anyway, when there is a patch release, you'll get another nice email from vmwareteam like this:


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Subject: ESX Server 2.5.4/ 2.5.5 New Patches Available Release Date: 01/31/08 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New patches are available for ESX Server 2.5.4 and 2.5.5. Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 2.5.4 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 15 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

VMware ESX Server 2.5.5 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 4 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

We expect the next patch release in late February 2008. If you have any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.

Regards,
The VMware Team

More later on Communities Email Notifications and VMware marketing email subscription management.

Virtualization reddit: come on in!

JohnTroyer — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 05:50:34 GMT

There are many social media sites out there. Most of them can be interesting if you have something in common with the crowd that hangs out there. Digg often gets most of the press, but I've always been more partial to reddit.

Reddit works in a similar way to Digg -- people submit items, and everybody votes them up or down. In theory, the most interesting items bubble to the top. Also in theory, as you rate items up or down, the system learns about your interest and starts to show you recommended items.

The reddit crowd has always been a little geekier and a little more interesting -- a bit of lisp, a bit of web culture, and sometimes a funny picture. A quick dip into the programming reddit now and then will help you carry on the conversation at your next party when Erlang or closures come up. (Hmm, I may be going to the wrong parties.)

Reddit just opened up a beta feature to create new topic-specific reddits and I'm very pleased to announce:

virtualization reddit

Virtualization reddit is the place to read news and commentary about virtualization, all chosen by the virtualization community. VMware, Microsoft, Virtuozzo, Xen, whatever. Go ahead, create an account, submit your favorite news article or blog post on virtualization, and rate the others.

I've submitted a few articles, but one man does not a social media site make. Come on in, add your two cents, vote up the most interesting articles, and have fun. Then check back every day to discover today's must-read articles about virtualization technology and the virtualization industry.

virtualization.info Vanguards on LinkedIn

JohnTroyer — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:17:38 GMT

We last saw our intrepid Web 2.0 adventurer about to delve back into the depths of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is old school, one of the oldest business social networks, and it's not about virtual martinis or superwalls or how many movies you have in common -- it's all about the networking.

I will admit it's been a while since I've been there -- probably since the last time I was looking for a job, which seems to be one of the major use cases for LinkedIn. The principle activity of LinkedIn, aside from the meta-activity of increasing the size of your personal network, is the Introduction -- asking your network to hand your referral from person to person until you reach the object of your affections -- Bill Clinton, a hiring manager, a prospect. I've never sent or received one of these invitations, but I do know folks that have gotten plenty of job inquiries from the site. My profile on LinkedIn is here, and no, I'm not looking for a job.

Spurred on by the current social networking frenzy, they are adding features like a Q&A section and beefier profiles. Here's Bernard Lunn of Read/Write Web on how he recently used LinkedIn and his perception of its business value vs Facebook's.

After logging in and taking care of some pending connection requests, I joined Alessandro Perilli's virtualization.info Vanguards Group (not to be confused with VMware's Virtual Vanguard Awards).

After only a month and with a single announcement, Alessandro has assembled 383 virtualization professionals from across the globe. Not bad! So why do you want to be there, even if you're not looking for a job?

A wide cross-section of the virtualization industry. There are vendors (from VMware and Microsoft on out), consultants of all stripes, very experienced sysadmins and IT experts, and quite a few names you may recognize from communities.vmware.com.

You can see and contact everybody in the Group. The contact piece is configurable on a per-group and per-person basis, but Vanguards is set up by default so that we can all contact each other. Interested in finding a virtualization consultant in Norway? Looking for a contact at a vendor -- either the executive or the engineering kind? Want to compare notes with someone else in your industry? You can probably make that happen here with a quick search.

You won't be spammed. Now, since this is a business network, many people have something to pitch, so LinkedIn groups are not built for spam. In a LinkedIn Group you can contact individuals, but nobody in the Group can globally spam everybody in the group with a pitch for their latest virtualization management appliance.

LinkedIn is still very much a business-to-business network, and so what a Group can do there is still very buttoned-down and oriented at making business contacts -- LinkedIn doesn't actually offer much more to do with Groups yet. I suspect that we'll see other functionality soon: for instance, you can ask a Question to your network and the LinkedIn community at large, but I'd love to see questions just from the virtualization.info Vanguards Group. Although the Groups feature on LinkedIn is at least two years old, they've only recently opened up and become easier to create.

So you can't go wrong adding the virtualization.info Vanguards Group on LinkedIn to your professional online presence. I think since we have such a vibrant community here, I'm not going to start up a LinkedIn group specifically for VMware, but let me know if you have other good ideas.

Are you connected?

JohnTroyer — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:20:47 GMT

Welcome! On this new blog, VMware Connected, I'm going to be talking about the greater community of virtualization users -- that includes you -- and how we connect, both here at our home base of communities.vmware.com and elsewhere on that series of pipes we call the internets.

How do you connect with other virtualization users? How will these connections help you learn more and be more successful in your own projects? How do you investigate the various technologies and solutions out there? How do you keep up with new tools, products, and resources here at VMware? And I always keep in mind what I've taken as my personal goal -- how can VMware help you save the day at work and get you fat raises and promotions?

I'll cover blogs, "Web 2.0" sites (like del.icio.us, Digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon), social networks (like Facebook and LinkedIn), and other communities of interest to virtualization users (say, Stickyminds and SQAforums for you software testing types). I will try to avoid talking about stupid web 2.0 sites, but one man's stupid is another man's cool tool.

I won't be talking about virtualization per se, but about where to get virtualization news and hook into networks of virtualization expertise and socialize with other virtualization practitioners.

I'm John Troyer, and I've been working on the communities team at VMware for about two years. I've been working with our internal and external bloggers, keeping the VMTN Blog on a slow steady drip, and am the de facto RSS guy here on the web team. I've also been involved with projects like the Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and I take full responsbility for anything you don't like about it. I can say "Enterprise 2.0" with a straight face and believe that RSS feeds and other lightweight standards and RESTifarian architecture will end up transforming our application architectures (and online lives) more than CORBA or WS-* ever have or will.

VMware Notification Blogs and Feeds

Here are a few notes to start us off. Did you know that we provide the following blogs and RSS feeds to keep up to date with VMware activities?

VMware News announces product releases, patch releases, betas, and other resources that VMware makes available. In addition to the web version and the syndication feeds in RSS and Atom, we also provide the ability to subscribe to this feed via email.
Hardware Compatbility Guides posts an entry every time any of our HCL documents are updated.
Guest OS Install Guide posts an entry every time the Guest OS Install Guide updated, which includes any changes in guest operating systems support.
To get an RSS feed with all new knowledge base entries as they come out, go to the main feed subscription page and select the "Knowledge Base" category.

Now, there are even more feeds that I didn't tell you about, and the fact that you probably didn't even know about all of these means that we need to rationalize how you find and subscribe to them, and we also need to publicize them better. (Caveat: as we do that, I may move some of these URLs around, but we'll always leave a forwarding address.)

Social Networks

If you're on Facebook (and a lot of us old farts are starting to show up there), feel free to stop by and say hi to me, but more importantly, we now have a VMware Page, where you can sign up to be a "fan" of VMware. There will be much more coming on this front. If you hang out on Facebook all day, I want to help you stay connected with everything that's going on.

Alessandro Perilli, the proprietor of the well-known virtualization.info, has also started a the virtualization.info Vanguards group on LinkedIn. I have to dig up my password, so I haven't dropped by yet, but expect more reporting about that.

Thanks for stopping by!

John

Features in the pipeline

JohnTroyer — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:40:13 GMT

We're continuing to do performance tuning and monitoring on the system. In parallel, we are continuing our software development, both in-house here at VMware as well as at Jive. We've got several features and UI changes in the pipeline.

In the shorter term, we are reintroducing several useful features that we used to have in the old VMTN based on Jive Forums that were not present in the Jive Clearspace platform we're now using. These features are in testing and we hope to have them out to you next week. (I hope early next week.)

Threaded display mode for discussions. This will add a preference to display discussions as a tree of indented replies. People have strong feelings about this, one way or another. For most forums, I actually prefer a flat display, and as an admin, I think flat displays help keep a thread on topic. However, for the intense discussions and the demographic we have here, and because we are all used to it, I think a threaded display is absolutely necessary. It's actually very useful as an moderator as well if we have to delete a message or branch a thread.

View all posts from a user. This will show all the messages posted by a user in a tab on their profile. Right now, in your profile you can only see the threads you've started, not the ones you've replied to. This is useful to keep track of your current conversations, and it's also useful to get more context about others in the community and what all they're participating in.

Set posts per page. This is a real convenience function to be able to set 50 instead of 15 posts/page. Right now, the default is 15 and you have to keep resetting it. This will be a preference, as it was in Forums.

Search in this community. The search box will by default search just within the community you're in, as it did in Forum. Once you're doing a search, you can specify other communities. Tip: you can select multiple communities -- for Windows, use shift-click or control-click.

Legibility tweaks. We will be tweaking the UI for fonts and colors to make it more readable.

Outstanding high-priority issues that will be addressed, but not by early next week:

Rich Text Editor. It doesn't load all the time, and is frustrating when it loads. This is the highest priority item for which I don't have a scheduled fix date. Tip: try out the Plain Text editor -- it's faster, and it has automatic spell-check.

Search. Results are per-message, not per-thread; there is no user filter (although you will be able to see all posts by a user now); some syntax isn't working; search results can be poor in general. Tip: use Boolean syntax (foo AND bar, foo || bar), not Google-style syntax. Also, you can use Google and add the term "(site:communities.vmware.com OR site:www.vmware.com/community)" -- works pretty well. Google still has a mix of old and new pages in its index.

Front page. We want to simplify the front page and add indications there when there are unread messages within a community.

Right sidebar. The right sidebar was designed as a way of adding contextual resources to each community -- links to docs, latest builds, kb articles, white papers, security alerts, blog postings from the team. For performance reasons, every community shows the same sidebar, and it takes up too much room on the page. We will address this.

Favorites/Watches. Have some graphical way in the communities of indicating which threads you're interested in, instead of having to go to your profile.

A fuller list of outstanding issues is VMware Communities Known Issues. I think soon we'll be faster and more powerful than where we were, so we can get back to the business of virtualization. (Oh, and there are some very interesting new community topics and blogs in the pipeline, but that's for another day.)

One step at a time -- site update

JohnTroyer — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:47:26 GMT

You may notice some small changes in the Communities today.

Discussion tabs are now selected by default. From there, you can more easily see unread posts (bold) and link directly to the last reply (last column)
Status icons are back in threads

We are targeting another update by early next week.

We continue to experience slow performance at certain times. We're working closely with Jive to identify the root cause and resolve these issues. We have monitoring in place that will automatically restart the application when it becomes unresponsive. IE performance, both with IE6 and IE7, remains problematic. Along with overall slow behavior, the editor seems to load with difficulty. Once it loads, try clicking on the Plain Text tab and then clicking on 'Always use this editor'. The Plain Text editor may load more reliably.

Today's update. During the launch, we patched the application several times. We needed ensure our source control system was in sync with these changes and to do regression testing so that future updates would not break anything. This why you haven't seen a lot of changes this week. Today we switched to this new version of the code -- and we also slipped in those two features.

UI update. While we were waiting, we've already queued up a number of fixes, including faster CSS-based menus to replace the slow Javascript menus and many other UI changes. One of the major goals is to make IE more usable with this update. We'll be testing that build Friday but may wait until after the weekend to release.

Feature update. We also have developers working on the most important missing features from this list: VMware Communities Known Issues. We'll have a better estimate tomorrow, but I am hoping the first batch them will also appear next week.

Ongoing work. We expect to continue the bug fixes and improvements for several more weeks. After that we hope changes will happen less frequently, and we can start to experiment and learn what we can do with our new collaboration tools. See What's It All About? for more information on why we upgraded the Communities.

Performance Update

JohnTroyer — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 05:40:15 GMT

The site is fast enough to use, but we continue to experience periodic issues.

We will be rebooting at the top of every hour. Please don't submit posts around this time.

Thank you for your extreme patience as we return the site to a useful state.

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