Blog Posts

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