VMware Communities : Blog List - Communities Website Feedback

User Experience Status

RDellimmagine — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:42:21 GMT

Work is currently underway to make some improvements and fixes to the user experience on VMware Communities following the recently launched new site design. Most of these improvements are in response to requests made at Communities Website Feedback, and based on those requests, we've prioritized the following list (highest priority first):

Errors when editing documents: Can no longer edit documents?
Display avatars on threads:
1. Avatars (status level, vExpert, moderator, VMware employee) will display in threads; currently they display only on community pages
Display helpful / correct answers in threads: Cannot tell what replies are marked correct or helpful.
1. Answers marked helpful / correct will display in the threads; currently they only display on community pages
IE6 errors on "All Communities" dropdowns: in IE 6 "all communities" dropdown is not clickable
Make new private messages easier to find: Notification of PMs
1. The username menu title will be bold when the user has unread private messages.
Wider view area for threads: Please make the thread posting area wider!
1. We are working on some JavaScript so that you can expand the thread view to cover the right column. This gives 30% more area to view threads while allowing us to keep the fixed width, which allows us to provide more consistency for the site across browsers and display sizes.
Truncated names: Shortened logins on forum
1. Names will still be truncated on community pages, but they will not be truncated in places where there's plenty of space to show the whole name, e.g. on user profile pages.

In addition to this, we are also working on bringing back the "My Communities" dropdown. This requires a bit more work than the other improvements above, so we will work on it after we have completed the bulk of the above list.

I'll update here as we deploy the fixes.

Thanks, Robert

Scheduled Site Maintenance at Various Times from November 6 - 8, 2009

RDellimmagine — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:04:43 GMT

Friday, November 6, 2009 from 6:00 PM – 12:00 Midnight PST
Saturday, November 7, 2009 from 6:00 AM – 8:30 AM PST
Sunday, November 8, 2009 from 5:00 AM – 9:00 AM PST

During the above times, VMware Communities will be up; however, unauthenticated users will not be able to log into the site. If you wish to contribute to Communities during this outage period, I recommend you log in prior to this timeframe to make sure you have the proper access rights. Otherwise, the Communities pages will appear in "Guest" mode (i.e. read-only) until you can sign in once again.

In addition, VMware Communities will be offline and unavailable at the following time:

Sunday, November 8, 2009 from 7:30 PM – 9 PM PST

During the above time, no VMware Communities services will be available, and site visitors will see a site maintenance message.

Thank you for your patience. Regards, Robert

Profile Image + Avatar Drawing Winner!

RDellimmagine — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:53:11 GMT

Yes, we have a winner for the Profile Image + Avatar Drawing!! And the winner is....

(drum roll)

TristanT

Congratulations, Tristan! I am now sending you a US$50 iTunes gift card that you can redeem for $50 of goodies from www.itunes.com. Enjoy!

A big thank you to the 140 people who have uploaded both a profile image and an avatar (and were in the drawing), as well as the additional 300+ people who have one or the other but not both (and therefore didn't qualify for the drawing -- but I thank you anyway!). I encourage every VMware Communities member to upload at least one image, so that people can learn a bit more about you.

And thanks to the Web site http://www.random.org for generating a true random number -- no pseudo-random numbers used here -- for the drawing.

Regards, Robert (see Upload a Profile Image + Avatar, and Win! for drawing details)

Upload a Profile Image + Avatar, and Win!

RDellimmagine — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:29:35 GMT

Upload a profile image and avatar into your VMware Communities profile, and you could win a $50 iTunes gift card!
It's that simple! VMware Communities has enabled both profile images and avatars, so now we want you to let other community members know what you look like! Or at least let us know what you wish you looked like.

Avatars are the small graphics that display next to all of your posts. Profile images are the large images that display on your profile page. For some good examples, let me introduce to you some people on the VMware Communities team:

How do I upload?
Go to VMware Communities, log in, then click your name at the upper right of the page.

- Avatar: Click "Change avatar" in the "Actions" box at the right.
- Profile Image: Click "Edit Communities profile" in the "Actions" box at the right.

How to Win!

Make sure you have both an avatar and a profile image uploaded into your VMware Communities profile before midnight Pacific on Wednesday, October 28. If you already have an avatar, that's great -- you don't need to upload a new one.
I will pick one VMware Communities member at random who has both an avatar and a profile image uploaded by the deadline, and I'll send that person a $50 iTunes gift card. Then I'll announce the winner here.
There's no need to tell me you've uploaded an image and avatar -- I will find them in your profile. VMware employees are not eligible to win the prize. No purchase necessary to win.

Have fun getting connected! - Robert

VMware Communities Site Error Report: Sept 15, 2009

RDellimmagine — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:59:35 GMT

An error in VMware Communities was fixed on Sept 15 at 11am Pacific, and all functions of VMware Communities are now available and the site is running with no known errors.

From Sept 14 early afternoon Pacific until Sept 15 11am Pacific, the nodes in the cluster running VMware Communities were not connected properly. During this time, different data displayed depending on which node in the cluster a user was connected to. No data is known to be lost, and once the nodes were reconnected, normal behavior returned. The cause of the problem was human error, and we are reviewing internal processes to make sure this does not happen again.

If site visitors do see any issues, please contact RDellimmagine or post to Communities Website Feedback.

Update 9/16 AM: It appears there are some data issues with threads posted before the above error was fixed. My dev team is investigating, and I'll update here when I have more information. I apologize for the problems this is causing. Regards, Robert

Update 9/16 PM: We fixed a couple of places where the above issue caused messages to point to the incorrect parent messages. Also, I believe that the threads-out-of-chronological-order issue resolved itself. This issue persisted a while after the fix was made because it took some time for the cache to catch up with the site once all nodes rejoined the cluster. Regards, Robert

Embedding YouTube videos made easy

Badsah — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:45:48 GMT

Hello Community Members,

Did you know that you can easily embed a YouTube video (with link to the source) in messages/threads, documents, and blog posts, on VMware Communities? Simply place the tag "youtube" within braces before and after the YouTube video link, as illustrated below:

{youtube}your_YouTube_video_link{youtube}

Therefore,

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7O4uMRADB8{youtube}

would give you:

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7O4uMRADB8{youtube}

Example within a document: Meet the Engineer Series: VMware Performance Advancements

Example within a discussion thread: @ Developer Day Sessions: Introduction to vSphere Web Services SDK 4.0 and NewFeatures

Badsah Mukherji, VMware Web Communities Team

Single Sign-on Downtime, Friday, September 11, 6PM - 11:00PM PDT (GMT -7)

RDellimmagine — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:28:42 GMT

The VMware Account Management Portal, through which you log into VMware Store and Communities, will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance tonight (Friday, September 11, 2009) beginning 6:00PM Pacific Daylight Time, for approximately 5 hours. During this time, VMware Communities will be up; however, unauthenticated users will not be able to log into the site. If you wish to contribute to Communities during this outage period, I recommend you log in prior to this timeframe to make sure you have the proper access rights. Otherwise, the Communities pages will appear in "Guest" mode (i.e. read-only) until you can sign in once again.

We Have Avatars

RDellimmagine — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 18:53:43 GMT

Avatars are now available. You know, the little icons that show up next to your name. It's time for something more exciting than boring guy/gal:

Here's how:

Log in
Go to http://communities.vmware.com/people/<your-username>?view=profile
Click "Change avatar" in the actions box
Upload your avatar
Select it to display

That's it! Avatars display 128 pixels x 128 pixels and 75 x 75 (depending on which page), so pick an image that is simple enough to be visible at a small size. Have fun!!

I'm starting with a computer screen, RDellimmagine, while I look for something more creative...

I'm looking forward to what ideas you all come up with.

Google Search on VMware Communities

RDellimmagine — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:29:03 GMT

A Google search option is now available on the VMware Communities advanced search page. The Google search option uses Google's "site:communities.vmware.com" feature to limit results to the VMware Communities site, and functions as a good complement to the VMware Communities native search function.

For IE users, we fixed a bug in the VMware Communities native search. IE users who search within a large number of communities will no longer see a blank page caused by search strings exceeding IE's 2083-character URL maximum. Instead, those searches will default to a site search, which does not encounter this issue.

Thanks to all who gave feedback on search. If you have more to add, please do!

Regards, Robert

Single Sign-on Downtime, Friday, August 14, 6PM - 11:00PM PDT (GMT -7)

RDellimmagine — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:53:05 GMT

The Account Management Portal, through which you log into VMware Store and Communities, will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance tonight (Friday, August 14, 2009) beginning 6:00PM Pacific Daylight Time, for approximately 5 hours. During this time, VMware Communities will be up; however, unauthenticated users will not be able to log into the site. If you wish to contribute to Communities during this outage period, I recommend you log in prior to this timeframe to make sure you have the proper access rights. Otherwise, the Communities pages will appear in "Guest" mode (i.e. read-only) until you can sign in once again.

Scheduled Maintenance, August 13, 5-5:30pm Pacific

RDellimmagine — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:24:17 GMT

VMware Communities will be unavailable at 5pm Pacific on August 12 for a maximum of 30 minutes.

We are upgrading the cluster software on VMware Communities for increased stability.

Thanks, Robert

Cloud Computing Simply Explained - or not...

Badsah — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:14:12 GMT

Thanks to Geek and Poke (geekandpoke.typepad.com).

Badsah

Single Sign-on Downtime, Friday, July 10, 6PM - 11:30PM PDT (GMT -7)

Badsah — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:29:19 GMT

Community members,

The Account Management Portal, through which you log into VMware Store and Communities, will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance tonight (Friday, July 10, 2009) beginning 6:00PM Pacific Daylight Time, for approximately 5.5 hours. During this time, VMware Communities will be up; however, unauthenticated users will not be able to log into the site. If you wish to contribute to Communities during this outage period, I recommend you log in prior to this timeframe to make sure you have the proper access rights. Otherwise, the Communities pages will appear in "Guest" mode (i.e. read-only) until you can sign in once again.

Thank you,
Badsah Mukherji
Web Communities Team

Join the VMware Studio 2.0 Beta Program

Badsah — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:26:06 GMT

We are pleased to announce that the beta version of VMware Studio 2.0 has been released and is available for download. We look forward to receiving your feedback - issues, feature requests, suggestions for improvement - through the Discussions forum in the VMware Studio 2.0 Beta Program Community.

If you already have a Store account on VMware.com, register for the beta directly.
If you do not have a Store account, please create an account AND join the beta.

The VMware Team

VMware & the World on the Internet: VMware can save your marriage...

Badsah — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:36:13 GMT

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r4UcBmtR1M{youtube}

(courtesy of "vmwarerocks")

Scheduled Maintenance, June 12 6pm - midnight Pacific

RDellimmagine — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:54:53 GMT

VMware will be performing a system upgrade to several VMware Web applications on June 12 – 13, 2009. Maintenance will begin on Friday, June 12th at 6 P.M. PDT. All maintenance will be completed by Saturday, June 13th at 12 A.M. PDT.

While this upgrade is in progress, you will be unable to:

- Log in to VMware Communities (if you are already logged in, all services will be available)
- Access or manage your VMware account
- Submit support requests online
- Download, purchase or register VMware products
- Manage VMware product licenses

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance period. These system upgrades are part of our commitment to continued service improvements and will help VMware better serve your needs.

News of the Weird from the Internet: 21-May-2009

Badsah — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:49:05 GMT

Do VMware users love us THAT much??? US$20.99 at Cafe Press, comes in 5 sizes:

vSphere Download Available

RDellimmagine — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:57:25 GMT

vSphere is now available for download. See the updated vSphere community for additional technical information and links to the downloads.

For developers: New vSphere SDKs and APIs along with new developer resources are now available.

Planned Maintenance to VMware Web Applications - May 8-9

RDellimmagine — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:31:39 GMT

UPDATE (May 9): All maintenance completed successfully. All services are available.

VMware will be performing a system upgrade to several VMware Web applications on May 8 – 9, 2009. Maintenance will begin on Friday, May 8th at 6:30 P.M. PDT. All maintenance will be completed by Saturday, May 9th at 12 P.M. PDT.

While this upgrade is in progress, you will be unable to:

Log into VMware Communities (Note: If you are already logged in, you will still have full access to the site)
Access or manage your VMware account
Submit support requests online
Download, purchase or register VMware products
Manage VMware product licenses

The upgrade will not add any new functionality or make any changes to VMware Communities.

We appreciate your patience during this maintenance period. These system upgrades are part of our commitment to continued service improvements and will help VMware better serve your needs.

Introducing VMware vCenter Orchestrator Community

Badsah — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:02:27 GMT

The creation of the VMware vCenter Orchestrator Community marks the release of the latest component of the VMware vCenter Suite. Links to product details may be found in the community itself. *Check it out*!

Planned Maintenance, April 24, 7pm to midnight Pacific

RDellimmagine — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:25:33 GMT

Login to VMware Communities will be unavailable on Friday April 24 from 7pm to midnight (5 hours) for planned maintenance of VMware Web site infrastructure. VMware Communities is expected to remain available for people who are already logged in. The maintenance does not involve any changes to core VMware Communities functionality.

http://communities.vmware.com/home.jspa

RDellimmagine — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:30:34 GMT

The VMware Communities homepage is now fully migrated to http://communities.vmware.com/home.jspa and the old homepage has been retired.

The new homepage contains all of the navigation links from the old homepage, plus a lot of other useful links and content.

VMware vSphere Community is here - plus some rearrangement...

Badsah — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:24:12 GMT

We are pleased to announce the arrival of the VMware vSphere Community, as we rapidly approach GA of vSphere 4.0. The community landing page and its sub-communities have useful content and links for your perusal. The Upgrade and Install community in particular would be of interest to customers planning to upgrade to vSphere 4.0, as well as prospective customers interested in evaluating (and buying, of course!) our new cloud operating system. Have fun!

Also, we have done some minor rearranging and/or renaming of existing communities:

"Datacenter Virtualization Products" has been changed to "VMware Infrastructure™."
"Enterprise Strategy & Planning" has been moved up from under VMware Infrastructure to reside directly under VMTN.
"VMware VMmark" has been moved from VMware Infrastructure to General > Performance.
"VI: Virtual Machine & Guest OS" has dropped the "VI" from its name and moved under General (and the URL now ends with /vm-guest instead of /guest).
Finally, the "Security and Compliance" community under General has been modified to reflect the addition of "vShield Zone;" it is now called "Security and vShield Zones"

Thank you.
The VMware Team

Communities Platform Minor Update

RDellimmagine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:55:28 GMT

Bug Fixes
The following two bugs were fixed:

Last Logged In Date: Your profile (My Content -> Profile) now displays the correct Last Logged In date. Note: To reset your Last Logged In date, you will need to log in.
Session Expiration while Posting Content: If your session expires while you are posting content (e.g. starting a discussion, replying to a thread, creating a document, or editing a document), your content will get posted correctly and then you will be logged out. This fixes a problem that caused your content to be lost. This is the one known cause of lost content, but if you are still seeing lost content issues, please let me know and I'll investigate.

Embedded YouTube Videos:
In addition, you can now embed YouTube videos in Discussions, Documents, and Blogs. If you include the following code in either a Discussion or Document or Blog Post:

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ{youtube}

It looks like this:

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ{youtube}

I hope you like! - Robert

New Community, New Product: VMware vCenter Mobile Access Technology Preview

Badsah — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:52:11 GMT

We are pleased to announce the arrival of vCenter Mobile Access, currently available for FREE to all VMware customers as a technology preview. The community may be accessed under the Beta Community category at http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess. The product team will actively participate in the community discussions and listen to your feedback, so please check it out. Begin by reading Srinivas' welcome message: VMware vCenter Mobile Access Technology Preview is now available.

Thank you,
The VMware Team

New VMware Update Manager Community

RDellimmagine — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:15:09 GMT

Take a look at the new community for Update Manager.

The product manager and some people on the engineering team have signed up to participate, so ask your questions about VMware Update Manager.

To start this off, I've moved the recent threads tagged "update_mgr" from the ESX 3.5 community to here.

Updated Communities Homepage

RDellimmagine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:08:32 GMT

We recently updated the Communities homepage, also known as the "Communities" tab in the header of all VMware Web sites. Here's how it looks:

What's new, you ask?

All Communities and My Communities navigation lists are now integrated into this page. See them in two places: as dropdowns at the top (shown above) and in the main body of the page. This page has always shown the top new community content and your own personal statistics -- now it also lets you easily navigate to any community. As a side benefit, we optimized the page for faster load times.

Feedback for the new homepage has been positive. And now that the page has navigation features, I want to make it more visible. This is the ideal homepage because you can go anywhere, see recent community contributions, and see how the community receives your contributions, all from one place. This makes it easier to interact with other community members.

In the next week or so, I plan to replace the old homepage (which has only the navigation features) with this one. Meanwhile, if you haven't seen the new homepage, take a look and let me know if your feedback.

VMware Communities Maintenance Complete

RDellimmagine — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:05:54 GMT

New functionality includes performance tuning, bug fixes, and some enabling technology for upcoming new features.

VMware Communities Maintenance, February 20, 6:30 - 9:30pm Pacific

RDellimmagine — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 05:27:12 GMT

VMware Communities will undergo maintenance on February 20 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm Pacific.

During the maintenance window, the VMware Communities application will be mostly unavailable. If the site is available during the maintenance window, please use caution and save any messages before posting.

New functionality includes performance tuning, bug fixes, and some enabling technology for upcoming new features.

I will post again when the maintenance is complete.

UPDATE: Communities is available, but login will be unavailable until February 21, 9am Pacific.

vCenter Server community

RDellimmagine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:02:42 GMT

I moved VMware vCenter™ Server to the VMware vCenter™ sub-tree from the VMware Infrastructure™ sub-tree. It makes more sense for it to be with the other vCenter products.

Nine Web sites IT pros should master in 2009

RDellimmagine — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:29:45 GMT

If you use VMware Communities, you already know this, but now Network World / InfoWorld confirms it: VMware Communities is one of the top nine Web sites IT pros should master in 2009.

Here's what they say about virtualization:

Chances are you’ve already embarked on a server virtualization project, and continued consolidation of your servers is a key money-saving goal for 2009. Most of you are using VMware for your server virtualization projects, and our product reviewers recommend you stick with VMware over Microsoft’s Hyper-V for the foreseeable future. To get the best real-world feedback on how best to deploy VMware, keep your eyes on the VMware Communities Web site. It’s got user groups in your community and lots of tips from other VMware developers that can help you solve problems faster.

The other sites are good ones too -- this makes a great list.

Happy New Year!

Updated Developer Community

RDellimmagine — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:13:35 GMT

The Developer Community has a fresh new look.

What's new:

- A cleaner taxonomy of VMware's developer products
- A clearer, cleaner list of VMware's developer resources
- A tabbed interface to make it easier to find discussions, shared documents, and blog posts
- A new VI API video

The Performance & VMmark community also got a facelift. While the changes here are more subtle, you should find the content easier to navigate.

Communities Patch Deployed

RDellimmagine — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 01:35:58 GMT

Today we deployed a patch that made the following changes:

- The previous / next links on threads are now disabled. This feature is cpu-intensive and was credited with causing a number of recent node crashes, so it has been disabled to increase system stability.
- The "Who's Online" feature is now disabled for the same reason. The address book function in private messaging relies on this feature and was also disabled.
- User authentication calls were optimized for performance.
- Email notifications were fixed. There had been an issue where some email notifications were not sent.

There was no downtime associated with this patch.

Node Synchronization Issues

RDellimmagine — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:50:30 GMT

We determined that one of the three nodes in the cluster was not connected to the cluster for about 15 hours today. While all data was correctly written to the database, the two nodes in the cluster were showing different content than the third node which wasn't connected. We resolved this issue around 6pm Pacific time on December 3, and we are taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

There may be some additional delay before the caches are 100% in sync again, and I will report status tomorrow. Meanwhile, we continue to watch the application closely so we can respond quickly if any other problems arise.

Thank you for your patience. Regards, Robert

Update December 4, 11:21am Pacific: It appears that node synchronization problem is resolved, but we are still seeing high load on the servers and some errors reported by VMware Communities participants. We are actively working with Jive, and we have some active areas of investigation that we expect will lead to improvements. Thanks again for your patience.

Update December 5, 3:55pm Pacific: We made a configuration change early this morning that has decreased server load significantly.

Site Issues December 3, 2008

RDellimmagine — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:17:18 GMT

The VMware Communities site is experiencing some issues where new posts are not displaying. We are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it. I will post here when I have more information on the fix. We are giving it high priority. Regards, Robert

Product Name Changes

RDellimmagine — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:01:19 GMT

You'll notice we made some name changes on VMware Communities (and you'll see the on the main www.vmware.com site as well).

- VMware VirtualCenter is now VMware vCenter Server
- VMware vCenter is the family name for all management products.
- VMware Lab Manager is now VMware vCenter Lab Manager (since it is in the management products family).
- The VMware vCenter prefix applies to the other products in the management products family as well.
- VMware View is the family name for all VDI / VDM products.
- VMware VDI is now VMware View
- VMware VDM is now VMware View Manager

So, while all change takes a bit of time to get used to, I think this one is pretty straightforward, and I wish you all well adjusting to the new names.

November 21 Maintenance Complete

RDellimmagine — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:57:10 GMT

All VMware Communities functions are now available.

VMware Communities Maintenance, November 21, 6:30 - 9:30pm Pacific

RDellimmagine — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:27:31 GMT

VMware Communities will undergo maintenance on November 21 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm Pacific.

During the maintenance window, login to VMware Communities will be unavailable, and the VMware Communities application may be unavailable for short periods with no warning. If VMware Communities members use the site during the window, they should be sure to save the text of any new content before submitting it.

New functionality includes restricting new usernames to consist only of a-z, A-Z, and 0-9; and some other minor bug fixes.

I will post again when the maintenance is complete.

Introducing the new Communities Homepage

RDellimmagine — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:51:52 GMT

The VMware Communities homepage taps you into the knowledge and wisdom of your peers. Access it easily by clicking the "Communities" tab on www.vmware.com.

What is it?

A single place to find the latest content from VMware Communities, VMworld.com, GoVirtual.org (the academic portal), and VIOPS (the operations portal).
A homepage to monitor your activity (be sure you're logged in)
A place to find the top community experts

We'll continue to update and tune it based on your feedback.

VMware Communities Maintenance Complete, November 6, 2008

RDellimmagine — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:33:41 GMT

Maintenance on VMware Communities is now complete and all functions are available. Thank you for your patience during this planned downtime.

[Update: November 10] Issues discovered with the underlying infrastructure following the site maintenance have been resolved, and the site is functioning normally. We are still investigating reports from community members that email notifications for watched threads are not always delivered.

VMware Communities Maintenance, November 6, 6-7pm Pacific

RDellimmagine — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:11:41 GMT

VMware Communities will be unavailable on November 6 from 6pm to 7pm Pacific.

There will be no new functionality with this outage.

Preview: New Communities Homepage

RDellimmagine — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:47:18 GMT

Introducing the new VMware Communities homepage!

What is it?

A single place to find the latest content from VMware Communities, VMworld.com, GoVirtual.org (the academic portal), and VIOPS (the operations portal).
A homepage to monitor your activity (be sure you're logged in)
A place to find the top community experts

This page will replace the Communities tab.

We'll roll it out quickly and continue to update and tune it based on your feedback.

Communities Upgrade Successful: October 25

RDellimmagine — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:26:00 GMT

The VMware Communities upgrade from platform version 1.03 to 1.10 is complete and successful. All functions including login are now available.

Report Issues:
If you see any problems, please report them at Communities Website Feedback.

Update 10/28, 12:00 noon Pacific: On 10/27 at 6pm Pacific, we fixed some configuration issues with the load balancer on VMware Communities. Since that fix, the site has been running smoothly.

Site Changes:
The following changes will be made to VMware Communities as part of this upgrade:

1. Upgrading the Communities platform from version 1.3 to version 1.10, which includes functional bug fixes.
2. Fixes for errors when attaching images to discussions
3. Additional fixes for formatting / display issues
4. Ability for community moderators to move documents

Planned Downtime for Communities Upgrade: October 25

RDellimmagine — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:51:00 GMT

VMware Communities will undergo an upgrade on Saturday, October 25, starting at 12:00 noon Pacific.

Upgrade Window Timeline:
October 25, 12:00 noon to 3pm Pacific: VMware Communities will not be available.
October 25, 3pm Pacific to October 26, 4am Pacific: All VMware Communities functions will be available except for login.

Visitors who need to post to VMware Communities when login is unavailable should make sure they have logged in before 12:00 noon Pacific, so that their VMware Communities cookie is set. Visitors who post during the upgrade window should save their postings before submitting them, since the site may go down without warning during the upgrade window. For safety, visitors are recommended only to view content on VMware Communities during the upgrade window.

Site Changes:
The following changes will be made to VMware Communities as part of this upgrade:

1. Upgrading the Communities platform from version 1.3 to version 1.10, which includes functional bug fixes.
2. Fixes for errors when attaching images to discussions
3. Additional fixes for formatting / display issues
4. Ability for community moderators to move documents

I will post again here when the maintenance upgrade is complete.

New Product Releases: Server, Workstation, ACE, Fusion

Badsah — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:04:00 GMT

Hello,

You may have noticed that several beta programs have ended, and four products have come out with new releases:

VMware Server 2.0 (new sub-community of VMware Server)
VMware Workstation 6.5 (same community as older versions)
VMware ACE 2.5 (same community as older versions)
VMware Fusion 2.0 (same community as older versions)

Thanks, Badsah

Communities Gathering at VMworld 9/15 at 8pm

RDellimmagine — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 04:38:00 GMT

If you're going to VMworld, head on over to the V Bar in the Venetian on Monday night at 8pm after the opening reception. Some VMware Communities members will be there for an informal, no-host gathering to network as another VMworld conference kicks off. See details and chatter.

Community Name Changes

RDellimmagine — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:20:00 GMT

I changed some community names to make them more consistent with vmware.com's datacenter products page:

1. "VMware Infrastructure" is now "Datacenter Virtualization Products"
See http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vi

2. "Management and Automation Products" is now "Application and Infrastructure Management Products"
See http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/mgmt

This change won't break any links or bookmarks because no URLs changed -- the only change is the names at the tops of the pages.

Thanks, Robert

Virtual Pavilion at VMworld

RDellimmagine — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:28:00 GMT

Check out the VMworld Virtual Pavilion!

What: It's a virtual world of all things VMworld where you can "walk around" the conference online.

Highlights: See discussion areas around VMworld technology topics, live chat with other visitors to the site, vendor booths from VMworld show sponsors, expert sessions, and even an open bar. It's pretty fun to move your avatar around the virtual show, and it makes the site navigation really easy for visual thinkers like me.

Communities Maintenance Successful Completion

RDellimmagine — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:43:00 GMT

All functions should be working correctly. Please report any problems you see in Communities Website Feedback. Thanks!

Planned Downtime for Maintenance Upgrade August 23

RDellimmagine — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:01:00 GMT

VMware Communities will undergo a maintenance upgrade on Saturday, August 23, 7am - 3pm Pacific.

Maintenance Window Timeline:
During approximately 1-2 hours of the maintenance window, VMware Communities will not be available. During the rest of the maintenance window, all VMware Communities functions will be available except for login. Visitors who need to post to the site during the maintenance window should make sure they have logged in before 7am Pacific. Visitors who post during the maintenance window should save their postings before submitting them, since the site may go down without warning during the maintenance window. For safety, visitors are recommended only to view content on VMware Communities during the maintenance window.

Site Changes:
The following changes will be made to VMware Communities as part of this maintenance upgrade:

The user interface will be streamlined to improve site usability by reducing clutter and fixing some user interface issues identified by users. Details of these changes are documented in VMware Communities Proposed Homepage Design.
Improved error message text for the login / authentication process.
Additional fixes to other VMware Web site and online store infrastructure that is not related to VMware Communities.

I will post again here when the maintenance upgrade is complete.

Email Replies: Did you know...?

RDellimmagine — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:15:00 GMT

You probably know that if you put a watch on a thread (i.e. click "receive email notifications"), you'll get an email notification anytime the thread is updated. Same goes for entire communities as well. But did you know that you can simply reply to any of those emails and your email reply will get posted as a thread reply on VMware Communities? It's pretty slick -- if you haven't used this feature, give it a try!

New VMworld 2008 Community

RDellimmagine — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:18:00 GMT

Find out who's going to VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas and start networking with them online before the show.

Announce your plans for the show at http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/general/vmworld2008.

And for more information on VMworld, check out:
~ the official VMworld Web site
~ the VMworld.com community site

Fix Implemented for Thread Not Found Error

RDellimmagine — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:36:00 GMT

On August 6, I reported the following:

Recently a number of people reported seeing thread not found errors, day-old threads shown on community listing pages, and other similar errors. I believe we've found the root cause of the problem, which is related to some performance optimizations we made that had unexpected side effects. We are updating the configuration this week to eliminate those side effects, and I'll post again when they are in place.

We made a configuration change that I believe will eliminate those issues. However, if you see any System Error: Thread not Found or day-old content on community home pages when logged in, please contact me, RDellimmagine, via private message.

I know these two issues created problems for many of you, and I thank you for your patience while we worked to resolve them.

Regards, Robert

Communities Issues Update

RDellimmagine — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:51:00 GMT

Recently a number of people reported seeing thread not found errors, day-old threads shown on community listing pages, and other similar errors. I believe we've found the root cause of the problem, which is related to some performance optimizations we made that had unexpected side effects. We are updating the configuration this week to eliminate those side effects, and I'll post again when they are in place. Thanks for your continued patience.

Planned Maintenance Friday, July 18

RDellimmagine — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:20:00 GMT

We are performing planned site maintenance on Friday, July 18.

* From 6:30pm to 12:30pm Pacific time (6 hours), VMware Store will be undergoing maintenance. During this time, site visitors will not be able to log into VMware Communities or register for new accounts.

* From 7pm to 8:30pm Pacific time (1.5 hours), the VMware Communities application will be brought down for infrastructure maintenance. During this time, the VMware Communities site will not be available.

Site Performance Tuning

RDellimmagine — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:35:00 GMT

Today we are increasing the expiration interval for cached content from 1 hour to 2 hours, so that guest visitors to VMware Communities will see content that is up to 2 hours old. This change is expected to increase overall site performance because more visitors will see cached content, which is served faster than non-cached content and offloads traffic from the application. After the last Akamai change we made (caching site pages for guests), site visitors including both guests and logged-in visitors reported faster page load times on the site. Today's change is part of our on-going strategy to improve site performance on VMware Communities.

Please see Performance Upgrade Planned May 28 for a full explanation.

Warning: Intermittent System Errors

RDellimmagine — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:24:00 GMT

We've identified an issue where some testing for a critical update to VMware Store is "leaking" into VMware Communities and causing occasional system errors and thread not found errors. We are working to resolve this, but have not yet identified the leak. Because of this, you will need to expect some intermittent problems continuing possibly through June 19.

While I don't want to minimize the disruption this is causing, I am seeing that overall traffic on VMware Communities is still at normal levels, and users continue to post new content. Thank you for your patience, and please know that we continue to work to resolve this as quickly as possible.

Regards, Robert

VMware Communities Organization Changes

RDellimmagine — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:09:00 GMT

We re-organized some of the product areas on VMware Communities based on feedback from the community.

The new organization is as follows:

VMware Infrastructure
- Enterprise Strategy and Planning
- VI: ESXi
- VI: ESX 3.5
- VI: ESX 3.5 New Features
- VI: ESX 3.0
- VI: VirtualCenter 2.x
- VI: Virtual Machine and Guest OS
- ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x
- VMmark

Management and Automation Products
- VMware Lab Manager
- VMware Converter
- VMware Stage Manager

VMware Server

Desktop Products
- VMware Workstation
- VMware Fusion
- VMware Player
- VMware ThinApp

Enterprise Desktop Products
- VMware ACE
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
- Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM)

These changes do the following:
* Separates desktop products from enterprise desktop products
* Separates VMware Server into its own category
* Makes the management and automation tools easier to find
* Makes the naming of VMware Infrastructure communities clearer

One other change coming this week:
* We will combine the VI: ESX 3.5 New Features community into the VI: ESX 3.5 community

Please comment below if you have feedback.

Regards, Robert

Infrastructure Upgrade Complete and Successful

RDellimmagine — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:03:00 GMT

We added additional CPU and memory to the VM for the database.

VMware Communities Planned Maintenance, June 5, 6pm to 7pm Pacific

RDellimmagine — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:41:00 GMT

VMware Communities will be unavailable on June 5 from 6pm to 7pm Pacific for planned maintenance while we upgrade some infrastructure components.

Performance Upgrade Is Live

RDellimmagine — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:13:00 GMT

The performance upgrade that increases caching of the communities application is now live. See details at Performance Upgrade Planned May 28.

Please reply to Performance Upgrade Is Live and let us know if you're seeing any improvements.

Recently-added Public Betas

Badsah — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

It's been a while since I updated all of you on the creation of new VMware Communities. Since we created the first two beta portals, Workstation 6.5 Beta and ACE 2.5 Beta, two more public beta program communities have emerged: VMware ThinApp™ and VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta . Obviously, the VMware desktop product teams have been quite active! But don't worry, the server product teams are quietly working behind the scenes, and you'll see the fruit of their labor in due time.

Meanwhile, the Workstation 6.5 Beta and ACE 2.5 Beta portals have been refreshed, but will now require you to register, in order to view the beta portal as well as to download the binaries. The initial step is annoying: having to go in and complete that dreaded registration form all over again, and accepting the End User License Agreement. However, the upside is that, in the future, you will never have to register again for beta programs for these two products. (Some users have been complaining about going through registration process and receiving an error message: "Unauthorized." I am writing a separate post just on that subject.)

Thanks.

Badsah

Good Example of Collaboration Using Community Documents

Badsah — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:05:00 GMT

Team Fusion has been making good use of the Documents feature in VMware Communities. Since the release of VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta, the product team has been collecting feedback from the beta community on the compatibility and performance of DirectX 3D gaming applications with VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta. They are leveraging open, online collaboration amongst beta participants on the Document: VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta: 3D Games Testing Matrix.

The most obvious benefit is that any beta participant can contribute to the matrix, thus helping to build up a useful repository of information valuable to the community of VMware Fusion users who wish to use 3D games within a virtual machine. But a by-product of this process is that this medium of online collaboration is bringing together individuals who share a very specific common interest - and that is, after all, the point of web communities, isn't it?

Do you have other good examples of Documents and online collaboration in VMware Communities? Would love to read about them in your comments on this blog post.

Badsah

Performance Upgrade Planned May 28

RDellimmagine — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:57:00 GMT

We are deploying a configuration change next Wednesday, May 28 that is expected to increase VMware Communities performance. Performance is expected to increase because we will be serving more VMware Communities content via Akamai.

For logged in visitors, there will be no functional change. For guests (site visitors who are not logged in), commonly viewed community and thread pages may be up to an hour old because those pages will be served out of a cache that refreshes hourly. If you currently visit VMware Communities as a guest, you should feel free to continue visiting as a guest, unless you need to see the absolute latest threads, in which case you should log in. If you currently visit VMware Communities logged in, then you will see no change except faster page load times.

With this configuration change, performance is expected to increase in three ways:
1. Pages are expected to load faster for guests because the pages will be served by Akamai. Network round trip times are shorter to Akamai's geographically distributed nodes, especially for site visitors who are located far from VMware's origin server in California.
2. Pages are expected to load faster for guests and logged in visitors because Akamai will be caching more JavaScript than before.
3. Pages are expected to load faster for logged in visitors because VMware's origin server will not need to service requests from guests, and will therefore have more cpu available to serve pages for logged in visitors.

Session Timeout Error Fixed

RDellimmagine — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:24:00 GMT

The short session timeout has been fixed. Sessions now last for 30 days, just like they did before. Sorry for the inconvenience caused by the short timeout in the last few days.

Session Timeout Update

RDellimmagine — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:21:00 GMT

We have coded a fix to the session timeout issue that will allow sessions to remain active >24 hours, and we are testing it today, and will deploy it as soon as we can. I'll update here when I have an ETA for deploying the fix.

Currently sessions time out after 60 minutes, and if your session times out while you are composing a post, you will likely lose your post. Until the fix is deployed, please copy your posts to a clipboard before you submit them.

Login / Logout / Update Profile

RDellimmagine — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:26:00 GMT

The May 9 - 11 infrastructure upgrade completed successfully. There is one outstanding issue and one usability improvement.

Outstanding Issue: Prior to the upgrade, login was required only once every 30 days as long as you didn't delete your VMware cookies. Following the upgrade, session timeout is 60 minutes, meaning you need to log in again after 60 minutes. We are working to restore the original functionality, but in the meantime it will be necessary to log in more frequently.

Usability Improvement: On your profile screen, e.g. http://communities.vmware.com/people/<your_username>, you can now update your VMware Store profile as well as your VMware Communities profile. Prior to the upgrade, you could only update your VMware Communities profile.

If you click "Edit Communities Profile" in the Actions box, you can edit the fields that show up in your VMware Communities profile, including your name, the email where watches are sent, and your signature.

If you click "Edit VMware profile / Change password" in the Actions box, you can edit your VMware Store profile. This is new, and should make it easier to maintain your VMware Store profile. Also new: you may now change the email address in your VMware Store profile.

One thing to note: The email address in your Communities profile and the email address in your VMware Store profiles can be changed independently of each other:

+ The email address in your Communities profile is where emails generated by VMware Communities watches (e.g. when you click "Receive email notifications" on a thread) are sent.
+ The email address in your VMware Store profile is your VMware Store login name. If you update this email address, you will need to use the updated email address the next time you log in.

If you change your email address, please be sure to change the correct one.

Communities Maintenance Complete

RDellimmagine — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:40:00 GMT

Maintenance on VMware Communities (and other VMware Store functions) is now complete. VMware Communities participants are now able to log in, log out, and update their profiles.

Communities Platform Update

RDellimmagine — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:10:00 GMT

You may have noticed the announcement posted May 1 (or if you didn't, I'd like you to see it) that system maintenance will occur from May 9 - 12. During that maintenance window, VMware Communities will be available read-only, and you will be unable to login to your account or access any functions like posting content or replies that require login. You will also be unable to access or manage your VMware account; submit support requests online; download, purchase or register VMware products; or manage VMware product licenses.

The reason for the outage is to upgrade some functions of VMware Store to a more robust platform. We are not making any changes to VMware Communities directly, except for the login / logout / manage profile function that previously relied on VMware Store and now will use the new infrastructure. From the standpoint of a VMware Communities participant, the change should be mostly transparent -- you may notice some cosmetic changes when you log in, but the process will be the same.

Once this maintenance is complete, we will start in the next few weeks to make improvements to the VMware Communities user experience. We have been working with Akamai on a new configuration that will allow full caching of guest content. This will improve performance for guests (site visitors who are not logged in) because all guest pages (except for cache misses, of course) will be served by Akamai without having to go back to our servers. And it will improve logged in performance by offloading most guest traffic from our origin servers and by increasing the cacheability of logged-in pages. We expect to complete testing of this configuration in the next few weeks, so I will blog again when this is ready to roll out.

Following the performance improvements, we will next roll out the 2-column design that simplifies the layout of VMware Communities and improves readability of pages. This design contains a number of usability improvements requested by communities participants. See Homepage Design Proposal for details.

I'm looking forward to fixing some long-standing issues and improving everyone's experience on VMware Communities. Please feel free to comment or send me a private message if you have any questions.

Regards, Robert

New Communities and New Model

RDellimmagine — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 00:54:00 GMT

Two new communities are now available: Workstation 6.5 Beta Program LOCKED and ACE 2.5 Beta Program LOCKED. Visit these communities to get up to speed on exciting new features like Unity, which integrates your guest apps with your host.

Aside from the new beta releases, there's something else that's interesting about these communities. These two communities use a new model that integrates technical content with discussion forums and additional community services. The integration of content and services creates more ways to interact with VMware and your community peers and offers one-stop shopping for all technical and community resources.

Participants in the beta programs can:

Content

- Access downloads, documentation, and release notes.
- View, track, and give feedback on beta testing tasks.
- Log & view Support Requests based on entitlement.

Forums

- Participate in discussion forums we've integrated with relevant content. Bringing content and communities together creates more value for community members, especially as we add more community-driven services like those described below.

Community-driven Services

- Log & discuss Feature Requests in a dedicated forum. We'll upgrade this to a Digg-like system where you can vote up or vote down feature requests, with the goal of giving the community a bigger role in helping set feature priorities.
- Create "Journal" entries to share your beta experience and see what others in the community are seeing and doing.
- View Expert Sessions: a VMware technical expert presents a new feature (initially slides synchronized with audio), and for two weeks the presenter is available to answer community questions via a dedicated discussion forum. See VMworld Expert Sessions for more examples.

Tell Us What You Think
We're pretty excited about the possibilities of this new community model. We'd love to hear your thoughts, so we can improve this model as we build more services and roll it out to other communities.

Another New VMware Community: Customer Education

Badsah — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:35:00 GMT

Check out the new Customer Education community under VMTN -> Technical Training & Certification. Per the introduction - Welcome to the Customer Education forum - by community host, Brian Rice:

"Greetings, all. I am VMware's Education Services Product Manager; I've been working in VMware's customer education program, as an instructor, course developer, and now product manager, since 2002.

"Through this forum, I hope to get feedback and suggestions from VMware customers and partners about how our program could serve them better. Example topics: What courses should we offer that we presently don't? How could we improve our current courses? Are we offering training in the right formats: instructor-led, live online, self-paced online ("eLearning"), or blends? Why don't we have training in your hometown?"

Thanks.

Badsah

Performance Enhancement Scheduled Today

RDellimmagine — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:35:00 GMT

We are deploying two stability and performance patches to the VMware Communities platform today:

1. A performance patch from Jive

Certain objects were calling a reflection API dynamically that should have been cached internally. According to Jive, caching this will reduce CPU demands on the application.

2. An update to the JRE

Minor update that will remove some errors we have seen in the log files.

The update is scheduled at 4pm Pacific time today, March 21, and will not affect VMware Communities availability because we will deploy it on each cluster node and then restart each cluster node individually. Only communities participants currently connected to a node that is restarted will temporarily lose their connection when they are reconnected to another cluster node.

New VMware Communities

Badsah — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 03:38:00 GMT

Hello, Community Members,

I am pleased to announce several new communities that you have been anticipating for a while:

VCP: VMware Certified Professional: now the official, central location for all VCP-related FAQs, questions, discussions, moderated by the VMware VCP program leaders. This is located under the new Training & Certification category. Look out for the upcoming Customer Education community!
VI: VMware ESXi™ 3.5: no more digging through the catch-all ESX Server 3.x community for 3i answers!
VMware ThinApp: Discussion Forum: technically a "Public Beta" community, this is a community for providing your feedback directly to the product team! Product Manager, Ed Albanese, is all ears.
~~c-2553~~: a community focused on VDM, the connection manager software component of VDI.

You'll be hearing about more new communities in the future, right here on the VMware Communities Blog. Let us know what you think!

Badsah Mukherji, Sr. Community Manager

Performance Update

RDellimmagine — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:56:00 GMT

This blog has been quiet for the last two weeks, so I wanted to give an update: We are testing a performance patch next week that we received from Jive (it increases caching of certain objects) that they say will improve system performance. We are also investigating caching of pages for guests (non-logged in site visitor), which should provide further improvements. And we are investigating our Akamai configuration, although we believe any changes here will likely yield a smaller improvement. I'll update again next week when I have a schedule for the performance patch.

We also intend to re-enable points calculation, but this is lower priority than the performance fixes, so we'll schedule it after at least the initial performance patch is deployed.

All Systems Go: Feb 26

RDellimmagine — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:06:00 GMT

We've fixed the last open issues since Friday's system upgrade:

1. Inbound emails are now getting posted. So if you receive an email for a community or thread, you can now once again reply to that email, and your reply will be posted.

2. New account registration (the "register" link if you're not logged in) is now working. So newbies can now create accounts and start to participate.

Also, we've done some additional tuning on the system, and we have been seeing overall better performance. There is still more we need to do on site performance, but I believe we have made improvements in the last week. Tell us know what you're seeing: Has Communities Site Performance Improved?.

System Status: Feb 25

RDellimmagine — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:56:00 GMT

Some participants are reporting better performance since we rolled out the third node. As I've said before, we still have some additional tuning to do, so I expect to make additional improvements as we identify and remove performance bottlenecks going forward.

Private messaging is once again now working, as we corrected a misconfiguration that inadvertently disabled it.

We are still working on fixing in-bound email (replying to an email notification), so please do not use that feature until I announce here that it is working again. Also, registration for new accounts is not working, but I expect to have that fixed in the next day or so.

System Status Update: Feb 23, 4:30pm Pacific

RDellimmagine — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:24:00 GMT

Performance appears to be back at standard levels. We are continuing to monitor the system closely and assess tuning opportunities, as we believe faster performance should be achievable shortly.

Outbound email notifications (e.g. when you click 'Receive email notifications' in the Actions box) are now working again. However, if you reply to these notifications, the replies are currently not getting posted. I expect this to be fixed by Monday at the latest.

Private messages may be disabled for a couple of days. Sorry if this causes any inconvenience.

System Status Update: Feb 23, 9am Pacific

RDellimmagine — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:47:00 GMT

As of 9am Pacific on Saturday, February 23, we've run overnight with the third node added to the VMware Communities application cluster.

We are working on some errors in one of the three nodes that I reported in last night's blog post; and performance is somewhat slow, although I am finding the site usable, and community members are posting content. First priority is to monitor and improve performance, which should benefit from the additional compute power in the cluster.

We also see that private messaging and email notifications are not working. We believe this is also a configuration issue, and we are working on that as well.

Otherwise, all functions appear to be available. Please post in Communities Website Feedback if you see any other issues.

Thanks, Robert

Additional Compute Power

RDellimmagine — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:24:00 GMT

Tonight we added a third node to the cluster running the VMware Communities application. Performance is good as I write this, but we are investigating an error we are seeing on one of the three nodes. I will update before Monday with the status on resolving that error as well as the overall performance we see this weekend. Thank you for your patience with the downtime required for this change.

Short Downtime Announcement

RDellimmagine — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:34:00 GMT

We are on track to add a third node to the cluster on Friday, February 22 at 6pm Pacific time, which will require a maximum of 30 minutes downtime for some configuration changes. Caveat: We are still doing some testing, and will have a go/no-go meeting on Friday afternoon.

Update on System Status

1. Load Balancer Configuration: The load balancer configuration change described in the previous post removes one cause of gateway errors, but not all causes. I believe the other causes are related to a timeout occurring when the system is under load, but we are still investigating root cause.

2. Redirecting Google Traffic: We've confirmed that we are not getting spikes in traffic caused by Google since the load balancer configuration changes were made. So this is a positive step.

3. Third Node: As stated above, we are on track to roll this out Friday, February 22, and expect it to improve baseline performance.

VMware Communities Performance Update

RDellimmagine — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:56:00 GMT

We continue to work to improve VMware Communities performance and ensure consistently acceptable page load times. We are tuning the system in the following key areas:

1. Load Balancer Configuration: Today, we updated the F5 load balancer configuration to direct requests directly to the two clustered Tomcat instances running the communities application, bypassing Apache. This will remove the cause of the Gateway Timeout messages many of you have reported. If one of the nodes in the application cluster is down, the load balancer will now redirect all traffic to the functioning node.

2. Redirecting Google traffic: The performance slowdowns of the last several weeks correlate directly to increased load caused by automated services like Google or RSS readers indexing / accessing the VMware Communities site. We had been aware of this issue since December when we updated the robots.txt file on the servers to disallow crawling by Google and reconfigured Apache to redirect Google crawls to a mirror of the site. This fix appeared to work; however, in the last couple of weeks, we have seen that when the system is under load, Google traffic affects the application anyway. The load balancer configuration changes described in #1 above should help resolve this: instead of having Google redirected from Apache running on the same server as the application, it is now redirected from the load balancer. This should remove the cause of the recent performance slowdowns while ensuring that Google continues to index the VMware Communities content. As I write this, we are still in the process of investigating whether there are other changes required to isolate Google and other automated service traffic, so I will update later then week when I have confirmed this fix.

3. Adding a third node: This will add 50% more processing capacity and should allow the application to handle traffic peaks better. We are taking advantage of this change to review all system configuration settings across the cluster. We will implement the third node in the next two weeks.

In addition, we have made two application setting changes to temporarily increase performance:

a. Query caching: Many of you have noticed the "Your message was posted successfully, but there will be a short delay before it is viewable in the thread" message when you post. We turned on query caching, which reduces system load about 20% by not requiring the application to rebuild the thread when a new message is posted. The query cache was originally set to 10 seconds, but we reduced it to 5 seconds, which should reduce how often community participants see the message. Our current thinking is to remove query caching when we stabilize performance.

b. Status Level Calculator: The status level calculator refresh rate has been set to 12 hours, which reduces system load. We will reset the status level calculation refresh rate to a shorter interval when we determine that doing so won’t negatively affect system performance.

Updating UserPointLevelCache Timeout

RDellimmagine — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:43:00 GMT

We are changing the the UserPointLevelCache timeout from 1 hour to 12 hours. This will reduce the number of times that point level calculations are made for each user, and the resulting reduction in cpu load is expected to improve system performance. It also means that when you post to a community or are awarded points for a helpful or complete answer, you will not see your point total updated for up to 12 hours. I expect this to be a temporary change until we have stabilized performance, and then we will return the timeout to 1 hour.

On-Going Tuning

RDellimmagine — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:45:00 GMT

I wanted to give an update on VMware Communities performance. Overall, we have been seeing some intermittent slowness again this week, and we are working on a couple of areas to address it:

1. Networking errors: We have identified and are in the process of debugging some networking issues between the two nodes in the cluster.

2. Private network: We are currently testing and plan to roll out a private network between the two nodes, which will increase the transfer rate of cluster information between them.

3. Automatic restarts: From early December until mid-January, the communities application ran with consistent performance, but then started slowing down. This problem was resolved when we rebooted at the operating system level, which makes us think there is a resource leak. We are therefore implementing an automated restart at the operating system level on a periodic basis.

4. Resourcing: We are putting additional Java experts on these problems to get them fixed quickly. Performance and system stability is the top priority.

We've had system monitoring in place since early December, which includes automatic restarts of the application when performance thresholds are reached. And the root cause analysis that we do at every application restart consistently is pointing us at the issues listed above.

Site Error Report

RDellimmagine — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:16:00 GMT

On Monday, January 21, at approximately 9:31am Pacific, one of the two nodes in the cluster restarted. Normally, this is imperceptible to almost all site visitors; however, in this case the node did not rejoin the cluster correctly and the node, while appearing to be up, was not serving content fully. This put additional load on the other node and degraded overall site performance. It was not apparent until midnight on Monday what had happened, at which point we figured out the restart script for the down node had a bug in it that we had not encountered before. We manually restarted the second node just after 1am Pacific on January 22 (today, as I write this), at which point performance rebounded significantly but not fully. We spent the working day on January 22 investigating, and figured out that a system parameter was unexpectedly reset on Monday, which caused point levels to be calculated 4 times more frequently and added more load to the system. At approximately 4:30pm Pacific, we set the parameter back to its intended level, and performance is now back to last week's levels. We are fixing the script bug, and we are investigating why the parameter was inadvertently reset.

New Community Moderators

RDellimmagine — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:59:00 GMT

Please join me in welcoming six community members who joined the ranks of community moderators (identified by the icon) at the end of December:

juchestyle:	juchestyle
kimono:	kimono
Liz:	Liz
Texiwill:	Texiwill
Dave.Mishchenko:	Dave.Mishchenko
tom howarth:	tom howarth

Their role is to help with community moderation tasks, like moving misplaced or duplicate threads and helping identify content that goes against the terms of use (which thankfully doesn't happen very often). They also give me lots of feedback. And they all do this in their spare time for no reward except my gratitude.

They were nominated based on their continued contributions, on the respect that they've gained within VMware Communities, and their willingness to help.

So kudos to the six of you, and the rest of the community moderators. Thanks for your support -- VMware Communities would not be the same without you.

Operational Status

RDellimmagine — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:06:00 GMT

Happy New Year!

The VMware Communities application is up and running relatively smoothly, and community members are posting questions, answering questions, and reading threads, documents, and blogs. The overall situation looks good.

I am still working on getting the test and stage environment in place, which is required before we can roll out the 2-column design that removes some u/i clutter and reduces JavaScript. My IT team has the VMs configured (that part was easy of course), but like organizations everywhere, it is taking longer than expected to get processes in place to ensure continued stability. I will write another blog post by next week with specifics on when that will roll out.

Speaking of stability, it has worked out well to cluster the VMware Communities application. One of the nodes restarted on Sunday, January 6, but because of the cluster, users did not see downtime (only those connected to the node that restarted got reconnected to the other node, which would not affect people browsing the site), and no one posted that there was any interruption. The previous time a node restarted was on December 21, so that is more than 2 weeks between node restarts.

As for performance, the application itself is performing quite well. Most users are seeing acceptable page load times but would be happier if the site were faster; only a relatively small number of users are still posting about unacceptably slow page load times. Performance data indicates the application is not the culprit, which is why we are focusing on reducing and optimizing JavaScript. As noted above, the 2-column design is a first step in this direction, and once that is in place, we will investigate additional JavaScript tuning.

The next step is to get to the latest release of Jive Software's ClearspaceX product. This will help improve maintainability of the application and get a lot of fixes that are now in the base product. We are working with Jive to scope out the work required, since the version we are running now has some customizations and also has a number of backports of fixes from subsequent releases.

Also in plan are fixes for some u/i bugs, browser compatibility (especially for IE6), and on adding some context-sensitive links (e.g. adding links to the VI3 documentation into the VI3 communities).

And finally, we plan to create some administrative scripts to streamline certain backend processes.

Now you see the development roadmap for VMware Communities for the rest of the first quarter. I'll keep you updated as we make progress on the list. Meanwhile, please continue to use the Communities Website Feedback to report issues and post feedback.

I'm looking forward to a productive 2008!

Site Update Plan

RDellimmagine — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:54:00 GMT

The transition from emergency mode (where we were pushing out fixes to critical bugs as quickly as we could verify them) to our standard mode (where we need to maintain the current level of stability and ensure we don't introduce new bugs) is taking longer than I had originally expected. The tasks we are working on (and have partially completed) are: reconfiguring and standardizing our stage environment; and automating the build, test (including writing regression tests and improving the load tests), and deployment processes. I'm working on ways to do an interim release before some of these pieces are together, but it's hard to get the full level of confidence in the new build without these processes in place. My expectation is it will be early January before we can roll out the 2-column design.

December 5 Update

RDellimmagine — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:21:00 GMT

We implemented the clustered configuration of the community software today, and after two hours it continues to run smoothly. We will continue to monitor it closely. The clustered configuration will allow the site to handle peak traffic (early morning weekdays, Pacific time) better, increase cache sizes, and restart a single node without affecting overall site availability.

One note: As part of the cluster upgrade, we increased the expiration time for the user status level cache from 15 minutes to 1 hour. This means it will take up to an hour for status levels (i.e. points) to be recalculated and displayed. We made the change because we are still researching a bug in the status level calculator that has caused threads to hang -- by exercising this code less frequently, system stability increases. We are of course working on fixing the root cause, which will allow us to decrease the expiration time again.

As for the user interface fixes with the 2-column layout, we decided to wait a few more days before releasing them in order to minimize risk in rolling out the clustered configuration.

November 30 Update

RDellimmagine — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:43:00 GMT

Forum stability and performance have continued again this week at acceptable levels most of the time.

We are still planning to implement clustering on the application, which will allow us to increase the amount of processing power to the application, increase the size of the caches, and make single-node restarts in the cluster transparent to users (since the other node will handle the traffic). All of this is expected to make noticeable improvements for visitors to VMware Communities. We will roll out the clustered implementation next week, i.e. the first week of December.

At the same time, we will also roll out the 2-column layout for VMware Communities that is described in VMware Communities Proposed Homepage Design along with community feedback in Homepage Design Proposal. The 2-column layout is meant to offer better navigation, better readability, and an appropriate emphasis on the community content.

November 26 Update

Badsah — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:52:00 GMT

Nothing new to report. We're still keeping an eye on performance, which appears to be good. If, however, you are still experiencing problems, please report it to us with specifics of which page(s) are consistently slow, and if there is any pattern (e.g. hours of the day).

Thanks.

Badsah

November 21 Update

Badsah — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:49:00 GMT

Last update before we Americans go stuff ourselves over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend: performance and stability appear to be fine for the fifth straight day. Given this, and a combination of VMware's scheduled maintenance windows plus holiday vacation schedules for critical team members, we have decided to postpone the deployment of a second node to our cluster until first week of December.

Thank you, and will be back online on Monday, November 26!

Badsah Mukherji, Sr. Community Manager, VMware

November 20 Update: Note U.S. Holiday, Nov. 22-23 (Thanksgiving)

Badsah — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:31:00 GMT

NOTICE: Due to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, the VMware's U.S. offices will be closed Thursday and Friday, November 22 and 23, 2007.

Well, we are cautiously optimistic that we've reached a period of stability on the site. We have enjoyed four plus days of continuous uptime, and the performance has been consistently reasonable. We are still targeting end of next week (last week of November) for adding the second server to the cluster, to enhance the performance.

If you still encounter sporadic error messages, reload/refresh the page and you will usually see the error disappear. If the problem persists, please bring it to our attention. Details such as timing, page information, and specifics of what you were doing at the time are helpful, as always.

Thank you.

Badsah Mukherji, Sr. Community Manager, VMware

November 15 Update

RDellimmagine — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:10:00 GMT

After running 27 hours with reasonable performance, we saw a slowdown again last night. We rebooted the application and still saw some issues. After a bit more investigation, we realized that the issues were related to the kernel timer, so we moved the application to different hardware, and voila, no more timing issues. As I write, the system has been up with reasonable performance for another 14 hours.

The timing issues would explain the viewed threads problem and other similar cache-related problems people have reported.

Given that performance is significantly improved, we are taking a more measured approach to implementing the cluster, so that we can be sure the configuration is bullet-proof before it is deployed. We are currently targeting the end of November for the clustered configuration. Also, we are continuing to work on feature fixes, and after we have seen a few more days of reasonable performance without kernel timing issues, then we will start focusing on getting those fixes rolled out to the site.

November 14 Update

RDellimmagine — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:58:00 GMT

Last night we did an upgrade on the kernel to update the system clock to a newer version. This change is required before we add a second node to the cluster. The result of the update is that we have seen system performance improve significantly in the 18 hours since it was implemented. Users have reported performance improvements as well. If you have observations to share, please do: Performance?.

In addition to (and after) the system clock update, we also added in a second node to the cluster, but rolled it back because of some configuration issues. We are working actively to resolve those configuration issues so that we can get the second node running in the cluster.

Some users have reported errors in read tracking and private message notifications, and we believe this to be related to some work on the second node. We are monitoring it closely, and believe these errors to be in the presentation of the data, not in the data itself.

November 12 Update

RDellimmagine — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 07:07:00 GMT

We configured a load balancer this afternoon during the low-traffic window in preparation for implementing a clustered configuration of the community application. Behind the load balancer is still a single node, so visitors won't see any changes in performance or stability, but the next step is to implement the second node in the cluster, which will bring improvements. Meanwhile, there is a known issue that causes an occasional error when viewing threads. The error resolves itself when the page is refreshed, and it will be fixed when the cluster is complete.

November 8 Update

RDellimmagine — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:57:00 GMT

Performance and stability continue to be much improved.

Meanwhile, we are investigating 3 areas:

1. some compatibility errors we're seeing related to the JDK version and Jive's caching engine;
2. moving to a more accurate system clock to avoid some bottlenecks waiting on a new time;
3. we are accelerating our move to a clustered configuration.

I'll post again as we define the precise action plan around these.

November 7 Update

RDellimmagine — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:57:00 GMT

Yesterday morning, we found and fixed an error in the way the site handled web crawlers, which was causing threads to block. We also did additional tuning of cache sizes. These changes resulted in a significant increase in stability and performance: the site remained up for 22 hours with much better performance than we had seen.

We continue to monitor the site and are investigating the cause of this morning's restarts, but it appears that we have turned a corner, given site visitors are also reporting improved performance. We continue to investigate performance, as we believe page load times can be further improved. The main area of work, as I wrote earlier, is to cluster the application server, which will allow us to increase overall cache size and take advantage of load balancing. This will result in faster performance and increased flight time of the application.

November 5 Update

RDellimmagine — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:26:00 GMT

Today we increased the heap size of the application server and then increased cache sizes in the application to increase their effectiveness. We also rolled out a patch to the AuthFactory that fixes a locking problem in the status level calculator and removes the root cause of one class of system slowdowns.

The result of these fixes, along with the switch to JDK 1.5 last Friday, is that we are seeing improved stability and overall lower cpu usage. However, we are still seeing periodic performance slowdowns that we continue to monitor closely.

We are actively working to implement a clustered solution for the application server, which will allow for larger caches and therefore fewer hits against the backend database. Meanwhile, we have decided to hold off for a few days on the feature enhancements we discussed last week, so that we can focus fully on the app server cluster.

November 3 Update

RDellimmagine — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 18:20:00 GMT

On November 2, we rolled back the November 1 update because it introduced errors that we are still investigating.

However, we kept or re-implemented the following configuration changes:

Changed JDK version: We changed from JDK1.6 to JDK1.5 for better compatibility with the caching engine used by the community platform.

Increased Heap & Cache Sizes: We increased the Tomcat heap size and the community platform's message cache size for better message throughput.

Database Connections: We increased the number of database connections by 50% because peak traffic occasionally maxed the number of database connections.

APIC Setting: We disabled a power management setting that was causing timer-related problems.

Next week, we will work to re-implement the usability features we rolled back, including the AuthFactory fix that will remove one class of issues resulting in system slowdowns.

November 1 Fixes

RDellimmagine — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 03:13:00 GMT

Stability

Tonight we rolled out the following stability / performance changes:

Database Connections: We increased the number of database connections by 50% because peak traffic occasionally maxed the number of database connections.

APIC Setting: We disabled a power management setting that was causing timer-related problems.

AuthFactory fix: We implemented a fix that allows us to avoid locking in the status level calculator. This removes the root cause of one relatively infrequent class of system slowdowns.

While these fixes help, we are actively working on some additional stability / performance fixes that we will roll out next week.

Features

We rolled out the feature fixes described in yesterday's blog post:

Filter searches by user: There's an additional field in Advanced Search where you can specify an individual user so that search returns matching results from that user only.

Search returns individual messages, not threads: Search returns a result for each thread (instead of for each message) matching the search term.

Email notification of private messages: There is a new preferences that allows you to specify whether you get sent an email when you receive a private message. This works if your email is displayed or hidden.

Email monitor improved: The email monitor now catches (and discards) a wider range of out-of-office replies.

Edit Email in Profile: You can now edit your email address in your profile.

And also a couple of additional fixes:

Status Level Legend: A status level legend showing the points for each status level now displays on the people page.

Documents-only Communities: They now show the documents tab, e.g. Community Sample Code -- before they were erroneously showing a discussions tab even though discussions were disabled.