Someone asked me this week how I picked the top 5 blog posts. Did I have some sort of rating formula to decide which blog post should be on the list. The answer is short: No I don’t. I just pick the five post of which I think they were most useful and/or enjoyable. This can be a deep technical post, but also a post about a newly released tool like the one from Richard below. There’s no science behind this, based on feeling and it’s personal. Hope this answers your question. Anyway, it’s week 30 already, enjoy:

• Mike Laverick – Download the complete Vi3 Book for free
  You can now download the Vi3book that I wrote with Ron Oglesby and Scott Herold for free.
  You might like to supplement these free chapters with the free guides which I released with Vi3.5…
• Richard Garsthagen – New Beta Release – vAudit
  Well after a few hours of programming, I am happy to make my latest utility available. The program is called vAudit and it allows you to audit your VMware View environments. vAudit will show you when your users are working with their desktops in an easy timeline.
• Mike Laverick | Duncan Epping – What I learned today (HA Split brain) RTFM and Yellow-Bricks
  Anyway, the time for detecting split brain used to be 15 seconds, for
  some reason this has changed to 12 seconds. I’m not 100% why, or if in
  fact the underlying value has changed – or that VMware has merely
  corrected its own documentation. You see its possible to get split
  brain in Vi3.5 happening if the network goes down for more than 12
  seconds, but comes back up on the 13th, 14th or 15th second. I guess I
  will have to do some research on this one. Of course, the duration can
  be changed – and split brain is trivial matter if you take the
  neccessary network redundency steps…
• Joep Piscaer – How to configure VMware vCenter Orchestrator
  While I was delivering a training course about vSphere last week, I decided to throw in some Orchestrator goodness, and configured it with the students. Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to actually using Orchestrator, so for now, I’ve limited this blog post to merely configuring it. I’m planning to dive deeper into it some time soon. Below is the complete configuration guide for VMware vCenter Orchestrator, including database and attaching it to LDAP. I’ve included some screenshots as well.
• Hany Michael – vSphere in a box Part 3: Lab Manager 4.0 Automation
  I discovered another great use case while I was working on the Lab Manager, which is training the SysAdmins in my current corp on the new vSphere platform. We are also growing rapidly with our virtual environment (soon to be: private cloud) and we’ll definitely need more SysAdmins on board. That being said, I now have an instrumental tool for provisioning independent labs for the SysAdmins to login and have their own hands-on experience with the new platform.

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A question I get from customers on a regular base is if vSphere 4.0 has already achieved Common Criteria certification. Unfortunately I could never give an answer to their question but this has changed as of yesterday. Although we have not achieved it yet, we are working towards it…

Source: VMware vSphere starts the journey to Common Criteria certification
Many people have been interested in knowing when vSphere 4 will achieve Common Criteria certification, as was the case for ESX 3.0 and vCenter 2.0 and as will be the case for ESX/ESXi 3.5 and vCenter 2.5. Common Criteria is important for government and defense customers, since it is often a requirement for many of their IT environments, but it is also valuable for other customers, since it represents an objective measure of a software product’s security. Having Common Criteria certification, especially at the higher levels, is often used by security professionals and auditors as a way to gauge whether or not a product should be considered for use in security-sensitive environments, such as credit-card transaction systems.

I am happy to report that VMware vSphere 4 has begun the Common Criteria certification process for vSphere 4.0 at EAL4+. This specifically includes: ESX 4.0, ESXi 4.0, and vCenter 4.0. We have received the letter of intent from the security consulting firm hired by VMware for the evaluation; unfortunately, we cannot post it here, but interested customers should contact their sales representatives directly if they want to see a copy of it.

As you might be aware, the journey towards final certification can be a long one, due to the extensive documentation requirements and rigorous tests that the products must undergo. We’ll provide updates at major milestones of the certification process, but the expectation is that final certification will be achieved in the 2nd half of 2010.

Revenue of $456 Million
Non-GAAP Operating Margin of 21%; GAAP Operating Margin of 8%
Non-GAAP Operating Cash Flows Increased 19% Year-Over-Year to $233 Million; GAAP Operating Cash Flows Increased 62% Year-Over-Year to $243 Million
. Supplemental Financial Tables
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 22, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter to the cloud, today announced financial results for the second quarter 2009:
Revenues for the second quarter were $456 million, flat from the second quarter of 2008.Non-GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $96 million, a decrease of 14% from the second quarter of…

It seems to be the summer holiday season cause the amount of blog posts decreased over the last week or so. Now don’t get me wrong, the quality of the posts did not change. Especially the first two by Alan and Bouke, although I’m not talking about the quality of the info but about the quality of the tools they wrote, are amazing. Enjoy,

• Bouke Groenescheij – CPUBusier
  Remember the good ‘old CPUBusy script used during the VMware Install
  & Configure training? Well I wanted to have something which allows
  you to control the load. So I created this little piece of software
  called CPUBusier.
• Alan Renouf – PowerCLI Daily Report
  I have been using this script for the past month and it has
  highlighted a number of issues which would have been harder to find
  without it.Daily Report does what it says on the tin, it runs as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information about your infrastructure in a nice easily readable format.This script picks on the key areas of the virtual infrastructure and
  reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is check your
  email.
• Alan Murphy – Choosing between Azure and VMM Private Clouds
  I do like the idea of them embracing private clouds with VMM, a logical
  step when competing against VMware and vCloud, but then I pause. Will
  Azure ever compete against vCloud? vCloud is designed to allow
  enterprise customers to build a services-based application bundle
  in-house (ie running in a private cloud) and then push that entire
  application service bundle up to a service provider also running VMware
  and supporting vCloud (ie the public cloud). Build at home, push to the
  cloud. Makes sense. When people think private cloud, they think vCloud.
• Hany Michael – VMware vCenter AppSpeed 1.0 first look!
  The AppSpeed is not meant to replace any of your existing monitoring
  tools that you are happy with. It’s another great visibility tool for
  doing that, not to mention the SLA part and the integration with the
  vCloud technologies. I just wanted to tell you that you still need this
  even if you are a VMware expert who knows how to use the traditional
  tools for performance analysis.
• Greg Lato – VMware Network Port List
  One of the recurring requests I hear from my clients is for a list or
  diagram showing the network ports that are used by the various VMware
  products and components.  Thanks to some of my VMware Professional
  Service Colleagues for creating and allowing me to share with you the VMware Network Port List.  I’ll keep this under the VMW Launchpad section of the blog and try to update it as time permits.

Register for VMworld 2009 by July 24, and you could win a free pass to VMworld 2009!

Don’t miss VMworld 2009, the leading virtualization event. Register now and automatically be entered into a drawing to get your registration fees fully reimbursed. VMworld is the must-attend event for anyone interested in virtualizing
the enterprise.

For more information, please visit http://www.vmworld2009.com/registration/promo.

If you’re still looking for reasons to attend VMworld 2009 in San Francisco, then you’ve come to the right place. Three of our VMworld alumni have posted great blogs about why you shouldn’t miss VMworld.