My summer has been exciting. On Wednesday, I received notification that I was accepted as a vExpert for 2014! That’s pretty awesome, both as confirmation that hard work has payed off and encouragement to keep it up in the future. On Thursday night, the Virtual Design Master competition kicked off. This will hopefully keep me busy throughout the summer. I haven’t even gotten started on it, though, as I am on-call this week and things blew up right after the live start. Here’s hoping it settles down so I can work this weekend!

As if that wasn’t busy enough, my wife accepted a new job in June with a start date in August. We’ll be moving in support of that around the end of the month. With that in mind, I’m taking a summer break from the blog (but certainly not a vacation!). I have a few scheduled articles that will take me through the end of July and I’m hoping to have a guest author to cover August until VMworld. I plan to get back to blogging in early September.

Until then, here is a mix of the most popular articles and the ones I really enjoyed writing.

• Puppet – There are two more articles to complete the intro portion. Now that you’re familiar with Puppet, we’ll look at closer integration with vSphere in the Fall.
• Auto Deploy Deep Dive – I was hoping to present this at VMworld but it wasn’t meant to be! Check out the #vBrownBag presentation, too. They’re in the middle of a Cisco track and will be covering Docker on 7/23, good stuff.
• The Philosophy of Ender’s Game – Now that the movie’s out on DVD and cable, it’s a good time to watch it again and do some critical analysis. Preferably on your tablet while piloting a quadcopter drone, both ideas that can be traced back to this novel. This wasn’t very popular, but it was one of my favorite articles to write. It’s always fun to wax philosophical.
• Snapshots Management – Surprisingly, this recent article seems very popular. I shouldn’t be surprised, snapshots continue to be a wildly misunderstood tool that cause problems for even veteran vSphere admins.
• InfoSec and Social Media – This article was a result of attending CPX 2014 and comparing it to VMworld 2013. I had fun writing it, soliciting feedback, and working to do the things I said I would.
• Synology Multi-VLAN Setup – This remains a very popular article. I hope Synology makes VLAN configuration a little smoother in future DSM revisions, but until then, this will get you going.

Have a great summer!