vSphere4 card – version 2 released!

Well here it is!

Its been a long time coming. Version 2 of this card has many changes that I’ve wanted to make since writing these cards. It’s taken a good couple of months of hard (and frankly a bit boring :0) work, which had pulled me away from blogging about more interesting things and playing with some of the newly released products.

The best bit is you probably won’t notice much of a difference. A lot of the work is under the covers, to make the most out of the paper real estate.

However, for those curious types who are wondering if anything has actually changed since the last release, here’s a quick changelog that I just pulled together (although there are probably other unlisted tasty tibits hiding in there):

• I’ve resized the content boxes. Hopefully this should make for better results when printing on A4 as the margins are slightly more generous (I don’t have access to any A4 paper these days, living in this anti-conformist land :), so I can’t test this myself. Please let me know if you think its better or worse).
• The line spacing has been reduced slightly to allow for more content to be squeezed in. I haven’t reduced the font size, just the whitespace.
• Previously, the card used a mixture of different fonts. I could never guarantee that these would render properly on everyones PDF viewer, and I couldn’t embed them without potentially breaking font licenses. Now version 2 exclusively uses the Liberation Font set, which is a great free font created under a GPL type license by Red Hat.
• I’ve managed to reduce the PDF’s file size by around 40%, by optimizing the fonts and graphics.
• Since the last version, vSphere 4 Update 1 has been released, so I’ve updated the card to reflect the new limits.
• Extra content covering: PVLANs, dvUplinks & Network VMotion definitions, vDS VLAN options expanded, TPGS, ALUA, Current host load standard deviation, Partitioning advice change, Security levels, Pre-update detection tool, Changed block tracking files, Disk formats, vCenter server settings.
• More web and KB links.
• Firewall updates.
• Corrections, many of which came from the great vReference readers. Thanks everyone!

I’ve been looking back at my website this week, like many follow bloggers recently.

This is the 3^rd iteration of the my site which started over 2 years ago as vmreference.com on google pages, before I moving to my own hosted site and then finally migrating to the current vReference site. Unfortunately I’ve lost many of the statistics, but since my last move only 5 months ago I’ve had around 120,000 page views. The vSphere 4 card has been downloaded over 18.000 times since publishing it only a few months ago, and my vSphere 4 notes have had around 9,000 downloads. I first published the original VI3 card over 26 months ago. Sadly no vExpert for my troubles though :P, but I have got not 1 but 2 links on Eric Siebert’s awesome vLaunchpad honour roll.

Now, time to get back to work on my supplemental page (yeah I hate the name too, suggestion on a SAE please).