I’ve always avoided twitter.  Until now.  I’ve got something to say this time and want as many people to hear about it as possible.  The last one of the top 25 virtualization bloggers is joining the twitter ranks.

You might have noticed that for the last 6 months my blogging content has fallen off dramatically.  This was an unfortunate side-effect of all the work I have poured into a new project.  I hope my part of this new endeavour benefits our community – its something I’m pretty proud of.

Although I have blogged for a few years now and hopefully created useful content for VMware community, I have never joined the twitter gang.  I made a conscious effort to concentrate on areas I could add-value and was mindful of spreading myself too thin.  We all suffer from information overload these days, drinking from the fire hose.  For that reason, I purposefully don’t “do” Facebook, LinkedIn, IRC channels. I avoid spending too much time on forums and keep my RSS feeds to a minimum.  Keeping up to date is crucial in our industry, but being able to skim the cream and not get caught up in the noise is a tricky tightrope.  As essential (and enjoyable) as it is to consume information, I believe creating it is so much more valuable.

Now I’m not quite ready to let you all know what I’ve been up to, but I will use my spanking brand new twitter account to reveal all, sometime in the next couple of weeks.  So why not follow me on this space-aged newfangled twitter thing and be the first to find out what is happening.  Don’t fear, I don’t expect to flooding the twitterverse with my daily routine, just the odd tweet to let you know about new blog posts, new reference cards, or anything vSphere related that doesn’t warrant a full blog post.

If you already know what I’m about to reveal, then please don’t spoil the fun and keep it to yourself.  It’s probably not too difficult to figure out, and super-sleuths (like you Mr E. Sloof ;)) are banned from playing.

Here is my vSphere 4.1 card blown up to poster size.  It’s finally time to spruce up your office and get rid of that old Baywatch one with the curled ends.

Help yourself.  Thanks again Dudley.

In case you’ve not seen it before, here is my View & ThinApp Desktop Card as a poster as well.

And remember, if you haven’t already voted; get yourself over to vsphere-land and show your support for your favourite VMware bloggers for all their hard work over the year.  It will only take 2 minutes of your time, and everyone on that list deserves a big pat on the back as far as I’m concerned . It’s your turn to pay it forward!

I’ve already had a couple of great bits of feedback about the new vReference card for 4.1.

Valerio spotted a handful of typos and Christian Meier point me to some licensing changes.  I’ve updated the card and you’ll now find the download is for version 2.3.2.

So here is a couple of things new to me:

• vMotion is now included with the Essential Plus and Standard versions.
• Thin provisioning which used to be included in all versions (including the free ESXi version, Essential and Essential Plus) as can be seen on the table here, is now only included in Advanced and above according to this new licensing PDF.  I hope this is just a documentation error.  If not then I consider this quite a loss for the smaller businesses who probably won’t have access to advanced storage arrays.

Sorry about the update so soon after its release, but I thought you’d all rather have the correct information as soon as possible.  As ever, the vReference card page is always the place to go for the latest version – don’t link friends to the card directly as these links get out of date.  I had over 100 downloads for the old version 1.0 and 0.x cards just in the last week alone.  I released 2.0 around a year ago!

I’ve also added a link on the vSphere 4 card page to the last card supporting vSphere 4.0.  I realised that some of you are still probably supporting and maybe even deploying/designing around this version.  If any of you are still working with 3.5, you can still find the old VI3 card on its page here.