Jeremy Carter

For two days Duncan Epping (blog) and Frank Denneman (blog) are giving away the kindle edition of their book, VMware 4.1 HA and DRS Deepdive for free. Yes that’s right THE bible for VMware admins is free for two days! Head on over to Amazon to get your own copy. Also while you are at it, if you aren’t already following their blogs, be sure to check them out. They continuously post a great wealth of information.

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VMware Press is currently holding a sweepstakes for being a part of their Facebook community. Like their page and then be sure to sign up by June 30, 2012.

One (1) Grand Prize Winner will receive:
One (1) $100 gift card to www.amazon.com
Choice of print or eBook edition of three (3) VMware Press titles (Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0, Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator and Storage Implementation in VMware vSphere 5)

Nine (9) Second Prize Winners will each receive:
One (1) eBook of choice (Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0, Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator or Storage Implementation in VMware vSphere 5)

Enter here.

Full Disclosure: I have a couple of book contracts with VMware Press, though I am getting nothing directly for promoting their Sweepstakes.

sweepstakes, vmware

If you are interested in how you can work smarter with VMware vSphere, Orchestrator is your answer. If you haven’t heard of Orchestrator you are not alone. Until recently it has been one of VMware’s best kept secrets.

Orchestrator is a workflow tool that comes out of the box with a library of predefined workflows. There are also a large number of 3d party plugins that allow it to coordinate processes across multiple platforms and allow it to integrate with your own applications.

One of the coolest things about Orchestrator is that it allows you to enforce your business logic and best practices around how you manage your vSphere infrastructure. Gone are the days of each admin doing things their own way and occasionally forgetting proper procedure.

The other great thing is that it is FREE. It comes with vCenter so there is no excuse not to use it… Unless you don’t know how to use it.

If you aren’t familiar with Orchestrator, information has been a little tough to come by. That has been changed now with the release of the new book, Automating vSphere: With VMware vCenter Orchestrator . The author, Cody Bunch (website | twitter), is a Private Cloud architect and vExpert. I just purchased my kindle edition and started reading it yesterday. I’m pretty excited to learn more about it and will post a review when I complete it.

*Disclaimer: I work with Cody and am his co-author on two upcoming books, Exam Prep for VCAP5 DCA and Exam Prep for VCAP5 DCD. However any opinion expressed here is my own, for better or worse.

architect, best practices, business logic, dca, dcd, orchestrator, vmware, workflow tool, workflows