VMworld is just around the corner and for those in the server / virtualization space, its a pretty exciting time to see what the market leader is doing next. The market is getting more crowded with other hypervisors and some of them are challenging VMware more than others. Yes, even I will admit that Hyper-V is making some noise. A lot of talk within companies about Microsoft’s licensing advantage and features that are “good enough” for most workloads, its a conversation that many shops will be having when that VMware contract comes up for renewal.

Well, the 4th 5K is in the books and I’m quite pleased with the result. Last year I had seen the Ankeny Sunset Run 5K but due to a scheduling conflict, I just couldn’t make it work. This year however, no conflicts and the race was on one of the free weekends I have in August.

The official count of participants was 49 so by no means is this thing a large race. And I think that it is mainly due to a lack of advertising and information on the race. As an example, it was hard to find the route information on the city of Ankeny web site. I had to go off a brochure that was a couple of years old. It was the same as before, but still, left a feeling that this wasn’t the most organized of events.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak at Puppet Camp in Chicago. The goal of the event was to basically share, energize and evangelize puppet to a group of “locals” who will hopefully then use it and also spread the word to others.

I got involved in the event basically by accident. Last year at VMworld, I met Jose who is one of the community guys at Puppet. He helped sponsor a local LUG meeting where I spoke about puppet and it was a pretty good success. For the puppet camp chicago, they were a little short on presenters so I threw something together in the past week and away I went.

Continuing on with my running goal knocked down run #3 of the year with the Warrior Dash – Iowa just outside of Earlam IA.

This was a race that several of my co-workers were going to run including my wife. Before the race started, the big boss (wife) and I agreed that we’d run this together. We’re out to enjoy the race and have some fun…race times be damned!

The race is basically a 3.43 mile trail run with 12 obstacles along the way. The day was hot as could be with some nice humidity and to add to it all, no breeze. Or, the worst weather for running you can imagine.

Recently I spent some time upgrading our corporate VMware environment from ESX4.1 to ESXi 5. Fun times I know. For most of the hosts, I was able to use the update manager to upgrade and only one host was short on space that required a full re-install from CD.

The upgrades weren’t without incident. I had the unfortunate incident of running into an error of “The Unlicensed license for host does not include vSphere HA. Upgrade the License”.