2017 Review

2017 – A Year in Review

Constantin Ghioc VMware

It’s first end of year since I started this blog, so I guess it’s review time 🙂 . I will cover 2017 review in three different areas: I will first check what 2017 meant for this blog, then I will write something on my VMUG activities, and in the end I will go over social media.

2017 Review – CloudHat.eu

I started CloudHat.eu at the beginning of August 2017. Since then, I published 39 articles which attracted close to 5,000 unique visitors.

Most viewed article: Latest vCenter and Latest Chrome = No Love

The articles I had most fun writing: How to Install vSphere HTML5 Web Client Fling and How to Update vSphere HTML5 Web Client Fling

Most visitors received from: blogs.vmware.com

Country with biggest number of visitors: United States of America

Most clicked referral keywords in search engines: vmware vcenter converter standalone 6.2

Most clicked outgoing URL: KB2151945 – Shockwave Flash crashes with vSphere Web Client 6.x

2017 Review – VMware User Group (VMUG)

This year was busy for me in terms of Romanian VMUG activities. Before this, I only attended VMUG meetings as a spectator, and I benefited the networking area of the meetings. During one of such talks, I received positive feedback about one of the shared stories and I decided to try to step up by becoming a presenter.

My first VMUG presentation was on 16 February 2017 with the title “Extending vRealize Automation – Real Life Examples”. I talked about what issues I had with my vRealize Automation implementation and which paths I followed to mitigate them.

The positive feedback I received urged me to continue on this path. So, on the next VMUG meeting, on 6 July 2017, I was back on the agenda with “Making your VMware Datacenter talk to AWS”. I talked again about vRealize Automation (I guess they all know me by now as vRA guy :-)), but this time working together with Velostrata and AWS.

Third meeting of the year came on 12 October and I couldn’t miss it. I changed gears this time and I left my beloved vRA aside. We all got into a good discussion around the topic I chose: “Building Your VMware Homelab”. At the time of this meeting I already started playing with the blog, so of course I got it covered: VMUG Romania Meeting Report.

End of October came with a change in responsibilities in Romanian VMUG community: I became co-leader of the group. At first this only meant a couple of beer meetings with few VMUG friends, but then we started working. We produced a plan for 2018 and we hope it’s going to be a good one 🙂 I take this opportunity to thanks for the friendly community!

2017 Review – Social Media

I am mainly active on two social media platforms: Twitter and LinkedIn. Out of these 2, I find Twitter the most attractive. After few years of searching the best way to stay up to date with industry news, I ended up on Twitter. If it’s not there, high chances it’s not interesting enough for me.

My tweet with the biggest engagement rate is somehow related to my professional field (but more to my hobby, the Go game):

If I keep it blog related, then I need to mention a tweet about the “VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive” giveaway:

Back to LinkedIn, I got the biggest engagement with a post on how to install Active Directory on Windows Server 2012 R2 in your lab.

Thank you all for following my blog and see you in 2018!

Happy New Year!

Constantin Ghioc

I usually play with vSphere API, Ansible, vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, and different AWS tools. In my other life I’m a husband and a father, an amateur photographer and a Go enthusiast.

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