In-Depth

A 'Top vSphere Tips and Tricks' Non-Listicle

No Buzzfeed gimmicks here; just good reasons why attending TechMentor may save your career from a horrible death.

• By Greg Shields
• 10/27/2016

Keith Ward, editor-in-chief of this fine publication, asked me recently to sketch out a short listicle of "Top vSphere Tips and Tricks" that might make a good teaser for my upcoming TechMentor workshop Sixty-Seven VMware vSphere Tricks That'll Pay for This Conference! I actually spent quite a bit of time pondering his request. Here's why.

If you don't already know, a "listicle" is a publishing industry term for a short article that's generally a series of bullet points. You've seen them before in places like Buzzfeed and other clickbait Web sites. In our world of ever-shortening attention spans, the whole listicle format has become a reasonably successful gimmick for capturing attention for just the second or two you're likely to give it.

The problem with listicles -- and admittedly even the intentionally-dramatic title of my upcoming TechMentor seminar -- is that neither do a good job of delivering useful information.

That's why I'm here in this article to convince you not to check out my upcoming session, at least not if it's an actual sixty-seven tips you're looking for. Yes, indeed, there are all manner of aspects of vSphere that you've paid for and are likely not using. Have you replaced your vCenter Server's self-signed certificates yet with trusted ones? Are you using Storage Policies or poked around yet with VVOLs? Are you digging deep into multipathing policies and the Pluggable Storage Architecture to make sure you're getting the most out of your investment? Heck, do you even know what factors impact a DRS migration after you've set your cluster to Automated?

Odds are, you don't. vSphere is chock full of bells and whistles that make it near-universally acceptable for environments both large and small. In doing so, VMware has created a virtualization platform that's full of bell and whistle checkboxes and configuration sliders that many of us simply ignore.

Helping you figure out which ones are important among those that aren't is my mission in this upcoming workshop. I'll admit, we may not necessarily get to a full sixty-seven actual tips and tricks. But, if we together share enough knowledge, if we have enough "I didn't know I could do that!" moments, if the very barometric pressure in the room drops enough as everyone gasps in serendipity together, I submit that's a paid-for use of time.

Why didn't I submit this article as a listicle like what Keith wanted? Because sharing that much information takes a lot more column inches. At this upcoming TechMentor, we've got seven hours. We'll make the most of it.