Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 12

Week 12 already, time is flying. I picked 5 excellent posts again, well except for Mike’s. Mike’s article wasn’t selected because of the article it self but because of the book he released. The difference between this book and the others Mike did is that it is freely available for download. However a donation to Unicef is appreciated... Read the articles, download the book and make that donation.

• Mike Laverick - NEW: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0
  I’m pleased to announce the general availability of my new book. It’s free to download as a PDF file – and if you prefer a hard-copy you can print a physical copy of the book from LULU.COM. Both the PDF and the hard-copy are available from the LULU.COM website. Some stats:” The book is just short of 100,000 words, 400 pages, Additional 100 pages of text and supporting graphics from the SRM 1.0 book, Additional 3 chapters...
• Rodney Haywood - Top 5 Best Practices for Architecting "Existing Workloads" for VMware Cloud
  How tidy and efficient is your wide area and local area networking? Is your IP address register up to date? Would you easily be able to break down your subnets based on associated workloads or are the servers intermixed with the addressing for of your other infrastructure such as networking devices, printers or even desktops. Do you fear changing an IP address on a server because you know it will probably bring down your core application, or who knows what?
• Alan Renouf - vCheck v5
  There is now a handy link to both the VMware KB site and Google which will automatically search for the errors found on these sites, no longer do you have a reason for not investigating those errors !
• Frank Denneman - ESX4 ALUA, TPGS and HP CA
  VMware addressed this shortcoming and added ALUA support in the new storage stack of ESX4. The ALUA support is a great feature of the new storage architecture, it reduces a lot of extra manual steps of creating a proper load-balanced environment. But how exactly does ALUA identifies which path is optimized and will HP Continuous Access still have an impact on ESX4 environments as well?
• Arne Fokkema - vSphere: Unattended ESX4 installation Tips & Tricks
  Before you start the post script, you have to wait until the hostd-vmdb service is ready. This is necessary if you want to use the /usr/bin/vmware-vim-cmd command. With the following while loop, you can check the status of the hostd-vmdb service. When the service is ready, the script continues to configure your ESX server.