Wednesday, August 20, 2014

10.000 Downloads!

10.000 downloads!

WOW!

Our whitepaper “Hybrid Cloud with NVGRE (Cloud OS)” has reached an unbelievable milestone today.
The paper has been downloaded more than 10.000 times!

I am truly humbled and honored to know that our effort by writing this whitepaper has been greatly appreciated by the community worldwide.

The Story

The initial idea back in October in 2013 was to create a comprehensive guide that would help people to implement Network Virtualization (NVGRE) using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 and Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2.
I started the job together with Flemming Riis – which had this real-world fabric available for us to test, crash and build. Learn, apply, and repeat.

The first release was based on the Preview bits of the Cloud OS and we decided to update the content with the RTM builds as soon as possible; in order to address many questions we knew would arise in the different TechNet forums.

Our reviewers was Daniel Neumann and Stanislav Zhelyazkov.

We had now a new version.

In addition, we added a comprehensive “FAQ” chapter to the paper based on experience from early adoption, TechNet forums and feedback.
This is when we decided that we had to “hire” Stanislav Zhelyazkov. He provided us with unique details that gave a much better quality to the whitepaper, and especially around this section.

This was the third version.

Our forth version added Windows Azure Pack to the paper where we ended up putting NVGRE into context. We highlighted how to leverage the multi-tenant IaaS platform we had been building with VMM, with the service management API in Azure Pack. This was a big update, which included several other elements such as gallery items, remote console and much more.

Our fifth version is where we added a “FAQ” chapter for the Azure Pack part, and hence the “hiring” of Marc Van Eijk, which gave us a deeper insight and a better perspective based on his experience as well, and this is still the current version that we know are helping people on a day-to-day basis.

We know that this whitepaper has been greatly appreciated by Microsoft Support and is widely used by their customers when they are facing challenges regarding these technologies. That is truly a confirmation that we really did something useful this time J

My promise to you:

Instead of putting too much effort into books with all those heavy processes, I will instead continue to write fresh, up-to-date and deep technical whitepapers that can make your life easier.
That means that you can expect more to come from this side as we are seeing new releases of this stack.

I also know that my team are with me and on behalf of them; I can only say that we are very grateful and appreciate all the feedback we have received on our way.

A big thank you from me, Flemming, Stanislav, Daniel and Marc!

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