VIOPS: Proven Practices for Deploying and Managing VMware : Document List - Community

Registered User Survey Results

rochej@vmware.com — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:20:05 GMT

Hello everyone, a few months back we ran a short survey for our registered users to ask a few questions on how we can improve VIOPS as well as some things that stop or hinder our users from contributing. Below you will find a PowerPoint doc with the formatted Q & A. We wanted to give everyone a chance to glance at these results. Overall we were very impressed with the answers given, and look forward to working on these suggestions in the near future.

Thanks, John

VIOPS Monthly Bulletin for February 2009

rochej@vmware.com — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:06:59 GMT

This report is intended for VIOPS community members to update them on the last month's progress.

This report is produced once at month, at the end of the month, and is published in the VIOPS Community Zone.

Keep up to date with news from the Community Zone with RSS

Please add feedback to the Comments at the foot of this document, or contact John Roche.

Outline

Community News
Top Participants
New Documents
Documents Top Ten Hit Parade
Hot Topics

Community News

Welcome to the second Community News article of 2009!

February has been a month of firsts!

First ever VIOPS moderator appointed - please welcome Rodos
First ever VIOPS project launched - VI3.Blueprint, VMworld Harvesting and Content Pipeline.
First ever sharing of official VMware graphics - our fantastically talented graphic artists have shared their icons and diagrams for everyone to use in their presentations (and maishsk has transferred them into Visio too!)
New look & feel has successfully been pushed
Updated infrastructure to support growing site traffic
Traffic to the site has increased by ~62% and we are getting more regular visitors coming back again and again. More direct deep linking from various sites means that VIOPS is becoming a recognized source of good information.

What's in store for March 09?

VI3.Blueprint project should be complete
VMworld Harvesting project will be underway
Content Pipeline tasks will be flushed into creating proven practice documents
First VIOPS webinar delivered, on Capacity Management, with Rob Ford @ Metron.

Top Participants

For February 09 we have six top contributors to recognize:

Thanks to them from the whole VIOPS team for their valuable contributions.

Rodos is the first Moderator on VIOPS

We would like to welcome our first VIOPS moderator Rodney Haywood AKA Rodos. Rodos will be assisting the VIOPS community in various ways by editing and approving various documents and answering various questions throughout the site.

Please give a warm welcome to Rodos - to find out more about him, check out his blog site here.

Rob Ford of Metron continues his outstanding contributions

Rob Ford and the guys at Metron, recognized ITIL and Capacity Management experts with decades of experience, have agreed to deliver the first VIOPS expert seminar on everyone's hot topic - VMware Capacity Management. The date is yet to be decided, but early interest has been strong.

Not content with working on the webinar, Rob has also written up a proven practice on handling a hot topic - how to identify virtual machines for "recycling" - reclaiming allocated-but-unused resources from idle/rogue VMs.

Proven Practice: Using Athene to recycle VM’s

Maish makes the official VMware graphics available in Visio stencils

Maish has transferred these icons and diagrams into Visio stencil format, so that you can now use them in your Visio architecture diagrams! Thanks, Maish!

The specified document was not found.
Library VMware Icons and Diagrams

Rodos writes up his Migration Methodology

Our new moderator, Rodos, has also written his first comprehensive proven practice on the popular them of migrating from physical servers to virtual machines. Recognizing that this challenge is more about a well planned and executed process rather than which tools you use, especially when working to scale, this document is a true fountain of knowledge.

Proven Practice : Migration Methodology

Rob Waite syndicates the NetApp best practices

Rob Waite from NetApp has kindly syndicated the fantastic best practices document into VIOPS.

NetApp and VMware VI3 Storage Best Practices

Greg Petras on Linux on VM

Greg has posted a link to a document he's found useful, to save others struggling with searching the internet...

Linux on ESX

Ken Thacker kicks of the VMworld Harvesting project

In the VMworld Harvesting project, Ken Thacker as kicked things of with the session catalogue:

VMworld Harvesting List

Who will be the stars next month - could it be you? Learn how to add your knowledge to VIOPS in How to create a proven practice document

New Documents

20 new documents highlighted for February 09

The specified document was not found.
NetApp and VMware VI3 Storage Best Practices
P2V Decision Tree
Proven Practice : Migration Methodology
Library VMware Icons and Diagrams
Integrating EMC Clarriion ISCSI with ESX 3.5
How to shutdown ESX/ESXi from APCUPDS using VI Perl Toolkit
How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS
Proven Practice: Integrating CommVault Galaxy 6.1 SP4 with VCB 1.1
Steps to setup EMC Clariions for VMware Site Recovery Manager
VI3.Blueprint Project
The specified document was not found.
The specified document was not found.
The specified document was not found.
The specified document was not found.
Proven Practice: Using Athene to recycle VM’s
Proposal: VIOPS Specialist Interest Groups (vSIGs)
VI3 Event Management Workshop
Virtual First Policy
Linux on ESX

Hit Parade

The top ten documents of February 09, were:

Position	Document	Last Month	Movement
1	Library VMware Icons and Diagrams	N/A	New Entry
2	The specified document was not found.	N/A	New Entry
3	Steps To Create a 2-Site SRM Demo Environment on a Laptop	N/A	New Entry
4	Proven Practice: 20 Questions from IT Security Professionals	N/A	New Entry
5	Proven Practice: Integrating CommVault Galaxy 6.1 SP4 with VCB 1.1	N/A	New Entry
6	Resources: Top 50 Virtualization Security Questions	5	-1
7	Proven Practice : Preparing for a Physical to Virtual migration (P2V) - a guide from real world experience.	6	-1
8	Proven Practice: Integrating VCB with Netbackup 6.0 and vRangerPro	N/A	New Entry
9	Resources: Virtualizing Citrix / XenApp	N/A	New Entry
10	Updated: EMC Celerra VSA and VMware SRM Installation and Configuration	N/A	New Entry

Hot Topics

The top ten most popular topics in February 09, were:

VIOPS Monthly Bulletin for January 2009

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:19:54 GMT

This report is intended for VIOPS community members to update them on the last month's progress.

This report is produced once at month, at the end of the month, and is published in the VIOPS Community Zone.

Keep up to date with news from the Community Zone with RSS

Outline

Community News
Top Participants
New Documents
Documents Top Ten Hit Parade
Hot Topics

Community News

Welcome to the first Community News article of 2009!

Looking back on January, the highlights were:

Development site finished and ready for the production push in February
Ten new proven practices added
Traffic to the site has increased by ~50%, and we are getting more regular visitors coming back again and again

Top Participants

New users, new content - and more from our established authors

Rob Ford at Metron add to his company's existing quality contributions on VIOPS with the publication of PROVEN PRACTICE: IMPLEMENTING ITIL V3 CAPACITY MANAGEMENT IN A VMWARE ENVIRONMENT.

We also had a new member write their first document, with VMware Technical Account Manager, Horst Mundt, contributing How to use trusted certificates with How to use trusted certificates with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

Another new member, David Antkowiak, created his first document Operational Test Requirements. Thanks, David!

The virtualization guys at EMC, Chad Sadak and Bernie Baker, have finally joined our growing community and contributed their excellent document Updated: EMC Celerra VSA and VMware SRM Installation and Configuration.

Cormac Hogan, VMware Technical Support-extraordinaire, has continued his purple patch by adding three SRM docs:

Perhaps the biggest hit of the month has been the Steps To Create a 2-Site SRM Demo Environment on a Laptop, from Desmond Chan of VMware Technical Marketing. Great work (as always), Desmond!

Fantastic quality from all of our contributors, which has attracted some great feedback - check out the docs, and read the comments

New Documents

The ten new documents of January 09, in order of publication, were:

Hit Parade

The top ten documents of January 09, were:

Position	Document	Last Month	Movement
1	Steps To Create a 2-Site SRM Demo Environment on a Laptop	N/A	N/A
2	Proven Practice: Integrating Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 with VCB 1.5	N/A	N/A
3	Proven Practice: ROBO - Managing Remote ESX Hosts Over WAN with VirtualCenter	N/A	N/A
4	Resources: Virtualizing Citrix / XenApp	N/A	N/A
5	Resources: Top 50 Virtualization Security Questions	N/A	N/A
6	Proven Practice : Preparing for a Physical to Virtual migration (P2V) - a guide from real world experience.	N/A	N/A
7	VI3 Roles and Permissions	N/A	N/A
8	Reference Implementation: Clustering VirtualCenter 2.5 Using Microsoft Cluster Services	N/A	N/A
9	Resources: Virtualizing Microsoft Active Directory	N/A	N/A
10	Oracle 10g Release 2 RAC On RHEL4 Linux Using VMware ESX Server and NFS	N/A	N/A

Hot Topics

The top ten most popular topics in January 09, were:

About Syndication

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:37:47 GMT

Syndication is the process of promoting content external to VIOPS by creating a document that describes that external content and provides links to it.

Why syndicate content?

VIOPS is an expert aggregation point, where a community of experts shares their successful methods in breaking down barriers to deploy and manage VMware Infrastructure.

VIOPS is a community that tries to provide one place to find answers, but does not seek to create unique document for all problems - which would be an impossible task.

Syndicating does three things:

It separates the "wheat from the chafe" by promoting valuable content above less useful content.
It removes duplication of content by using the web to link to documents instead of repeating them.
It provides value by allowing more knowledge to be wrapped around the original source document, such as discussions, feedback, additional content, and so on.

Why bother syndicating, if the doc already exists?

There is a lot of information out there, of variable quality and usefulness. The VIOPS community exists for people to share their successful paths through the jungle of content, and highlighting content to separate the wheat from the chafe is a way of helping each other.

What content can be syndicated?

Anything, from anywhere, that is judged as valuable by an expert in the VIOPS community as something that will provide value (help, guidance) to other users.

Kb articles, white papers, technotes, user guides - if it is useful, practical and has achieves the objective of providing guidance that is followable by VIOPS users, then it is a candidate for syndication.

Who can syndicate documents?

Any registered VIOPS user, but the final publication approval is made by a core member of the VIOPS team who will check the quality of the syndicated content through a lightweight and fast approval process

How do you syndicate content?

Really easy. Follow these steps:

Choose whether to do the work or not.

If you choose NOT to do the work, but still think it's worth syndicating, then send a PM to John Roche.
If you choose to do the work to syndicate a doc into VIOPS, then read on!

Copy the following text into the clipboard, ready to paste it into your new document:

_{copy from below this line}

Introduction

A paragraph to explain the value of the syndicated document

Intended Audience

What job role(s) will find this document useful, such as VCP?

And how will they find it useful, such as "when designing their VMware Infrastructure solution"?

Outline

This should be bullet/numbered list of the main headers/ToC from the source doc.

Value opener

Change the header of this section to reflect the opening position of the document, such as an Executive Summary or other text that provides a nice intro to the document so that the reader gets a "feel" for the doc and a desire to read on.

Value closer

Change the ehader of this section to offer the final results of the document, or the key points. This should provide enough information to not have to open the document to get an idea of what it really has to say, but on the other hand should not provide all the data from the original doc.

Resources

This is a bulleted list of helpful resources, related to the document and its topic

Authors

Change this section to add the original authors, put logos etc.

Syndicated

Put your details, logo etc.

Disclaimer

You use this proven practice at your discretion. VMware and the author do not guarantee any results from the use of this proven practice. This proven practice is provided on an as-is basis and is for demonstration purposes only.

^{copy above the line}

Create a new document in the "right" community - just pick one that makes sense to you, it can be changed later.
Paste the content from above into the new doc, put a good Title in and some Tags, and click Save Draft
Now start to Edit Document to add value into the syndicate wrapper, and provide a link to the source document in both the Resources section and in one of the other major sections such as below the Outline.

About Content Pipeline

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:24:51 GMT

VIOPS is now driving too many docs for a small team to manage, and therefore needs to more clearly define the process and use some queuing tools to manage the workload.

There are many daily suggestions for VIOPS content and these get lost in the noise and dropped off the priority list with the current system: this is an attempt to fix that because all of the suggestions are great and deserve better.

The content pipeline does not include VIOPS project deliverables like the VI3.Blueprint project.
The pipeline collects unplanned and unexpected requests and makes sure they get managed.

The first of these is the Content Pipeline which is implemented on VIOPS as a task list.

Content Pipeline 2009Q1

The four-step process to use the Content Pipeline is as follows:

1) Create task Potential VIOPS content is identified by any registered user by creating a new task in the Content Pipeline.

2) Task Info In the task information, the specification for the content should be entered and this should be simple an introduction, intended audience, outline, resources, authors.

3) Assign Task The task should be assigned to the person submitting the content, if they want to write it themselves, or assigned to Steve Chambers or one of the other community members. Assigning it to Steve means he will either do it or find someone else.

4) Due date The task date should be within the quarter, ie. if the task is created in Feb then the quarter is Q1 (Jan-Mar).

Any documents that are submitted for approval will be checked against the Content Pipeline - if they are there, they will be marked as completed by the approver. If they aren't there, then the doc will still be approved and added retrospectively to the task list as an exception.

The process is light-weight and helps us get even more content onto VIOPS with the same resources.

Without this kind of process we will all drown in documents, people will get frustrated and move on: let's avoid that, and make this a well managed, easy place to live.

Use the Content Pipeline, and feel happy

Proposal: VIOPS Specialist Interest Groups (vSIGs)

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:24:31 GMT

Introduction

This document proposes the formation of several special interest groups to create gravity around key virtualization topics. Is this the right timing; does the goal look right; is the structure sound?

Intended Audience

The VIOPS community leaders and members, so that the idea can be refined and hard-baked and then acted upon.

Outline

The proposal has the simple format:

Problem
Solution
Justification
Objectives
Costs
Benefits
Known Risks
Plan

1. Problem

There are identifiable expertise domains forming around virtualization. An expertise domain can be thought of as the knowledge and experience of a group of people who are trying to solve similar problems - hard to pin it down, but when you see the list it is more obvious:

Strategy - financial justification, proof of concept, roadmap
Design - multi-discipline design of services on VMware Infrastructure - patterns and anti-patterns
Network - integrating VI with this established discipline
Storage - integrating VI with this established discipline
Security - operations, policies, procedures and tools
Orchestration - automation techniques from Powershell through to Lifecycle Management
Operations - day-to-day administration, including standard operating procedures, and linking in to ITIL processes
Capacity Management - demand management, VM recycling and other topics
Availability - resilience and recovery, from redundant architecture, to HA clustering and SRM dual-site, not fogetting data recovery with VCB.
Applications - virtualizing applications, and moving to vApp including appliances and OVF

These domains contain knowledge and patterns for success, as well as anti-patterns and "what not to do" lists. However, despite these recognizable domains, the experts are dissipated around the world, across multiple organizations and timezones, and with snippets of knowledge spread across online knowledge sites such as blogs and vendor forums.

The problem with this lack of organization is most keenly felt at the consumer end by those who have an immediate and urgent need for help in a domain; but there is also a problem experienced by the providors of knowledge because there is no industry recognized meeting place for them to demonstrate and be recognized for their expertise.

These problems are recognized by VMware in the voice of their customers who, because they find it hard to find, access and understand the expertise to help them overcome challenges, do not get as many benefits from virtualization as they might - or at least they take longer to do so.

VIOPS is a new community extension to VMTN to address the wider challenges to virtualization, beyond the standard forum "break/fix" discussions, and attracts tens of thousands of visitors each month searching for expertise across these domains.

How can VIOPS better help consumers find the expertise they need; and how can it help the experts meet the consumers?

2. Solution

VIOPS is a new extension to the VMware Technology Network to extend the available online features from "break/fix discussions on product features" to a wider operational and pro-active approach to planning, deploying and operating well-crafted, fit-for-purpose virtualization solutions on VMware technology.

Documents on VIOPS come in several flavours:

Proven practices are the most common type, and encapsulate a problem solution by showing who has solved it, and how they did it, in an unambiguous explanation. These documents complement and often refer to kb articles, white papers and case studies. These are written by VMware consultants, partners and customers.
Resource documents are like web indexes for a specific topic. The document will contain guidance and references, compiled by domain experts, and bring together many useful resources on a specific topic (e.g. Virtualizing Active Directory).
Syndicate documents are direct link references to valuable resources on the web. Rather than repeat and/or re-write documents for VIOPS, instead a document that might exist on blog that has been recommended by the VIOPS community can instead be described in VIOPS and linked directly to.

These documents are currently written by a mixture of VMware, partner and customer experts but with no program to order the contributions around any particular program or expertise.

The next logical step for VIOPS is to form groups of specialists to provide focus on documents in their knowledge domain. The groups should be called VIOPS Specialist Interest Groups (vSIGs) with a charter that describes their format and activities. A vSIG should:

One vSIG, one Community - Be associated with one specific domain expertise which should have its own VIOPS community area (e.g. Availability vSIG).
Leadership - Have a recognized leadership made up of members from VMware staff, key customer representatives and key partner representatives, and this should be described as a vSIG Council.
Charter - The vSIG Council should define, agree and work to a vSIG Charter that simply states their activities such as regular meetings, communication plan, and team activities such as developing expertise content, and approval process for VIOPS documents.
Open to join - Anyone should be able to attach themself as an interested party to one or more vSIG, and to do so they only need to register their details on the VIOPS site.
Open to contribute - Any registered user can submit a document for approval and it wil be approved according the current simple rules for approval.
Approved documents - The vSIG can decide to offer a "standard" by committing to describe and maintain a special approval process so that special documents are marked as "supported" or "vSIG Approved" which implies a deeper quality check.
Pipeline - the vSIG should maintain a pipeline of contributors and content that can be used to drive a content roadmap.
Webcasts - the vSIG should deliver a minimum of one webcast per quarter on a topic of their choosing, and confirmed by a poll of their interested readers.
Ask the expert - there should be a process for queuing requests for information to the vSIG, which is different from random, unmanaged questions on the forum.

3. Justification

The disjointed nature of the web means that virtualization users are having to work harder to find the expert resources they need online, which delays their projects and benefits.

Virtualization experts are trying to reach out to these consumers via their own blogs but this means there is a loose federation that is only known amongst fellow experts, and means that experts find it hard to reach a larger audience.

Providing a marketplace for consumers to meet the experts in an organized manner would solve both problems.

4. Objectives

The objective of this project is to establish several vSIGs and ensure they have their own community on VIOPS to support their operation. Each vSIG should have its own charter and team. The first run of this should be to form just one or two vSIGs and test the format before launching the others.

5. Costs

The only costs are volunteer time, and the cost of leveraging established VMware resources such as VIOPS and VMware event facilities for webcasts. Additional costs should be identified as the vSIGs develop their Charter and plans.

6. Benefits

There are multiple benefits to the vSIG format:

VIOPS will benefit as an online tool because the vSIGs will know how to better meet the needs of the consumers and experts in their domain. An improved online service helps consumers solve their problems faster, and experts should find more business faster.
Consumers/customers will benefit for free access to high quality and well maintained content, which they can interact with and influence direction of via vSIG participation.
Producers/experts will benefit from free contributions via VMware extensive reaching online communities (VMTN has over 600,000 users and was voted #3 in most important websites to use).

7. Known Risks

The risks to the success of vSIG are:

Securing the right type of leaders at the right time. To kick off the vSIG requires more effort than that to keep the effort going once it is established.
Securing the commitment of the leaders. The best people are usually the busiest people, so there is a risk securing sustained effort.

8. Plan

The following high-level ten-point activity list should form the basis of a more detailed plan.:

Agree vSIG structure in VIOPS team, and with Technical Services and other stakeholder teams.
Select two vSIGs to trial the program.
Identify and tentatively appoint VMware specialists to each vSIG.
Identify and tentatively appoint partner specialists to each vSIG, from the TAP and VAC programs.
Identify and tentatively appoint customer specialists to each vSIG, from the VMware Customer Council.
Agree the vSIG charter and plan, including initial metrics.
Launch the VIOPS community for each vSIG.
Schedule first vSIG leadership meeting.
Schedule first vSIG public webcast.
Review progress and launch other vSIGs

VIOPS Twitlist

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:43:28 GMT

If you're not a tweep, you should be - go sign up at twitter.com

If you have an account, tell me your @twitter ID either on a comment on this doc, or on this thread, and I'll add it to this twitlist.

VIOPS Twitlist

Get a peer review

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:46:54 GMT

The biggest value our users get is the access to thousands of their peers who are solving the same problems but in different places: don't suffer alone - reach out to your peers!

Who is out there amongst my peers?

The majority of users are VMware experts but there is a growing band of network and storage experts, as well as management and operational professionals.

You can help find the person you want at the top of your document - see the template example below.

What kind of work gets peer reviewed normally?

The kinds of work put into documents for peer review are, but not limited to:

I am evaluating storage technologies, here's my approach and thoughts - comments/peer review targeted @ storage/ VMware experts.
I am desiging my monitoring approach, here's the diagram / decisions - comments/peer review targeted @ monitoring/VMware experts.
My thoughts on capacity management, here's the process and tool I'm thinking off - comments/peer review targeted @ capacity/VMware experts.

How do I get my work peer reviewed?

The format is simple, the process is easy:

1. Copy the following text into your clipboard ready for step 2.

Introduction

The goal of the work - is it a monitoring solution? A backup solution?

Solution outline for monitoring VMware Infrastructure.

Peers required

Job role of the peer who might be most able to help you.

Fellow VCPs and IBM Tivoli experts.

eview asked for

Review asked for

In one or two paragraphs, clearly state what you want the peer to focus on.

Please can you check the high level components (have I missed any?) and my sizing assumptions. Please feel free to add anything I have missed, or refer me to some standard that I can learn from. Thanks!

Resources

Bulleted list of material you used in the preparation of your work, to save people referring you to links you' ve already considered

http://vmware.com/techresources/128

Details of Work

This is where your work goes, or you can attach a document and refer to that.

2. When you've copied the above text into your clipboard, click here to create a document to put your request in.

How to create a proven practice document

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:19:55 GMT

Here's the lightweight process

1. Find the community that fits your practice (don't worry if you get it wrong, the community folks will help find the right home)

2. Create a document

3. Then select "Write a new document"

4. Put your content in, make it look like the template below (click on example to enlarge). There is a template at the bottom of this doc that you can copy & paste with to save you writing this out

5. After you've written the document, you can do a number of things:

Attach a document - this can be instead of writing out content in the main doc (but always add the headers above).
ALWAYS add Tags. The minimum is "proven_practice", but check out some of the others to get an idea. Product names, job roles, company names, busines verticals - these are all good tags.
If you are going to Submit for Approval straight away, then leave "Users who may edit:" set as "Anyone" - this is a collaboration site - and click "Submit for Approval"
If you want to keep this as a draft and work with someone on this prior to publishing, then in "Users who may edit" select the other VIOPS user(s) - and click "Save as Draft"
Always leave Comments open.

6. Wait for the approver to get in touch about adding more content

The template for copying & pasting

Paste the following into your document.

Introduction

explain why this proven practice came about, what problem does it solve?

Intended Audience

what kind of organization would this suit? - company size, business vertical, size of virtual infrastructure- which job roles will be interested in this - a VCP? A CCNA? An IT Manager? A Change Manager? Head of Operations?

Outline

briefly list the steps in the practice, in number order

Author

company logo + bio- author(s) name, email, bio

Resources

link to this document as a minimum- other links to white papers, KB articles, case studies, VMTN etc.

Disclaimer

Title of proven practice goes here

...and the unambiguous, prescriptive and actionable text goes here

How to: Request a proven practice

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:19:22 GMT

Didn't find what you were looking for? This document explains how to request a proven practice.

Proven practices are provided by the community of people involved in VIOPS - these people come from the ranks of VMware staff, the many partners of VMware, and from the customers using VMware.

If you can't find what you are looking for it doesn't mean it isn't possible, and the likelihood is that someone out there has the answer but they either haven't had time to create the document, or the reason to.

By you requesting a proven practice you are starting the birthing process! Without you requesting a proven practice, it might never be born and others like you will not find it either. Be the first to request a proven practice and be part of the team who develops it.

The Proven Practice Process

It is really simple to create a proven practice, but it involves a team of people and a number of discrete stages as depicted below.

Here are the steps explained:

Proven practices are born of:

Discussions : Does anyone know how to....?
Ideas : Wouldn't it be great if....
Experience - I creatively solved this problem by....

All of the above can be discussed in the relevant VIOPS zone - for example, if you have a question about Availability, start a thread in that zone.

The important step is to take one of the above and start a proven practice. If this step is not done, then the thread wil be lost over time and so might the opportunity for that proven practice...

To start the proven practice, post a request in the right VIOPS zone or create the document yourself with some text in it to describe the idea about the proven practice and click on Submit for Approval - this will alert the zone leader to this new proven practice and they will approve and provide guidance.

If you post a request instead of creating the document, make sure that at some point you do the create document step, and not let the thread die...

WIth a document created you can develop the draft with other like-minded folks on the community. Use the Manage Collaborations section at the bottom of the document whilst in Edit Mode to add users who can edit and approve this document. For example, if you are the creator of the document and you are working with charu@vmware.com, you can add him as another Editor and also an Approver. Whlst the document is in draft mode, only you and him (and the administrators) can see the doc - it isn't public.

You can make edits to your document and keep saving it in draft mode. Only people you have allowed in Manage Collaborations (in Edit Mode) will be able to see it, edit it, and approve it (plus administrators).

You can show people your draft in progress by either saving it as a PDF and emailing it to them, or use the Email option to send it from VIOPS (where you can attach it to the email).

If this is a real proven practice, does it look like one? Does it have three sections - Metadata, How to use this document, and then the main content?

When you are ready, click Submit for Approval and the administrator will, within three days, review and either Approve or Reject your document. In either case, you will have comments as to why and what to do next.

If your document was rejected, act upon the guidance by editing your document and again Submit for Approval.

If your document was approved, now you need to promote it! Get blogs to point at it, send it to our colleagues, show the world