 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. So here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to the VTUG. Here at Gillette Stadium, my name's Stu Miniman. I'm with Wikibon. Go out to all the big enterprise IT events, help extract the signal from the noise. Join for this segment by Paul Bararin, who's the founder of Tinker Try. I had the pleasure of being introduced by Paul by Matt Brender, long time friend of the virtualization community. Unfortunately, Matt's got a new job. He's checking it out in Seattle right now, so he was out of town, and I know he's upset that he can't be here, but he's here in spirit with us. He's also one of the geek whispers and a fellow blogger. So Paul, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, no, it's great to do this, and it's been fun staying in touch with Matt virtually across the country by Twitter. He's been quite active this morning. All right, so your first time on the program. Tell us a little bit about Tinker Try, what it is, and what you do. Sure, about three and a half years ago, I was trying to put together a virtualization lab in my home to stay up to date on V-Sphere, VMware's ESXi hypervisor, and Hyper-V. And I wanted to be able to do it in an efficient fashion where I could leave it running 24 seven. So I had been tired of hand me down gear that burned way too many watts, about a thousand dollars of electricity a month, we're in Connecticut where I live. So I put something new together, and it wasn't being bogged about it. I couldn't find good articles that told me what hardware to buy. So I started TinkerTry.com back in 2011. All right, awesome, Paul. So you are VMware certified, you're Microsoft certified, you're also a VMware V-Expert. What's the kind of stuff you play with, and what are you getting your hands into? Yeah, no, absolutely. I play with mostly consumer level gear, so getting to the lower price point. In my travels, many IT pros ask me, how do I affordably leave something running at home, and what do I buy? So, tended to be about a thousand dollar budget, which can be a challenge, so a Core i7, 16 giga-gram, maybe 32 giga-gram and a RAID adapter, and now for one to maybe two grand, you've got yourself a home, sans slash hypervisor, you can leave running. So my early articles tended to be about RAID controllers and setting up VMware from scratch. How to do it, step by step. All right, Paul, so how much real estate did you have to carve off here? Is there any, you know, tensions at the home is to, you know, boy, the electric bills, you know, been going up, and you know, would have really liked to do something else with that space in the household. You know, what's the reality for the homeland? Yeah, I'm lucky enough to have an unfinished basement, and basically I was trying to bring down three or four hundred watts a month, oh sorry, burning 24 seven, all the way down to under a hundred watts. So, no, the impact in electric bills way under a hundred dollars at this point, and it makes it quite easy to spin up VMs that can be left running, like the open VPN appliance that I've talked to user groups about, where I use it at a conference like this. If I join the wifi, I use open VPN to encrypt everything I'm doing from my iOS device or my Windows 8.1 device. So those little projects, those things I kick around on evenings and weekends, that's what I enjoy talking about at user groups like this. Yeah, so yeah, you're one of those rare breeds, I think Amy Lewis calls it a unicorn. It's like somebody that's actually, they're doing blogging, they're doing it in their free time because they are passionate and love it. How'd you first get started in it and then where's it brought you? Oh, no, good points. So for many years, I've written on internal databases or company databases that come and go. I kind of thought to myself, back in the late 2000s, I had finally finished traveling all over the country, trying to meet people in New England and kind of trying to do a brain dump of my own articles to share with people as I met them at user groups like this. So, like many bloggers, you start that way, you want to have a reference or a URL you can forward to someone, a public way to express yourself. And what that has led to recently was an IBM Red Books opportunity where I worked on IBM XIV storage and VMware over in Germany for a month. It was a really exciting opportunity. That kind of thing wouldn't have happened if I didn't stick my neck out and put myself out there and just say, I've got to work on my public speaking skills, excuse me, and I've got to work on my public writing skills and to put all that together because those are not my comfort areas as a home-based employee for the last five years, I need to put myself out there. That's really my motivation for starting it and it's been well worthwhile. Yeah, it could be a scary thing putting yourself out there at first, but as a friend of mine, Steve Todd said, when you first hit publish, you never know where it's going to lead. And I had great experience. You and I have talked about a little bit is the opportunity you have, which what we call kind of the outside in. Sometimes you say, oh, if I start on my day job and I talk to a lot of the people I'm working in, there's only so much of an audience you can reach, but if I put it out there for the outside, you never know who in the world's going to find that valuable and good content really just finds people and brings it in. So you've been working on the blog for a few years. How has it changed, matured? What do you work on these days? Sure, absolutely. The blog, the fine-tuning part into being the HD videos on YouTube to compliment it. So I'll work on a one-hour video that shows you soup to nuts, how to install ESXi hypervisor and the vSphere appliance on top of it. Basically, the title is, Build Your Own Data Center in About an Hour. That's been extremely popular. So started realizing, wow, okay, YouTube combined with an article to go with it can be a powerful thing in chapter markers and all that. So I got a little more structured in my thinking, putting it together, realizing, okay, to build a home lab for an hour, it's actually 180 steps. Got to write them somewhere. That's part of the thought process. It formalizes it. And then when a new version comes out like vSphere 6 coming, February 2nd, announcements coming, you're more ready for it. You have a process going. You've got HD video and ready to rock and roll. So for me, a lot of it's been learning the tools, learning WordPress. And what's exciting for me next month is my pages tend to load in three to five seconds when you get past around 50,000 visitors a month, which I surpassed a couple of years ago. It gets expensive this little evening and weekend hobby to run it at a decent speed. So what I'm excited to do is move away from WordPress and I'll be blowing the doors off of my current speed. It'll be under two seconds to load even the fanciest pages on my site. So keep an eye on me in 2015. I keep refining. I'm always kind of a speed demon at hypervisors and setting up a lab, but also presenting that to the world in a public way. I don't want my website to be slow or anything I do to be slow. All right, well, Paul, you're preaching the choir when you say video's an important content, a way to get things out, create a one hour video that with 180 steps, can you walk us through how long does that take you to do, both the prep and the shooting of the video and then I gotta imagine you've got a lot of post-processing editing that goes on with that. I do, my videos tend to be almost like a camera is aimed over my shoulder while I'm in a lab. So you're witnessing me doing something that it would be doing anyway in the evening or weekend. Three quarters of a minute up on the cutting room floor never get published because it didn't work or there wasn't value in it, but the ones that are gems are the ones that are almost off the seat of my pants. There's no script when I'm doing that hour video. There is some cutting room activity, some parts are boring because it's just taking four minutes to do such and such. But that process where I'll probably do 10 times building the lab from soup to nuts including editing in host files so you don't need a DNS simplifying it, making it as few steps as possible rather than complicated so that people would actually embark upon this on half a Saturday on a weekend rather than be too, find it too daunting to ever take on. Once I get the process refined, then I know what I'm gonna publish in the actual production of the video, the final cut might take five cuts, probably 10 hours of video whittled down to one hour. You're right though, it's a one or 200 hour project but I only do that every 18 months or so, those big posts where a one hour video takes a while. All right, so Paul, I'm sure people out there are watching this, boy, that's a lot of work. You know, what's the return on that for you? The feedback is constructive meaning I don't seem to have trolls on my YouTube comments or on my discuss comments that are open to the public. Wait, are you using the same internet that we are? I know, it's not a nasty world on my site which is great. I think my articles tend to be more intermediate and advanced users that are in the IT profession and the comments they're leaving are, did you know the Intel brand of the LSI adapter came out with new drivers last weekend that actually allows monitoring in a hypervisor that's reliable, that feedback that helps me make a better article for the next run. That's what I get out of it, the articles and my own comfort in my IT scales are all improved by putting myself out there. So I have no regrets about deciding to go public with my work a few years ago. It's been nothing but an upshot for me. All right, yeah, I guess the question is, is there other ways to monetize this or is this just a passion of yours that you're giving back to the community? Okay, oh, good questions. Buysell ads lets me separate myself from advertisers. So if someone wants to click on buy ads based on the right, they can do that. I don't really want to talk to vendors directly. I blog about what I feel like on the weekends. So they do help me keep the lights on and pay the bills. And YouTube videos to a smaller extent as well. Not as much as cute puppies or kittens. But yes, the longer video of an hour having many people watch it is exciting for me to realize in the comments you get hundreds of comments sometimes in the more popular videos. You're making a dent across the globe and that just feels good. It's addictive, like any hobby, but I try to keep it in control and I try to stick with articles that I'm writing that no one else has ever written. If I've already read it somewhere, I'll point to there, send a Google Plus or a tweet about it. I'm not going to reinvent it, right? Just for clickbait, clickbait. I'm just going to try to keep sticking with articles that are truly unique, something I figured out and had an aha moment and quite enjoy sharing with the world. All right, so Paul, last thing I want to ask is what's exciting you these days, either the virtualization space or some of the other technologies that you've been playing with? Caching. So when I said LSI raid controllers is one of them, that is OEN by many brands. Yeah, and of course, caching has nothing to do with money. It's about the storage caching. Yes, and using SSDs in your home lab. So three and a half years ago when I started the site, it was a little pricey to do. Now if you can get an M.2 SATA card for one terabyte, well, I'm not quite there yet or at half a terabyte, but my laptop has a terabyte in it now for under $400, not such a big deal anymore. So my virtualization lab, I'm pretty much done with spinny drives. I'll get a six terabyte for some backups, but for where all my VMs are going to live, I don't want to wait for nothing. I don't even need a cache. Reads and writes are on the SSD for the VMFS data store, you're good. But even those backups, I backup 10 to 12, maybe even 14 friends and family laptops that are not even in my house. They're coming in over UPN and doing a daily differential backup to my mother ship, my ESXi based server. I want SSD caching even for that. So I'm always about speed and trying to find something that's affordable for someone who's IT certified. Some of these companies make that a lot cheaper, meaning they'll give you NFR code or more than just a 30 day time bomb to try it. So that's where becoming a Vexpert in 2014 really empowered me to get my hands on more code than I had a chance to before. All right, Paul, I want to give you the last word here. Where can people find more about what you're doing, connect with you and contribute more to the community? Yeah, absolutely. TinkerTry.com in the upper right corner, you've got all the colorful icons to follow me on Google Plus and Twitter. I'm most active on those two areas. Google Plus, do you work for Google? No, but I find it's good technical discourse there that you've got screenshots, you can send up decent media. Twitter I find very constraining. So I have something a little more to say that's not quite a full blown article, but it's way more than a tweet. I tend to use Google Plus. Yeah, I totally agree with you. There's a lot of use cases for Google Plus. I do use it. It's, of course, excellent for SEO, and you can have kind of that mid-level conversation. The interesting thing to see is video rolls out on Twitter more natively. That could be some interesting opportunities for people that leverage video like yourselves and like us. All right, Paul, really appreciate you joining. Great to be able to share with the community things that you're doing. And it's really places like this that help the IT folks really understand what's going on much more than just reading some of the manuals and trying to figure out everything on their own. So thank you for helping to drive the path forward. And so glad you can join us here at the VTUG. We'll be right back with our next guest after a quick break. Thanks for joining.