2012: A year of blogging and tooling

It's this time of the year again ... time to look back on what you have achieved this year ... the time of annual reviews, and here is mine.

In 2012 I developed new tools for the community and continuously updated them:

• The ESXi 5 Community Packaging Tools help developers to create software packages for ESXi 5.x in the official and VMware proprietary formats VIB and Offline Bundle.
• ESXi-Customizer-PS is a PowerCLI script that greatly simplifies and automates the process of creating fully patched and customized ESXi 5.x installation ISOs using the VMware ImageBuilder snapin.

I have set up the HP & VMware Links page that provides lots of useful links to HP software and documentation related to VMware vSphere - and tried to keep it updated and also posted several articles with HP related news.

And here are some highlights of this year's posts. Time to look at now if you missed any of them:

• The ImageBuilder Deep Dive series (part one, two and three) explains how to use VMware's Powershell snapin for creating customized ESXi installation ISOs.
• The SBHVL (Small Budget Hosted Virtual Lab) series (part one, two and three) is about setting up a hosted virtual vSphere Lab-in-a-box.
• The Daemon's VIB series (part one, two and three) provides some guidelines for developing and packaging software for ESXi 5.x.
• One of the most viewed posts this year was How to update your (free / whitebox) ESXi server to ESXi 5.1.
• Another popular post was my guide to ESXi 5 patching: Are ESXi 5.x patches cumulative?. An outcome of this post is my ESXi 5.x Patch Matrix.

My New Year's resolution for 2013 is to be as productive as I have been in 2012. Be sure to subscribe to my blog via RSS feed, Google+ or Twitter to not miss a post.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!