Submit a nomination for the next VMTN Community Warrior. This program will continue to recognize users who commit time and energy to engaging with peers in the VMTN community. Learn more.

Congratulations to VMware Technology Network’s newest Community Warrior, @continuum for being a beneficial contributor to our community. We are truly thankful for everything you do to help the VMTN community.

Learn a little bit more about @continuum…

Which VMware communities are you involved in?

I started with Workstation as I had no access to ESX compatible hardware until about 2008.
Later I got quite involved in the Converter forum – I even developed a LiveCD  for Coldclones when VMware decided to discontinue their own version. Nowadays I rather search for recovery related posts in all forums. Even if I miss a post myself – other community members tell folks to contact me directly when they post any recovery topics.

What is the most difficult thread you’ve addressed on VMTN?

The most difficult thread I ever addressed in VMTN was the challenge to run VMware Workstation on top of a Windows LiveCD. Normally VMware Workstation requires a user-account to run on Windows but a Windows LiveCD only uses one SYSTEM account only.
So everybody I asked about this said it is impossible. One and a half year and countless hours later I finally was able to solve  the problem and I could celebrate one of the happiest victories of my  live. The next few years I offered a construction kit for a Windows  LiveCD with VMware Workstation on my website and had lots of happy  users.

What is the most rewarding thread you’ve addressed on VMTN?

The most rewarding thread I ever encountered in VMTN was the request to recover some vmdks from an unreadable VMFS-volume. That thread was in 2007 or 2008 if I remember right.
After some weeks of work I discovered an approach to recover lost vmdks after a VMFS-corruption. Later I added more work into this approach and got better and better the more cases I looked into. 3  years later I lost my boring factory job and thanks to this rare skill set I was able to find a new job for a german VMware Partner Company. Nowadays I run my own small business and offer VMware recovery support to world wide customers.

Are you working on any projects you think the VMTN community would be interested in? (book, blog, etc)
Yes – I maintain a Linux LiveCD that I use to assist users with remote support when they run into problems with VMFS-corruption. Unfortunately  major changes in ESXi 6 and later make this even trickier as before and  I am trying to keep up to date with the latest changes. This LiveCD is available on my site www.vm-sickbay.com. Unfortunately I don’t have enough time to keep this site up to date. At the moment I have a lot of research to do to keep up with the latest changes in the ESXi-product.

Anyway – I still offer my support in all VMTN posts that are somehow related to my recovery skills.

How do you work with VMware day-to-day?

I offer recovery support for VMware customers. So typically I scan VMTN for any questions in my area and if required I get in contact with those users and fix their problems. Another part of my time goes into research as the VMFS-filesystem and all the related recovery topics are only poorly documented – if they are documented at all. I used to work for a german VMware partner for a couple of years – but that company was not interested in my recovery work so I decided to try my luck as a freelancer.

How can people follow/get in touch (Twitter,etc)?
Nowadays I rarely use my twitter account @sanbarrow.
But I actively monitor my skype account “sanbarrow” and answer all questions related to any recovery problems.

Thanks @continuum!

Do you see someone frequently answering questions in your favorite forums? Did someone provide support to you recently at a VMUG or over Twitter? Any community involvement counts. Head to the Community Warrior page to nominate a user, or email jenniferg@vmware.com.