Four days into 2021 and I am doing my final retrospectives on the year just gone. I can’t/won’t even type in the year as most of you reading this wish it absolute hard and destruction. There are reasons why last year wasn’t that bad for me personally and I really don’t want to talk about the good… because I know there was so much bad. Through an accident of geography and choice, I live in one of the most isolated cities in the world and it would have been a monumental mess up to let things be as bad as most of the rest of the world.

That said, on a professional front the year was challenging. When you are robbed of what you love doing then things can become difficult. It’s lucky that I had some serious distractions on the home front to take away from the despair of being locked away… and while we (myself, Veeam, the industry in general) adapted and went online it was not the same. Motivation levels became hard to keep elevated and I think this is represented in my reduced output this year in terms of this blog. At Veeam though, we continued to grow after the January acquisition announcement and we had a very solid year of releases and we continued to make inroads into the market as we roll into our next major v11 Backup & Replication release.

Travel

It started well enough, we me basically flying around the world, going from Shanghai to Prague to Atlanta which a weekend stay in the English countryside. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I started the year relatively close to the center of the pandemic and without doubt the Veeam Velocity SKO was mingling with the virus in the early stages. From there I spent a great couple weeks in Europe and the USA. Little did I know that my delayed and rerouted DFW to PER would be my last flights… still crazy to think that I did close to 60,000 KMs in one month of the year, and that was it.

Blog

Looking back through the statistics generated via JetPack, I posted 83 blogs which is well below my goal of two per week, however given the strange year, I’m happy with the effort… though I know I should have been better in some areas.

One thing that is apparent is that this year, traffic and visits was down across the board… it seems like most longer term bloggers had a 20-25% drop in traffic.

Apparently in January, Google changed their search algorithm again which had an impact… but as the below survey suggests, this might also have a big thing to do with the year we have all had.. and maybe an indication that the Gen-Z/Millennial trend of video content being preferred is making its way into the older mainstream.

Though also.. is the content just not that good anymore?

Top Posts

  1. Quick Fix: VCSA 503 Service Unavailable Error 2020 Update
  2. NSX Bytes: Updated – NSX Edge Feature and Performance Matrix
  3. How to Configure NestedESXi on a Single Host – Part 1
  4. Veeam Backup & Replication 10 – Top New Features
  5. How to Configure NestedESXi on a Single Host – Part 2
  6. Quick Look – vSphere 6.5 Storage Space Reclamation
  7. Quick Post – Installing WireGuard® Client on MacOS
  8. ESXi 6.5 Storage Performance Issues and Fix
  9. Deploying Tanzu with HAProxy on a Single ESXi HomeLab Host Architecture
  10. Quick Fix – No Datastores after ESXi 7.0 Upgrade on SuperMicro with Intel Based SATA Adapters

One thing that was pleasing to see that six out of the top ten were 2020 posts.

Wrap Up

Well… the less said about the year that has just been the better… the one thing I can say is that I am looking to do better on all fronts on this site… more general posts, more Veeam posts and more thought leadership. That is the plan anyway… Thanks for being a Virtualization is Life! reader and I hope you can join me in 2020!