Welcome to vSphere-land!

Well maybe not often, that’s the way they used to do it in Chicago in the old days. I did want to make a plea to get your votes for my sessions at VMworld. I have several I submitted as part of HP and I promise to make them as technical as possible. My Top 10 things you must know about storage for vSphere session is crammed full of technical info, so much so that I’ve had to trim it down twice as it could easily go over an hour.

Before I highlight my sessions I wanted to mention how crazy it’s gotten trying to get session submissions approved for VMworld. Back in the ole days (2008) when I first presented at VMworld, there weren’t a lot of bloggers, there were a lot less partners and VMware had a lot less products. Fast forward to today and there are hundreds of bloggers (200+), hundreds of partners and VMware has a boatload of products. As a result they get a crazy amount of submissions each year and with very limited session slots it’s extremely difficult to get one. What really impacts it the most is that VMware has gotten so big with so many products that they need a lot of session slots to cover them all, that doesn’t leave much for partners, who are guaranteed some slots and that leaves hardly any for bloggers. It’s a shame as there are so many great session submissions each year but there are so few slots to fit them in.

Which brings me to the public voting, VMware lets public voting have an influence on the approved session outcome. Public voting is just a percentage of the methods used to approve sessions, a big part of it is the private content committee judging that is done. With the content committee, every session is given a look over and scored by the committee. Where it becomes extremely difficult is with public voting, there are so many sessions on the ballot that it quickly becomes overwhelming and nobody has time to go through them one by one. Therefore many people skim through them or look for specific sessions that they know about. What becomes really important is the title of your session, which is essentially the curb appeal that draws people in to take a closer look at your session. Many people don’t get past the titles and only look at interesting and catchy titles. When you are confronted with over 1200 sessions to vote on, you simply don’t have the time to look at them all. What I find that helps a bit is filtering on tracks, keywords or speaker names. It’s still a difficult task though, imaging voting for over 1200 people running for president, it’s just too much.

So with that I’d like to point out my sessions and let you take a look and see if you judge them worthy of your vote. I appreciate your consideration and vote or no vote I look forward to seeing you at VMworld anyway. Even if you don’t vote for me you should still get out there an vote.

So the voting has ended, the results have been tabulated and here they are. There were over 80 new blogs on the ballot this year and 4 new blogs to make the top 25. This year there was over 1300 votes compared to around 1200 last year. Voters were asked to pick their top 10 favorite blogs and them rank them from 1 to 10. The votes are weighted so a #1 vote is worth 10 points, a #2 vote is worth 9 points all the way down to a #10 vote being worth 1 point. The total points for each blog were added up to determine the results. It’s a pretty time consuming process for me, some of it is automated but I still have to add up votes and drop them into a spreadsheet to determine the winners.

Be sure and watch the special vChat top blogger awards episode that we recorded with special guest John Troyer as we count up the top 25 winners with lots of color commentary. The vLaunchpad and Planet vSphere-land will be updated soon to reflect the new voting results. Thank you everyone who voted and congratulations to the winners. With so many bloggers out there its a tough scene but I seriously encourage you all to keep at it, the longer you stick with it, the more people notice and will reward you with their vote. You guys are all winners, I know how hard it can be to find the time to blog but do know that your efforts are appreciated and your unselfish dedication makes a difference to a great many of people.

Special thanks to TrainSignal for sponsoring it again this year, be sure and check out their website for their new unlimited IT Training For Only $49 a Month.

Here are the overall voting results…

And here are the top blog category winners…

…you’ll have to wait a few days to find out. I’ve tabulated all the votes and applied points to the votes and have computed the results. We’ll announce the winners on a special vChat episode that we are recording on Friday with John Troyer and should be available on Monday. While you’re waiting here’s a few tidbits of information on this years voting:

• There were over 1300 votes this year
• 47% of the votes were from the US, next highest was 13% from the Netherlands followed by 6.5% from the UK and 3% from Germany
• We had voters from 60 different countries including Mongolia, Uruguay, Slovakia, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Iceland, Estonia, Egypt, Bermuda and the Isle of Man
• There are 243 blogs in the voting this year, last year there were 187
• There were some fierce competition this year in the top 10, there were 8 position changes in the top 10
• There were 7 blogs in the top 25 that were not in there in 2012
• There were 13 blogs in the top 50 that were not in there in 2012
• There were 4 blogs that were newcomers this year in the top 25
• There were 9 blogs that were newcomers this year in the top 50
• There is 1 blog new to the top 10
• One blogger in the top 50 moved up 86 places from last year, another one moved up 110 places from last year

That’s it for now, tune in next week to see the full results and find out if Duncan can retain the crown for #1 blogger…

Voting closes at midnight tonight, so far the voting numbers have surpassed last years with almost 1,500 votes collected since the voting began. The results this year should definitely be interesting with newcomers like Cormac Hogan making a big splash. I’ll tabulate the results by applying weights to the votes and we’ll be ready to announce the results on a special vChat episode with John Troyer that we will record soon.

So if you haven’t voted yet, what are you waiting for, git-r-done!

There are over 200 blogs dedicated to VMware and virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was a year ago and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

So please take all this into account when casting your votes, here are some more details on the voting:

• You can pick 10 of your favorite blogs and also rank them in your order of preference after you pick your 10. The results will be weighted with #1 ranking getting 10 points and #10 rankings getting 1 point. Point totals will be tabulated and from them the top 50 will be determined.
• Blogs are listed on the ballot  in alphabetical order, the current top 50 blogs are highlighted with their current ranking in parentheses, the current top 10 are also bolded so they stand out. So please go through the whole list when making your choices (Duncan ended up on the bottom).
• Again this year we also having voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The choices of which blogs to include in the categories was the result of this survey and my best guessing. I did cut down on some of the categories this year to keep it simple. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.
• Voting will run until 3/1, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special vChat episode with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer.
• Duplicate vote protection is enabled, we’ll be using geolocation, IP addresses & cookies to protect against duplicate votes. This isn’t Chicago, please be honest and fair when voting, any suspicious votes will be tossed.
• If you are not familiar with a blog you can click on it in the survey to view it or use my vLaunchpad to see links to them all. Try not to pick blogs based just on names but also take content into account. There are a lot of good blogs currently not in the top 50 that deserve to be there.

So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey to cast your ballot and reward the best bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them know that you appreciate them.

Special thanks to Train Signal for sponsoring the voting!

After fixing a few technical bugs with my survey, my annual top VMware/virtualization blog voting is just about ready to launch. This is no small effort and involves a ton of work collecting data, building forms, processing data, updating websites, building surveys and much more. It all costs me money paying for the services of a professional survey company. From start to finish this usually takes at least 30-40 hours of my time.

So as a small favor in return I would appreciate if you checkout the companies that sponsor my family of websites and make all this possible.

Zerto

Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions for virtualized infrastructure and cloud. Zerto won Best of Show at VMworld 2011, as well as 2011 Product of the Year Gold Award because our software, Zerto Virtual Replication, is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications. Zerto Disaster Recovery solutions replace traditional array-based BCDR that was not built to deal with virtual environments.

Unitrends

Unitrends, a leader in enterprise-level data protection, offers the #1 all-in-one backup solution for virtual, physical and cloud. Building on over 20 years of industry firsts, Unitrends continues to lead the market. Unitrends is used by IT professionals for backup of their virtual and physical servers and for performing disaster recovery to remote locations or to private or public cloud. Unitrends not only continues to set the standard in virtual and physical server data protection, but its US-based support team boasts a 99% customer satisfaction rate, further reinforcing its reputation for quality.

VMTurbo

VMTurbo delivers an intelligent workload management solution providing service assurance and infrastructure efficiency for cloud and virtualized environments. With an emphasis on prevention, VMTurbo delivers an intelligent and automated control plane for cloud and virtualized datacenters. Easy to deploy and simple to administer, VMTurbo Operations Manager assures application performance, operational efficiency and optimal resource utilization.

Veeam

Veeam Backup & Replication^TM Cloud Edition turns leading public storage clouds into easy-to-use data repositories for your backups. Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition provides the same powerful, easy to-use and affordable backup and recovery of virtualized applications and data you get with Veeam Backup & Replication, but with the added capability of automatically storing your VMware or Hyper-V VM backups with any of 15 leading public cloud vendors, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 or Glacier, Rackspace, and HP Cloud Services.

SolarWinds

Are you on the hunt for virtualization management software that’s powerful, affordable, and easy to use? You’ve found it! SolarWinds award-winning virtualization management software delivers unified capacity planning, VM sprawl control, performance monitoring, configuration management, & chargeback automation across your entire VMware® and HyperV® infrastructure.

TrainSignal

TrainSignal is a Chicago-based company that makes award-winning computer training for IT professionals. We work hard every day to produce premium quality computer training designed to give IT pros in-depth knowledge, build hands-on skills and promote career advancement. Our instructors include some of the top names in IT, who have the credentials and awards to back up their expertise. You’ll find courses from Microsoft MVPs, VMware vExperts, Citrix CTPs, certified experts in Cisco and CompTIA, and more. TrainSignal instructors also make, produce and develop 100% original content that can’t be found anywhere else.

The voting will open tomorrow, so check back here for the announcement.

It’s time to do the annual top blog voting, last year we had over 1,200 votes that shaped the top 50 list that is published on my vLaunchPad. Just like last year in addition to the traditional top 50 voting I’m opening it up to allow voting in specific categories as well to help distinguish certain types of blogs. To do this I have created a survey to allow you to nominate your blog or website for one of the categories that I have defined if your blog fits one or more of the categories, if it does not then don’t nominate it as all blogs on the vLaunchpad will automatically be included in the general top blog voting.

This survey is not the general voting poll for the top VMware/virtualization blogs, this survey is only to nominate your blog for certain categories if it fits. Once the nominations are collected I will open the polls for voting for the top blogs where voters will be able to rate their top 10 blogs and also vote in each of the categories.

You should only nominate your own blog/website, these nominations will be used to populate the category choices when voting opens. If your blog doesn’t fit one of these categories then do not nominate it, all blogs on the vLaunchpad will automatically be included in the general top blog voting. If your blog is not currently listed on the vLaunchPad use this form to let me know. The categories that can be voted on are:

• Best Storage Blog (Must have good percentage of posts be Storage related)
• Best Networking Blog (Must have good percentage of  be Networking related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have good percentage of  posts be Cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have good percentage of  posts be VDI/EUC related)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have good percentage of  posts be Scripting related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• Best podcast (Audio or video podcasts)
• Best official VMware Blog (Blogs part of VMware’s website)
  
• Best Videos used in a Blog (Must have produced a good percentage of videos)
  
• Best New Blog (Blog started in 2012)
  
• Best Independent Blogger (Can’t work for VMware or a hardware/software vendor)
  

So head on over to the survey and nominate your blog or website, the survey will be open until 2/4. Once it closes I will use the nominations to build the survey for the top blog voting which will begin shortly afterwards.

Tis the season for home labs and Veeam will fill your vStocking with a brand new dream home lab. The lab features the bigger HP ML310e G8 servers that are expandable up to 32GB of memory, have 4 PCI slots, up to 8 SFF drives or 4 LFF drives, 2 built-in gigabit NICs and built-in HP iLO.  They are also on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List. So if Santa didn’t bring you a home lab this year here’s your chance to win one. All you have to do is head on over to their site before  Jan. 14th and fill out a form to register to win.

If you’re looking for help and ideas for your own home lab be sure and checkout my massive collection of home lab links. Also Chad Sakac just did a nice post on his own home lab that he recently built. I’ll also be doing a series of upcoming posts detailing my experiences with home lab equipment.

We’ve recently posted vChat #33 with myself, David Davis & Simon Seagrave. This holiday edition episode was recorded on 12/21, the day of the Mayan Apocalypse, we discuss the latest in virtualization, cloud computing, home labs, iPads, storage, our predictions for 2013. and much much more. Enjoy!

Register now for a webinar that I am presenting tomorrow, 12/12 at 10:30am MST with SolarWinds where I review the big things that have happened with VMware & virtualization in 2012:

Virtualization continues to be one of the hottest technologies in the data center as companies increasingly virtualize their physical infrastructures. The evolution of virtualization has been changing at a very rapid pace mostly due to VMware’s efforts in creating their vision for a software defined data center built on virtualized technologies. 2012 proved to be another big year for VMware and virtualization and featured new product releases, glimpses of the future, leadership changes, licensing changes, increased focus on clouds & VDI and more. Join virtualization industry expert Eric Siebert as he reviews all the big things that happened related to VMware and virtualization in 2012.

Head on over to this page and sign-up and I’ll see you there!

This new free tool caught my eye when it was mentioned on an internal email chain, it’s called the HP Virtualization Performance Viewer (vPV). It’s a lightweight tool that provides real-time performance analysis reporting for to help diagnose and triage performance problems. It’s a Linux based utility and can be installed natively on any VM/PC running Linux or it can be deployed as a virtual appliance. It supports both VMware vSphere & Microsoft Hyper-V environments and has the following features:

• Quick time to value
• Intuitive at-a-glance dashboards
• Triage virtualization performance issues in real-time
• Foresee capacity issues and identify under / over utilized systems
• Operational and status report for performance, up-time and distribution analysis

The free version of vPV has some limitations, to achieve the full functionality you need to upgrade to the Enterprise version but the free version should be good enough for smaller environments.

It’s simple and easy to download the tool, just head over to the HP website, enter some basic information and you get the download page where you can choose the files that you want to download based on your install preference.

Downloading the OVA file to install the virtual appliance is the easiest way to go, once you download it, you simply deploy it using the Deploy OVF Template option in the vSphere Client and it will install as a new VM. Once deployed and powered on you can log in to the VM’s OS using the username root and password vperf*viewer if you need to manually configure an IP address. Otherwise you can connect to the VM and start using vPV using the URL: http://<servername>:8081/PV OR https://<servername>:8444/PV which will bring up the user interface so you can get started. I haven’t tried it out yet as it’s still downloading but here’s some screenshots from the vPV webpage:

I’ll do a more detailed review once I have it up and running but it looks like a pretty handy little tool. For more great free tools be sure and check out my huge free tool gallery that contains links to 100+ free tools for VMware environments.

Why would you want your own vSphere lab in the first place, if you read my book I have a whole chapter on it (actually Simon did that chapter), here’s why:

• Exam Study - To provide yourself with an environment where you can easily build a mock production environment to follow examples in any study material you may have and to also confirm to yourself that what you have read in your study material actually works as described in practice.
• Hands-On Learning - Probably the most common reason for putting together your own virtualization lab is to jump onto the kit, wrestle with it and get your hands dirty - breaking it, fixing it and then breaking it again in the process. This is the preferred method of learning for many though for this you obviously do need the luxury of time. Very few of us in IT have the opportunity or access to the necessary non-production hardware during the working day to spend learning a product. With the financially tough times over recent years attending a training course and the often hefty associated price tag has meant that fewer people have had the luxury of learning from a trained instructor making a lab environment a popular choice.
• Centralized Home Infrastructure - Perhaps you are running a home office or need a centralized IT environment from which to run your home PCs for things such as centralized monitoring, management of your kid’s internet access or the family file, music and photo repository.
• Because It’s There (ie: Why Not?) - Some of you, like myself, love to play with new enterprise IT products and technologies, even if it doesn’t have direct application to your personal or work life. A virtualized lab environment provides an excellent platform from which to do this from.

So want your own vSphere lab but maybe are short on funds, no problem, Unitrends has you covered. Unitrends is giving away a complete vSphere dream lab that has all the hardware and software you’ll need to get up and running with vSphere and start cranking out your own VMs. How do you get your chance win this complete vSphere dream lab, it’s pretty simple, just head on over to there website and check out Unitrends Enterprise Backup.

The vSphere dream lab consists of 2 HP servers, HP network switch, NetGear ReadyNAS and the VMware, Microsoft & Unitrends software you need to get everything up and running. I was able to find out some more detail on the hardware specifications:

• HP ML110 G7 servers with Xeon quad-core 3.20 GHz CPU’s that support hyper-threading, this will look like 8 CPU cores to vSphere. These are awesome servers, I have two of the ML110 G6 models in my own home lab, they are quiet, powerful and have 4 PCI slots so you can put lots of NICs in them, they’re also expandable to 16GB or memory. They also support all the vSphere advanced features that rely on specific hardware such as power features, Fault Tolerance and VMDirectPath. You can read the Quickspecs on them here.
• HP V1410-16G Switch, this is a 16-port switch that support gigabit connections, you can read the specs on it here. You’ll need lots of ports if you add more NICs to your servers so you can play around with vSphere networking more, I have 6 NICs in the servers in my lab so I quickly outgrew my 8 port switch.
• ReadyNAS Pro 2TB Storage system, you can read more about it here. I really like the NetGear NAS units, I have one in my home lab and they are very solid, high quality with lots of features.

All in all a nice sweet lab setup, the contest runs from now until Feb. 14th so you have plenty of time to head over there and download and register your copy of Unitrends Enterprise Backup and enter for your chance to win. If if you want to know more about home vSphere labs be sure and check out my massive home labs link collection.

John Troyer asked me to present to the vExperts at VMworld 2011 and talk about my experiences with blogging and writing. I meant to post this a long time ago and forgot, I recently came across the presentation that I made for that event so here it is.

For many, many years, my job role was sort of a swiss army knife of server administration, I managed Windows servers, email servers, application servers, databases servers and much more. I wasn’t particularly passionate about any of the technology I worked with, to me it was simply a job and nothing more. Then about 7 years ago, along came virtualization, the company I worked for wanted to implement virtualization as part of a server refresh/consolidation project. My first experience with virtualization was with ESX 2.5, I was a bit skeptical at first about it, back then virtualization wasn’t anywhere near as mainstream as it is today. I even remember questioning the all your eggs in one basket approach because as a server admin, if that basket ever broke it would make a really big mess for me to clean up. As part of the preparation for the class I had taken a training class and it really opened my eyes to virtualization and was a technology that I found I actually really enjoyed working with. As a result I think for the first time in my life I had found technology that I could truly be passionate about.

For me, virtualization became a defining point in my life and helped launch a whole new career for me. I became very active in the VMTN forums as I really liked sharing my knowledge and experience with others and helping people out. I was so active I achieved Guru status in points (20,000+) in just under a year, despite having not really posted much in many years I’m still in the top 20 in points. I also became one of the early moderators with others such as Jason Boche, Thomas Bryant, Edward Haletky, Steve Beaver and Jase McCarty. The VMTN forums are also what got me started collecting VMware-related links, the same questions would typically come up over and over and rather than answer them in full each time I just posted links that I had collected to other posts that answered them. One day one of the other moderators said why don’t you post your collection of links so I did and from there I started vmware-land.com where I continually grew my link collection. The first iteration was using GoDaddy’s website tonight builder and was pretty crude and basic, from there I built my own site using FrontPage, it gave me more control over the formatting but was a pain in the butt to maintain, you can still see the original site here. I finally moved to Wordpress which made things much easier, I still did a bunch of theme hacking though to customize it how I liked it. I also changed the name from vmware-land.com to vsphere-land.com when VMware made the big name change several years back. I still grow and grow my link collections each week, it’s pretty tedious and time-consuming work searching for and noting quality links and them getting them posted to the right categories.

Unknowingly, the VMTN forums also served as a stage for me to get noticed by others, I had one publisher contact me several years back as they noticed me in the VMTN forums about writing a book for them. I did the proposal for them, they liked it and made me an offer and strangely enough that same day another bigger publisher contacted me as well and made me an even better offer. That really launched my writing career, I had never really even thought about writing before but once I started it just seemed natural and I found that I enjoyed it. This lead to my writing my first book which took about 6 months to write, VMware VI3 Implementation & Administration, which unfortunately had bad timing as it was released the same month as vSphere was. Not to be discouraged by that I launched into my second book, Maximum vSphere, for that one I wanted to make the most of timing this time around and have it launch at VMworld. To accomplish that though I had to write the book in 2 months which I did (I got Simon Seagrave to help me on 2 chapters) and made it just in time to launch at the VMworld bookstore. I haven’t had the motivation to write another one yet, it’s a lot of work, you don’t make a lot of money writing tech books and because technology changes so much they have a short shelf life. Who knows maybe someday I’ll do another.

Around that time I also had Tech Target contact me about writing for them, I started writing for searchservervirtualization.com as a newbie writer back in 2008. I migrated to SearchVMware.com after they launched it and became one of the main writers there for many years until I joined HP. I also was noticed by other Tech Target sites and ended up writing for at least 8 other sites including searchstorage.com and searchdatabackup.com. Being an independent writer was fun, I was invited to events such as HP Discover, VMworld, Tech Field Day and more. I was even one of only four of bloggers that VMware flew into San Francisco for their private vSphere 5 launch event that was held in a small little event room and broadcast on the internet. Sometimes I think back and wonder if I enjoyed writing so much, why I didn’t start writing sooner. For me I think virtualization is what provided me the motivation and the spark I needed to ignite my writing career.

All in all I have a lot to be thankful for and I owe a lot of it to virtualization which has enabled me to be part of a huge community of fellow virtualization enthusiasts and meet a lot of great people from all over the world. Virtualization has provide me with a lot of great opportunities and has really given me a sense of direction, a passion, a purpose and a bright future. So when I sit in front of my turkey this Thanksgiving and think about what I’m thankful for, virtualization is near the top of that list. Thank you VMware for making such incredible software that ignites such passion in those that use it and building a community that brings millions across the world together to share in that passion.

Every year is an election year at vSphere-land! Voting for the annual virtualization top blog contest will begin in January, all blogs that are listed on my vLaunchpad will be put on the ballot. So if your blog isn’t there, now is the time to let me know about it. If I don’t know about your blog, you won’t be listed and you won’t be included in the voting. So head on over to my vLaunchpad and see if you’re listed and that your website URL and twitter/RSS links are correct. If you’re not on there use this form to let me know about it. Be sure and include your blog name & URL, your name and twitter/RSS links.

One thing to note is that I only keep active blogs listed on the vLaunchpad, so any blogs that have not had any new posts in over 6 months I remove from it. I just went through it and removed over 2 dozen stale blogs from it.