February 2013 archive

Voting now open for the 2013 top VMware & virtualization blogs

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!


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Top blog voting about to begin – but first a small favor

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

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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

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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

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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

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Veeam Backup & ReplicationTM 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

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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

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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.

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

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