Category: News

Those who made the Top 50 this year get a free commemorative coin courtesy of Infinio. If you made the top 10 you get gold, 11-25 silver and 26-50 copper. Sign up to get it by filling out the form below so I have your shipping info. Since international addresses can be challenging please include any special instructions that I might need to know for shipping.

So the voting has ended, the results have been tabulated and here they are. There were almost 90 new blogs on the ballot this year and 3 new blogs to make the top 25. This year there was over 2200 votes compared to around 1400 last year. You can read more stats about this years voting here. 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.

If you missed the live results show be sure and watch the replay of the special Google Hangout awards episode that we recorded with Simon Seagrave, John Troyer  and Scott Davis from Infinio 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.

This year any blogger that made the Top 50 will get a special 2″ commemorative coin courtesy of Infinio, I’ll have a form where you can enter your shipping details up in a few days. Bloggers who make the top 10 will get a gold coin, 11-25 a silver coin and 26-50 a copper coin. Also if you’d like a free metal holder for your coin go to this post and re-tweet it. Finally we have another vendor jumping in to get you all a cool metal holder ring with lanyard so you can proudly wear your coin around your neck at VMware events, more details on that soon.

Special thanks to Infinio for sponsoring this year and making the giveaways possible. 

Here are the overall voting results…

Here are the full category results…

ESG EVV Whitepaper: ESG, an integrated IT research, analysis, and strategy firm, conducted a detailed Economic Value Validation (EVV) analysis looking at the direct and indirect costs and benefits organizations should consider when evaluating a storage performance investment. Download Whitepaper   |   Learn more about Infinio

Below are the results for the overall voting for the Top 25, full results will be published soon:

And below are the winners of the individual categories:

VMware finally released the list of supported and non-supported vSphere features and VMware products with their new Virtual Volumes  (VVols) storage architecture. I’ve been looking for this in their documentation for VVols and have not found it so I’m glad to see it’s finally available so you can see exactly what is supported and more importantly not-supported that may impact your plans to deploy VVols.

Right now the one non-supported feature that sticks out and is a big one is storage array replication which is not part of the current VASA 2.0 specification. I’m not sure when VMware will support this, hopefully it will be soon as it currently limits VVols adoption. You will probably see storage array vendors supporting this on the array side before VMware supports it through their Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) in vSphere. Note that while storage array replication is not currently supported vSphere Replication is as it is host based and sits above the VVols architecture. Also note though that while vSphere Replication is supported with VVols, SRM is currently not supported with VVols so it may be of little use to you.

Full-scale adoption of VVols will likely be slow in most shops as they both get experience with the new architecture and VMware along with storage array vendors improve feature support for VVols over time. But one thing to keep in mind when it comes to un-supported features with VVols its not all or nothing with VVols and you can continue to use VMFS right along side VVols to utilize features that currently are not supported such as FT and storage array replication. Also remember every vendors implementation of VVols is different and you should check with them to see what storage array features they support and do not support with VVols.

Below is the list of Not Supported features, expect this to shrink over time, be sure and check out the post on the vSphere blog for more details and the source for this information in the VMware Knowledge Base.

Virtual Volumes (VVols) Not Supported and Interoperable Products and Features

VMware Products

• VMware vRealize Operations Manager 6.x
• VMware vCloud Air
• VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.x to 6.x
• VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.x to 6.x
• VMware Data Recovery 2.x
• VMware vCloud Director 5.x

VMware vSphere 6.0 Features

• Storage I/O Control
• NFS version 4.1
• IPv6
• Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS)
• Fault Tolerance (FT)
• SMP-FT
• vSphere API for I/O Filtering (VAIO)
• Array-based replication
• Raw Device Mapping (RDM)
• Microsoft Failover Clustering (MSCS)

…not ready to be revealed yet, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow 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 live Google Hangout tomorrow with David Davis, Rick Vanover, Simon Seagrave, John Troyer and Scott Davis from Infinio. Go here for information on how you can watch the live results show. While you’re waiting here’s a few tidbits of information on this years voting:

• There were over 2200 votes this year (1400 last year)
• Approximately 32% of the votes were from the US, next highest was 7% from the UK, followed by 6% from the Netherlands, 5% from the Turkey and 4% from Australia and 4% from Germany
• Votes came from all across the US except for Maine, Vermont, Montana and Wyoming (no voting available via pony express)

• We had voters from over 60 different countries including Ukraine, Thailand, Seychelles, Slovakia, Romania, Portugal, Philippines, Peru, Oman, Nigeria, New Caledonia, Malta, Mauritius, Latvia, Iran, Iceland, Egypt, Cyprus, Cote D’Ivoire and Azerbaijan.

• There are 411 blogs in the voting this year, last year there were 320
• There were 7 position changes in the top 10
• There were 4 blogs in the top 25 that were not in there in 2014
• There were 2 blogs that were newcomers this year in the top 25
• There is 1 blog new to the top 10

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

Join the vChat gang, Eric Siebert from vSphere-land, David Davis from Virtualization Software and Simon Seagrave from TechHead along with special guests Scott Davis from Infinio and John Troyer from TechReckoning as we countdown the top 25 bloggers based on the results from my annual VMware/virtualization blog survey. This event will be broadcast live via Google Hangouts at 9:00am PST on Tuesday March 31st right here on vSphere-land.com so bookmark this page, get the popcorn ready and come back when it starts. If you want to tweet about this event please use the hashtag #TopvBlog2015.

Of course all this wouldn’t be possible without the support of our official sponsor of Top vBlog 2015: Infinio

ESG EVV Whitepaper: ESG, an integrated IT research, analysis, and strategy firm, conducted a detailed Economic Value Validation (EVV) analysis looking at the direct and indirect costs and benefits organizations should consider when evaluating a storage performance investment. Download Whitepaper   |   Learn more about Infinio

Register for the VMTurbo 5.1 Release Webcast and get THREE CHANCES to win a Turbostack Home Lab, valued over USD $1,600.00!

Now I would encourage you to watch the webcast even if they weren’t giving away a pretty cool home lab kit (that’s what they call it in the UK) as VMTurbo makes a great and unique product for vSphere environments. If learning about a great product wasn’t enough, you also have a chance to win something that you can try it out on. Their Turbostack Home Lab includes everything you need to get vSphere up and running including a host, external shared storage and networking to connect it all together. Below is what is included:

• Intel NUC with Intel Core i5-4250U
• G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 16GB (2x8G) 204-Pin DDR3 Memory
• SAMSUNG 840 EVO 250GB SATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive
• Synology DS415+ Diskless System DiskStation 4-Bay NAS
• 2x Dell 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive
• Cisco SG300-10 10-port Gigabit Managed Switch
• Rosewill 7ft. Cat 6 Network Cable

Now if you aren’t familiar with the Intel NUC, it stands for Next Unit of Computing and is designed to fit a lot of computing power in a small little package. This is great for a home lab as it requires very little space and both noise and power consumption (65w) are very low. You can read the specs for this cool little unit here.

The Synology DS415+ is a great mini storage array, I’ve owned a Synology unit and have always been impressed with them. It’s a very versatile unit that supports both iSCSI and NFS protocols and can be used for a variety of things beyond your vSphere lab. It holds up to 4 drives, supports SSDs and up to 24 TB (6 TB HDD X 4) of space.

So what are you waiting for, grab some popcorn and a beer, go watch the webinar, learn about a great product and maybe you walk away with some cool kit.