Category: News

So the voting has ended, the results have been tabulated and here they are. There were around 80 new blogs on the ballot this year and 4 new blogs to make the top 25. This year there was almost 1200 votes compared to around 800 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 great, 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 great new vSphere 5 and View 5 training offerings.

Here are the overall voting results…

And here are the top blog category winners…

Join me and Jonathan Reeve from SolarWinds in a webcast on Wednesday, Feb. 22nd at 10:00am MST on managing performance in a virtual environment. This webcast is based on a white paper that I wrote for SolarWinds and covers why monitoring performance is critical, where to get started, key metrics to monitor, why vCenter Server isn’t that effective and how SolarWinds fills the gaps in monitoring performance. You can register for this webinar here. Hope to see you there!

It’s time to do the annual top blog voting, last year we had almost 1,000 votes that shaped the top 25 list that is published on my vLaunchPad. This year in addition to the traditional top 25 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.

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 more than 50% of posts storage related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have more than 50% posts cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have more than 50% posts VDI/EUC related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have more than 50% posts Scripting related)
• 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 must be less than a year old)
  
• 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 1/17. Once it closes I will use the nominations to build the survey for the top blog voting which will begin shortly afterwards.

I find myself frequently needing to copy files such as application installation files from my workstation to the guest OS running inside a VM. Sure you could do this using UNC paths and shares by connecting to the VM at the guest OS layer and authenticating with the VM and then copying files with Windows Explorer but this can be a pain sometimes. It also means that those files are taking up space on the VM and if its only temporary and you’re using thin provisioning you can’t easily reclaim that space. I also find myself installing the same applications on many VMs and to have to copy the files to each VM can be time consuming.

So instead of messing with copying files through the guest OS layer using a copy utility, I prefer to copy them through the virtualization layer using an ISO file. By using an ISO file I can easily mount it on the VMs CD/DVD drive and then access the files without having to copy them to the VM’s file system. This is the same method by which VMware Tools is installed on a VM, the VMware Tools install binaries are mounted from a special mount point on the host disk partition to the CD/DVD drive of a VM so they can be installed. You’ll notice if you create a VM without a CD/DVD drive that you won’t be able to install VMware Tools and will receive an error if you try.

So you might think, creating an ISO file, isn’t that a pain in the butt as well. It’s actually very quick and easy and once you create it you can use it over and over on any VM to install applications with and copy files to VMs if needed. You can keep a collection of them on your workstation and mount them from your local disk or you can copy them to a host datastore and mount them from there. I sometimes create toolkit ISO images that contain many of the typical applications (i.e. Sysinternals, disk tools, etc.) that I use when troubleshooting problems within a VM. Windows still does not have the native ability to read or write ISO files but there are a number of free tools that you can create ISO files with such as ImgBurn, CDBurnerXP (works on Win7) and ISO Recorder. I usually use ImgBurn but ISO Recorder is even easier as you can select the files/folders that you want to include in the ISO file and launch it via the Windows Explorer menus like below.

Next you simply select a directory and a name to save your ISO file in, click Next and your ISO file will be created.

You can now mount it inside the VM using the virtual CD/DVD drive of the VM by browsing to the ISO file you just created so you can access all the files inside the ISO file from within the VM.

That’s it, quick and easy, takes less than a minute to complete and much easier then having to copy files through the guest OS of the VM.