March 2014 archive

So the voting has ended, the results have been tabulated and here they are. There were almost 80 new blogs on the ballot this year and 5 new blogs to make the top 25. This year there was over 1400 votes compared to around 1300 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. 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. This year was particularly taxing as I had to manually weed out some 500+ votes from a suspicious source.

If you missed it live be sure and watch the replay of the special Google Hangout awards episode that we recorded with David Davis, Rick Vanover and  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.

This year we have prize giveaways courtesy of Veeam, I picked 5 blogs randomly from the new top 50, the winners are listed below. I was going to choose 5 random voters as well for giveaways but thought I’d do something different instead. Each of the 5 blogs listed below who won a giveaway has the opportunity to run a contest or promotion on their website to pick a winner from their pool of readers, they can do this anyway they want. Whoever they pick will win the same exact prize that the blogger has won, so stay tune to their websites for more details on how you can win.

• Sony MDR-X10 headphones – The IT Hollow (Eric Shanks)
• Jockery Giant Rechargable Battery – Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping)
• Google Chromecast – vNinja (Christian Mohn)
• Pebble Smart Watch – Wahl Network (Chris Wahl)
• Asus Nexus 7 Tablet – mwpreston dot net (Mike Preston)

Special thanks to Veeam for sponsoring this year and making the giveaways possible. Veeam is about to get its 100,000th customer and is launching an interactive contest for a chance to win a trip around the world and other prizes. To participate, you need to register and predict the location of Veeam’s 100,000th customer on the interactive map.

Here are the overall voting results…

And here are the top blog category winners…

…not ready to be revealed yet, 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 live Google Hangout this Thursday with David Davis, Rick Vanover and John Troyer. Stay tuned here for information on how you can watch it, we’ll also be announcing the blogger and voter prize winners (courtesy of Veeam). While you’re waiting here’s a few tidbits of information on this years voting:

• There were over 1400 votes this year
• 39% of the votes were from the US, next highest was 10% from the Netherlands followed by 7.4% from India, 6.4% from the UK, 3.9% from Canada and 3.6% from Germany
• We had voters from 60 different countries including Bulgaria, Cape Verde, Kuwait, Malta, Morocco, Oman, Serbia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Yemen
• There are 320 blogs in the voting this year, last year there were 243
• There were some fierce competition this year in the top 10, there were 9 position changes in the top 10
• There were 5 blogs in the top 25 that were not in there in 2013
• There were 15 blogs in the top 50 that were not in there in 2013
• There were 2 blogs that were newcomers this year in the top 25
• There were 3 blogs that were newcomers this year in the top 50 (4 in the top 52)
• There is 1 blog new to the top 10
• Within the top 10 one blogger moved up 5 places from last year, another moved up 4 places from last year while another moved down 4 places and another moved down 3 places.
• One blogger moved up 19 places from last year to make it into the top 25, another moved up 12 places from last year
• One blogger in the top 50 moved up 123 places from last year, another one moved up 116 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 (hint: Kendrick Coleman made a good run for it but fell way short)…

The VMware Knowledgebase is always a fountain of great information. Even if you don’t have a problem with vSphere, there are a lot of general purpose informational and how-to articles that can help you out and educate you. There are a number of KB articles related to VSAN that you should definitely check-out that contain a lot of good tips for using VSAN. I’ve highlighted a few of them below:

vSphere 5.5 Virtual SAN requirements (2058424)

What you need to know before you start using VSAN, do you have what it takes to be able to run it?

Enabling or disabling a Virtual SAN cluster (2058322)

The simple stuff, how to turn VSAN on and how to turn it off.

Horizon View 5.3.1 on VMware Virtual SAN – Quick Start Guide (2073795)

If you want to run Horizon View on VSAN, here’s everything you need to know to do it.

Retaining virtual machines of Virtual SAN Beta cluster when upgrading to vSphere 5.5 Update 1 (2074147)

If you’re already running the Beta version of VSAN, what should you do to upgrade? Hint: You can’t, move those VMs or lose them

Adding more than 16 hosts to a Virtual SAN cluster (2073930)

VSAN can scale to 32 hosts but apparently they found this out late in the game and didn’t fix their code to let you do that. This KB article gives you CLI way to do it.

Virtual SAN node reached threshold of opened components (2071379)

There are a number of objects that are stored on a VSAN datastore for each VM. There is a soft-limit of 100 VM’s per host with VSAN but there is a hard limit of 3,000 objects. You may see an alert if the number of VM’s and associated objects gets to close to the 3,000 limit.

Configuring Virtual SAN VMkernel networking (2058368)

What you need to know to properly configure virtual networking for VSAN on either a standard or distributed vSwitch.

Virtual SAN insufficient memory (2071753)

Uh-oh, not enough host memory to run VSAN. If you have less than 32GB of RAM in a host you may need to increase it depending on the number of disks you are using.

VMware Virtual SAN datastores cannot store host-local and system swap files (2073944)

There is a special vswp VM file object built into in VSAN but you can’t store other VM vswp files on it that are not hosted on VSAN. You also can’t out your ESXi host scratch partition on a VSAN datastore.

Storing ESXi coredump and scratch partitions in Virtual SAN (2074026)

Here’s where to put your ESXi coredump and scratch partitions when using VSAN.

Adding a host back to a Virtual SAN cluster after an ESXi host rebuild (2059091)

The necessary CLI steps that you need to take to add a host back to a VSAN cluster.

Enabling or capturing performance statistics using Virtual SAN Observer for VMware Virtual SAN (2064240)

If you want to see VSAN performance stats, here’s how to do it.

Adding additional hosts to an existing Virtual SAN cluster (2059936)

It’s pretty simple, not sure why they need a KB article for it but if you don’t know here’s how to do it.

vSphere High Availability (HA) fails to restart a virtual machine when VMware Virtual SAN network is partitioned (2073949)

If you want HA to work on VSAN, make sure the VMkernel adapters used by VSAN do not share a subnet with the VMkernel adapters used for other purposes.

Virtual SAN device encounters a permanent error when devices are not readable or writeable (2071075)

Like your VMs and don’t want to lose then, you might want to set your HostFailuresToTolerate to greater than 1.

Want even more VSAN info, also check out my huge VSAN link page.

Over 1300 people have voted already for their favorite VMware & virtualization blogs. So if you haven’t voted yet then Git-r-done and don’t miss your chance to win some great prizes courtesy of Veeam while showing the bloggers some love. Voting will close at the end of the day on 3/14.

I’ve been hosting the top virtualization blog voting for several years and each year I come across a few inspiring bloggers that try and work the voting system to get their blog ranked as high as possible. This results in dozens and sometimes hundreds of votes that hurt the other legitimate bloggers out there. While this is a popularity contest, it’s aimed at voters who actually read blogs and can judge them based on what they read. It is not a general popularity contest for people who think vMotion is a V-Tech game and have no clue what virtualization is. The voter pool should be your blog readers and not all your family and friends and everyone else you know on Facebook. However if your grandma does know what a vSwitch is by all means have her vote.

What’s an obvious sign of a suspicious vote? When all 10 blog selections include your blog and the 9 alphabetically that come after it and your blog is ranked #1. Repeat this over and over and over with many of them coming from the same IP address and the suspicious votes clearly stand out. I’ve been doing this long enough to know what a legitimate vote looks like and if I have to look at every single vote by hand to make sure the votes are legitimate I will. Fortunately my survey tool collects a lot of data on voters such as their city, country, IP address, referring URL and more to help make it easier to spot suspicious votes. I then delete any vote that looks suspicious and will have a negative impact on the results of the survey.

You may be a good blogger but don’t expect that you’re going to become popular overnight. It typically takes years for you to get noticed and gather a good following. You can accelerate that by putting in a lot of dedication and hard work, not by trying to stuff a ballot box with bogus #1 votes to try and shoot up the blogging rankings faster. If you want to see how it’s done properly ask Chris Wahl, Derek Seaman, Michael Webster, Mike Preston, Marco Broeken and Cormac Hogan who put in hard work and it paid off for them. Try blogging with integrity and don’t try and cheat the system at the expense of your fellow bloggers. If you work hard at it, it will come on its own, it may take some time but the rewards will be better than if you tried to force it and ended up with a ranking that you didn’t deserve.

Infinio just announced general availability of Infinio Accelerator v1.2 which features support for VMware vSphere 5.5. If you haven’t heard of Infinio you should definitely check them out, their Accelerator product is a pretty slick solution for NAS storage that can give you a big boost in performance by using local host RAM as a storage cache. They offer a free trial version but if you’d like to use it in your lab they are giving away free licenses to the first 100 people that complete this survey.