March 2014 archive

2014 top VMware & virtualization blog voting results

top-vblog-2014-2-crop

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.

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…

BlogRankPreviousChangeTotal VotesTotal Points#1 Votes
Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping)1107735774221
Virtually Ghetto (William Lam)26+4559306234
Frank Denneman blog32-1458283129
Cormac Hogan49+5463273531
Scott Lowe blog53-2476264014
NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof)64-2437246734
Virtu-al (Alan Renouf)78+144322755
Wahl Network (Chris Wahl)812+4297201162
Virtual Geek (Chad Sakac)95-4359178311
Mike Laverick107-337516889
vSphere-land (Eric Siebert)1110-135115047
Derek Seaman's Blog1224+12229145139
Long White Virtual Clouds (M. Webster)1321+8178104011
My Virtual Cloud (Andre Leibovici)1414015493120
ESX Virtualization (Vladan Seget)1516+112581131
Kendrick Coleman1622+61497485
LucD (Luc Dekens)1715-21146417
VCDX56 (Magnus Andersson)18NEWNEW10557812
Virtualization Evangelist (Jason Boche)1911-81055087
mwpreston dot net (Mike Preston)2039+191065024
CloudXC (Josh Odgers)21NEWNEW754947
A vTexan (Tommy Trogden)2220-2824428
Datacenter Dude (Nick Howell)2317-66043923
VMGuru.nl (Various)2431+77643524
Erik Bussink2535+106142512
Chris Colotti's Blog2637+11804229
Professional VMware (Cody Bunch)2730+3753956
vXpress (Sunny Dua)28151+1236739111
vInfrastructure Blog (Andrew Mauro)2940+11703740
Viktorious.nl (Viktor van den Berg)3043+13623559
IT 2.0 (Massimo Re Ferre)3134+3633525
vFrank (Frank Brix Pedersen)3298+66723511
Brian Madden3325-8653504
Gabe's Virtual World (Gabe Van Zanten)3419-15653469
Pure Storage Guy (Vaughn Stewart)3513-22653377
Virtual Langer (Jason Langer)3662+26623322
Technodrone (Maish)3741+45332811
vReference (Forbes Guthrie)3832-6583136
Punching Clouds (Rawlinson)3945+6683112
The IT Hollow (Eric Shanks)4049+95030711
2 VCP's (Jon Owings)4136-5572987
VMFocus (Craig Kilborn)4294+52512787
vNinja (Christian Mohn)4373+30562773
Around the Storage Block (Calvin Zito)4426-18582684
Justin's IT Blog4542-3482667
Virtual To The Core (Luca Dell'Oca)46NEWNEW472654
IT Blood Pressure (Dwayne Lessner)4790+43482594
The Lone Sysadmin (Bob Plankers)4852+4502560
DiscoPosse (Eric Wright)49165+116452428
ValCo Labs (Josh Coen)50126+76542400
VMwareMine5182+31412347
vCO Team (Burke Azbill)52NEWNEW532342
VMware Front Experience (Andreas Peetz)53143+90392295
Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat5418-36422242
WoodITWork (Julian Wood)5546-9602241
Tom Fojta's Blog5697+41462201
TechHead (Simon Seagrave)5723-34362174
Perfect Cloud (Rasmus Haslund)58NEWNEW412141
The SLOG (Simon Long)5927-32552121
The Saffa Geek (Gregg Robertson)6051-9462121
VMware Arena (Mohammed Raffic)61NEWNEW442116
Nickapedia (Nicholas Weaver)6259-3472100
vHorizon (Dale Scriven)63104+41422091
VMware Videos (David Davis)6455-9522091
Hypervisor.fr6557-8422084
Chris Wolf blog6647-19412051
vTesseract (Josh Atwell)6787+20462050
vmPete (Pete Koehler)68NEWNEW402025
VMware Tips (Rick Scherer)6953-16432012
vClouds (Marco Broeken)7038-32422004
Mike Tabor71NEWNEW392003
UP2V (Marcel van den Berg)7254-18351992
Virtualize Tips (Brian Suhr)7348-25331925
VCritical (Eric Gray)7428-46351875
vSential (James Bowling)75122+47361875
StorageIO (Greg Schulz)7669-7381865
Default Reasoning (Marek Z)77206+129291825
Mikes.eu (Roy Mikes)7865-13311804
Hans De Leenheer79155+76311781
MyVirtuaLife.Net (Andrea Casini)80NEWNEW361770
vPirate (Abhilash HB)81NEWNEW301766
vElemental (Clint Kitson)82107+25381751
The Storage Architect (Chris Evans)8363-20341731
I'm all Virtual (Lior Kamrat)84NEWNEW291724
vExperienced (Edward Grigson)8581-4351700
A Day In The Life (Adam Baum)86125+39341693
VMware & Veeam Blog (Karel Novak)87106+19341691
Paul Meehan88NEWNEW421680
SOS Tech (Josh Andrews)89177+88361670
A Crazy Penguin (Andy Wood)9056-34331661
Planet VM (Tom Howarth)9183-8311664
vTricks (Patrick Schulz)92NEWNEW351663
Demitasse (Alastair Cooke)93128+35331651
Ravi IT Blog (Ravi Kumar)94NEWNEW291653
Proudest Monkey (Grant Orchard)95NEWNEW311641
HyperVizor (Hany Michael)96132+36301633
My Virtual Vision (Kees Baggerman)97NEWNEW341631
Virtual Blog (David Hill)9870-28361631
Virtualization Software (D. Davis/S. Lowe)99NEWNEW311632
Aaron Delp Blog100105+5331601
Running-System (Andreas Lesslhumer)101150+49241604
VM Guru (Scott Herold)10266-36361600
50 mu (Rob Koper)10378-25271563
Marco Pol104NEWNEW301565
SFlanders.net (Steve Flanders)105NEWNEW311553
VirtualementVotre (Cedric Megroz)106NEWNEW221554
Virten.net (Florian Grehl)10760-47311540
vmDK (Damian Karlson)108166+58301462
VMware & Powershell (Greg Kulikowski)109NEWNEW311460
Elastic Sky (Paul McSharry)110220+110351451
Virtual Patel (Manish Patel)11185-26291451
By The Bell (Steve Kaplan)112115+3261442
Arnim van Lieshout113120+7311441
vDestination (Greg Stuart)114117+3291420
The Virtualization Practice (Various)11580-35231404
Burdweiser (James Burd)11688-28201395
Vroom Blog (Fouad El Akkad/Alban Lecorps)117NEWNEW241397
Virtual Lifestyle (Joep Piscaer)118140+22291381
Wikibon Blog11929-90281371
Deep Storage (Howard Marks)120139+19271371
Notes from MWhite (Michael White)121NEWNEW251372
VMpros.nl (Sander Daems)12276-46341370
Blog VMware (Leandro Ariel Leonhardt)123NEWNEW221357
Storage Mojo (Robin Harris)12461-63311351
vHersey (Hersey Cartwright)125NEWNEW341351
V For Virtual (Aylin Sali)126NEWNEW291353
Vdsyn (Ayan Nath)127NEWNEW221334
VSpecialist (Michael Poore)128114-14291332
Adventures in a Virtual World (Paul Grevink)129160+31251320
VMware Training & Certification (S. Vessey)130175+45241322
vSamurai (Christopher Wells)13133-98281302
Storagezilla (EMC - Mark Twomey)13267-65281300
The Lower Case W (Matt Liebowitz)13375-58241302
vNoob (Conrad Ramos)134135+1281301
Virtual Future (Sven Huisman)135136+1241290
Craigwaters.org136203+67291290
Everything Should Be Virtual (Larry Smith)137NEWNEW211284
What Would Dan Do (Dan Brinkmann)13877-61231283
Virtualized Brain (Manfred Hofer)139NEWNEW231275
Virt for Service Providers (J. Dooley)14091-49301260
Uber Tech Geek (Marc Crawford)141NEWNEW321265
Cloud-Buddy (Bilal Hashmi)142198+56201250
Virtual Tech (Dan Fallon)143130-13271250
Ray On Storage (Ray Lucchesi)144142-2261240
VDICloudn.nl (Arjan Timmerman)14564-81251243
Virtual Insanity (S. Sauer/A. Sweemer)146141-5251242
VMnerds (Jeremie Brison)147NEWNEW261240
William ter Harmsel148NEWNEW271230
Blue Shift Blog (Kevin Kelling)149200+51221220
Cloud Jock (Todd Mace)150232+82211221
The VM Guy (Dave Lawrence)151110-41221210
Get Scripting152NEWNEW221190
vCrumbs (Josh Sims)153NEWNEW241182
VM Dude (Frederic Martin)154144-10221162
Robert van den Nieuwendijk's Blog155174+19221150
VirtualGeekCH (Various)15658-98191152
Blog.Shiplett.org (Jason Shiplett)157NEWNEW171145
How 2 VM (Aram Avetisyan)158NEWNEW201131
Mike D's blog (Mike DiPetrillo)15984-75261120
VMwareAndME (Santosh Suryawanshi)160NEWNEW181123
vCO Flow (Simon Sparks)161NEWNEW261111
View Yonder (Steve Chambers)16292-70241110
vConsult (Duco Jaspars)16344-119251101
The Data Center Overlords (Tony Bourke)164129-35181101
vCloud Info (Carlo Costanzo)165116-49271100
Michael Ryom166NEWNEW201092
vByron (Byron Schaller)167NEWNEW181094
Thankfully the RAID is Gone (G. Chapman)168170+2201082
ICT-Freak.nl (Arne Fokkema)169102-67271060
Amitabh's Virtual World (Amitabh Dey)170NEWNEW211042
Backup Central (W. Curtis Preston)17189-82251040
Virtualised Reality (Barry Coombs)172173+1201045
Everyday Virtualization (Rick Vanover)173168-5201031
Geek After Five (Jake Robinson)17474-100171032
Matt Vogt175NEWNEW281030
VirtXpert (Jonathan Frappier)176NEWNEW261032
Everything Virtual (Simon Davies)177186+9211012
The SAN Man (Archie Hendryx)178171-7221013
Timo Sugliani179NEWNEW251010
Come Lo Feci (Pietro Aiolfi)180NEWNEW141004
Vinf.net (Simon Gallagher)181111-7023980
Gerbens Blog (G. Kloosterman)182156-2615970
Virtual Bits & Bytes (Niels Engelen)183167-1621960
Penguinpunk.net (Dan Frith)184109-7521952
Cosonok's IT Blog (David Cookson)185217+3216940
Jonathan Medd's Blog186146-4016941
rsts11 (Robert Novak)187NEWNEW15942
Virtual Admin Notes (Anton Zhbankov)18871-11717943
Virtual VCP (Rynardt Spies)189179-1023940
VM Admin (Andy Barnes)190219+2919920
Aravind Sivaraman191161-3024900
Storagebod (Martin Glassborow)192159-3320900
NutzandBolts (Mark Jones)193NEWNEW15891
Stretch Cloud (Prasenjit Sarkar)194NEWNEW17890
Virtualize Planet (Ricky El-Qasem)195137-5811893
vNelsonTX (Brian Nelson)196NEWNEW14894
Amit's Technology Blog (Amit Panchal)197NEWNEW18881
Virtualization Eh (Mark Achtemichuk)198184-1417881
vReality (Tomi Hakala)199229+3018880
Ivo Beerens200112-8821861
Techazine (Philip Sellers)201NEWNEW15860
TinkerTry (Paul Braren)202NEWNEW17860
Virtual Noob (Chad King)203127-7624860
VMworld.net (Andi Lesslhumer)204210+615861
vNugglets (Allen Crawford)205138-6717863
yoyoclouds (Yohan Wadia)206131-7521860
I'm Tellin' Ya Now! (Mike Foley)207218+1118850
SnowVM (Rene Bos)208NEWNEW17854
The Odd Angry Shot (Andrew Dauncey)209NEWNEW18850
Virtualization Express (Karthic Kumar)210NEWNEW17850
VMnick (Nick Fritsch)211227+1617851
Virtually Mike Brown (Mike Brown)212197-1520830
GestaltIT (Various)213145-6817820
Knudt Blog (Brian Knudtson)214100-11418810
Andi Mann - Ubergeek215176-3919800
DefinIT (Sam McGeown/Simon Eady)216NEWNEW15800
I wish I could be a VM (Benjamin Ulsamer)217NEWNEW13796
Storage Soup (Tech Target)218162-5621790
Storage Nerve (Devang Panchigar)219231+1216780
The Eager Zero (Michael Stump)220169-5114781
The HyperAdvisor (Antone Heyward)221154-6713781
Tim's IT Blog (Tim Smith)222178-4411782
VMware Admins (Eric Sarakaitis)223213-1021780
Infoworld Virtualization Report (D. Marshall)224183-4112771
Unix Arena (Lingeswaran)225NEWNEW19771
Empiric Virtualization (Joel Gibson)226NEWNEW15761
GeekSilver's Blog227190-3716760
Messaging-Virtualization (A. Pogosyan)228133-9511762
Pascal's Wereld (Pascal Heldoorn)229NEWNEW15762
Rickatron Blog (Rick Vanover)230108-12219760
Tecnologas Aplicadas (Patricio Cerda)231NEWNEW10762
vWilmo (Geoff Wilmington)232NEWNEW18750
Hosting is Life! (Anthony Spiteri)233NEWNEW13743
Hu's Blog (HDS - Hu Yoshida)23479-15512741
Rational Survivability (Christofer Hoff)235121-11412741
VM Today (Joshua Townsend)236124-11215740
VM Trooper (Trevor Roberts)237204-3315741
Orchestrate This! (Magnus Ullberg)238201-3718730
Double Cloud (Steve Jin)239149-9013720
Pivot Point (Scott Drummonds)24068-17216720
Rickard Nobel24186-15520720
Virtual SMB (Will Huber)242199-4318720
Got DeDupe? (Eric Hagstrom)243NEWNEW12720
Jase's Place (Jase McCarty)244119-12513710
Musings of Rodos (Rodney Haywood)24593-15220710
ThinkCloud.nl (Martijn Baecke)246181-6514710
vBrowncoat (Gurusimran Khalsa)247NEWNEW18710
Virtuwise (Angelo Luciani)248NEWNEW16711
Storage Tuning (Jamon Bowen)249191-5815700
VMexplorer (Matt Mancini)250202-4815701
Virtualized Geek (Keith Townsend)251NEWNEW15701
Keith Norbie Virtual Ideas252NEWNEW14690
Ken's Virtual Reality (Ken Cline)253103-15013690
Phil the Virtualizer (Philip Ditzel)254164-9015691
Dmitry's PowerBlog255158-9713680
vMackem (David Owen)256NEWNEW9683
doOdzZZ's Notes (Abdullah Abdullah)257237-2010674
VMdamentals (Erik Zandboer)258101-15713660
Sean's IT Blog (Sean Massey)259NEWNEW13650
VMAdmin (Fletcher Cocquyt)260208-5215650
SearchServerVirtualization Blog (Various)261242-1912640
Peacon Blog (James Pearce)262148-11415620
Run-virtual (Richard Garsthagen)263134-12913620
Horizon Flux (Tim Arenz)264NEWNEW14601
Virtually Speaking (Dan Kusnetzky)265226-3915590
Virtual Management (Marco Giuricin)266193-7314580
Juanma's Blog (Juan Manuel)267195-7214570
The Virtual Way (Francesco Bonetti)268NEWNEW12571
That Could Be A Problem (Kyle Ruddy)269NEWNEW9560
VirtuallyLG (Lorenzo Galelli)270207-6315560
Gert Kjerslev271NEWNEW13550
Virtualization Information (S. Snowden)272240-3211550
VMwise (Kanuj Behl)273224-4913550
J Metz (J Michael Metz - Cisco)27450-22411531
Tekhead (Alex Galbraith)275NEWNEW13530
VM-blog.info (Mourad)276209-6714530
Peeters Online (Hugo Peeters)277147-13010520
DeinosCloud (Didier Pironet)278215-6311500
Shogan.tech (Sean Duffy)279188-9111501
The Foglite (E. Rowe/A. Scorsone)28096-18411490
Virtually Everything (Phillip Jones)281NEWNEW12490
Stuart Radnidge282172-11013480
Tim's Virtual World (Tim Patterson)283NEWNEW8481
Cloud Computing Infrastructure (Bill Carter)284230-546471
Enterprise Admins (Brian Wuchner)285189-9611460
Jume (Bouke Groenescheij)286192-9410460
Poshoholic (Kirk Munro)287153-13410460
VMBulletin (Rick Schlander)288211-7713460
Eprich (Paul Richards)289233-5612450
Malaysia VM (Various)290113-17711450
VMwarewolf (Richard Blythe)291238-5313450
Blazilla.de (Patrick Terlisten)292NEWNEW10440
Eck Tech (Adam Eckerle)293234-596420
Virtual Potholes (AJ Kuftic)294223-7111410
Logical Block (Ashish Palekar)295NEWNEW10400
Stu McHugh's Virtualisation Blog296NEWNEW8400
M80ARM - Virt. Warrior (M. Armstrong)297196-10110391
Roger Lund IT/VMware Blog (Roger Lund)298241-579380
Virtualization Spotlight (P. Redknap)299123-1767381
Infotech Consulting Blog (Yendis Lambert)300236-646371
Ruptured Monkey (Nigel Poulton)301194-1077371
The Virtual Headline (Pete Del Rey)302228-747370
vPourchet (Valentin Pourchet)303212-917370
Virtualization Team (Eiad Al-Aqqad)304243-6111361
It's Just Another Layer (Ian K.)305216-896330
Joseph Griffiths306NEWNEW9331
TechProsaic (Hal Rottenberg)307239-688310
ITuda (Lieven D'hoore)308214-945301
Virtualizing the D.C. (Tony Wilburn)309235-746300
VM-Ice (Larus Hjartarson)310205-1058300
Blue Gears (Edward Haletky)311187-1245280
Ather Beg's Useful Thoughts (Ather Beg)312NEWNEW5250
VM/ETC (Rich Brambley)313185-1287250
Virtualization Buster (J. Franconi)314225-897240
Jameskilby.co.uk315NEWNEW5230
vTagion (Brian Graf)316NEWNEW7230
The Solutions Architect (Michael Letschin)317180-1376220
Hazenet.dk (Mads Fog Albrechtslund)318NEWNEW4200
Virtually Benevolent (Michael Stanclift)319NEWNEW3171
filipv.net (Filip Verloy)320NEWNEW2120

And here are the top blog category winners…

Favorite Storage BlogVotes
Cormac Hogan427
Virtual Geek158
ESX Virtualization83
StorageIO65
Around the Storage Block63
Pure Storage Guy60
A vTexan55
CloudXC49
vClouds (Marco Broeken)47
Erik Bussink42
Virtual To The Core31
GestaltIT30
Got DeDupe?20
doOdzZZ's Notes18
Wikibon Blog17
Vroom Blog16
Hans De Leenheer15
Penguinpunk.net12
Logical Block11
Hu's Blog9
None of these listed here200
Favorite Scripting BlogVotes
Virtually Ghetto346
Virtu-al223
LucD135
VCDX5669
VMware & Powershell69
vCO Team42
VMware Front Experience38
Technodrone37
Double Cloud32
That Could Be A Problem29
vNoob29
vNugglets28
ICT-Freak.nl27
Robert van den Nieuwendijk22
Virtualize Planet22
Jonathan Medd18
Shogan.tech16
Timo Sugliani12
None of these listed here235
Favorite PodcastVotes
vBrownBag353
vSoup84
Veeam Community Podcast70
Chinwag69
vChat58
Get Scripting57
The CloudCast55
Adapting IT50
VUPaaS42
Data Center Insiders39
StorageIO Podcast39
Virtualization Security Roundtable34
APAC Virtualization Roundtable33
vCatchup33
None of these listed here411
Favorite New BlogVotes
VCDX56172
CloudXC95
Virtualization Software84
VirtXpert71
Everything Should Be Virtual47
vPirate46
Uber Tech Geek44
Vroom Blog41
Virtuwise40
The Eager Zero36
Craigwaters.org35
Amit's Technology Blog32
The Virtual Way32
Tim's Virtual World31
VMwareAndME30
How 2 VM29
Pascal's Wereld28
V For Virtual23
NutzandBolts21
vNelsonTX20
Come Lo Feci18
Empiric Virtualization17
None of these listed here436
Favorite Independent BloggerVotes
Wahl Network143
Derek Seaman's Blog107
NTPro.nl84
ESX Virtualization63
The IT Hollow54
VMware Arena51
Erik Bussink43
LucD42
VCDX5642
VMGuru.nl42
vReference32
Gabe's Virtual World30
Running-System30
Burdweiser29
StorageIO25
Uber Tech Geek24
Virtual Langer24
vNinja24
Vroom Blog23
DiscoPosse21
Virtual To The Core21
Virtualized Geek19
GestaltIT18
The Saffa Geek18
Come Lo Feci17
Viktorious.nl17
Virtualization Software16
doOdzZZ's Notes14
UP2V14
WoodITWork14
mwpreston dot net13
Virtual Patel13
VMware & Veeam Blog12
VMware Front Experience12
vClouds (Marco Broeken)10
vInfrastructure Blog10
DefinIT9
The Eager Zero9
ValCo Labs9
VMwareAndME9
vNoob9
Everything Should Be Virtual8
Virtualized Brain8
Jonathan Medd's Blog7
Penguinpunk.net6
vCloud Info6
Empiric Virtualization5
Messaging-Virtualization5
Tim's Virtual World5
Virtuwise5
Infotech Consulting Blog4
The Virtual Way4
Robert van den Nieuwendijk's Blog3
Pascal's Wereld2
None of these listed here145

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Watch the Top vBlog 2014 Results Show live!

top-vblog-2014-2-crop

Join Eric Siebert from vSphere-land, David Davis from Virtualization Software, Rick Vanover from Veeam and John Troyer from VMware 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 10:00am PST on Thursday March 27th 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 #TopvBlog2014.

The Top vBlog 2014 Results Show giveaways are brought to you by Veeam:

Veeam is Modern Data Protection—Built for Virtualization and the Cloud. Their customers understand that virtual environments bring unique challenges. That’s why more than 73,000 customers chose Veeam to protect over 4 million VMs. Their powerful, easy-to-use and affordable solutions help solve virtualization challenges – making Veeam the perfect fit for the modern datacenter.

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And the results of the top vBlog 2014 voting are…

top-vblog-2014-2-crop

…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)…

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Some good VSAN related KB articles that you should read

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.

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Git-r-done, only one more week to vote for your favorite blogs

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.

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got VSAN? need Links? Check out the world’s largest collection of VSAN Links

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I’ve been collecting links on VSAN as part of my huge vSphere 5.5 link collection and since they are so many I’ve split them out onto their own page and categorized them to make it easy for you to find what you’re looking for. With VSAN set to launch anytime now you’ll want to read everything you can about it so you can start using it. Bookmark this page as it will be continually updated as more links become available every day.

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Pro blogging tip – don’t be an ass – show some class

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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.

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Take a survey and get Infinio licenses for your lab

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.

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