Eric Siebert

…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.

There is a ton of work that goes into maintaining my websites, I have to gather and sort through lots of links and information, organize it and publish it. In addition the annual top blog voting contest is no small effort either and involves a ton of work collecting data, building forms, processing data, updating websites, building surveys and much more. 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 that help make all this possible and also give them a follow on Twitter.

Zerto

Follow @ZertoCorp

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. Zerto recently launched a new version (3.1) of Zerto Virtual Replication that you can find out more about here.

Infinio

Follow @InfinioSystems

Infinio Accelerator lets you separate performance from capacity. For a fraction of the price of hardware-based products, Accelerator offers a software-only solution that extends the performance life of the NAS you already have. Accelerator is a virtual appliance that uses server-side caching to minimize the I/O traffic load on central storage. Infinio Accelerator won a “Best of VMworld” award, being named a Finalist in the Best New Technology category. I recently recorded a webinar for Infinio on right-sizing storage for virtual environments that you might find interesting. They also have another webinar available on 5 ways to get better performance from NAS-Backed VMs as well as a great technical video series on content-based caching.

Unitrends

Follow @Unitrends

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. Unitrends recently acquired PHD Virtual, another leading backup company for VMware environments and is kicking off a fundraising effort to support the Special Olympics.

StratoGen

Follow @StratoGen

StratoGen is a leading VMware hosting provider with award winning cloud platforms in the US, UK and Asia. From single virtual machines to dedicated private clouds, StratoGen delivers a powerful yet cost effective cloud hosting solution. The StratoGen Cloud is engineered from the ground up to be extremely dynamic and resilient, allowing you to add more servers or resources instantly. StratoGen hosted VMware services include a 100% uptime service level guarantee. The StratoGen Cloud can be seamlessly integrated with any on-site VMware infrastructure you may have, offering a “single pane” management console for both your hosted and on-site resources. StratoGen offers a wide range of hosted solutions for VMware environments including Hosted Desktops, Disaster Recovery, VMware Image Hosting and VMware Hosting.

SolarWinds

Follow @solarwinds

SolarWinds mission has been to provide purpose-built products that are designed to make IT professionals jobs easier. SolarWinds was built by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today’s dynamic IT environments. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager delivers integrated VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V capacity planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, configuration management, and chargeback automation; all in one awesomely affordable product that’s easy to download, deploy, and use. SolarWinds believes you should try their software before you buy and we offer free trials that deliver full product functionality. Be sure and try out a free trial of Virtualization Manager so you can find out what you’re missing that vCenter Server can’t provide.

Turbonomic

Follow @vmturbo

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. It closes the loop between collecting data and controlling the environment – enabling administrators to automate management of dynamic virtualized environments to ensure service levels, while maximizing efficiency. Easy to deploy and simple to administer, VMTurbo Operations Manager assures application performance, operational efficiency and optimal resource utilization. VMTurbo recently released a new version (4.5) of their Operations Manager product and offers a free 30-day trial so you can experience first-hand a smarter approach to virtualization management.

Veeam

Follow @veeam

Veeam is Modern Data Protection that is 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. Our powerful, easy-to-use and affordable solutions help solve virtualization challenges – making Veeam the perfect fit for the modern datacenter. Veeam Backup & Replication delivers innovative VMware backup, Hyper-V backup, recovery and replication. This #1 VM Backup solution helps organizations meet RPOs and RTOs, save time, eliminate risk and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs. Veeam has won 55 awards including Product of the Year for 2013 that serve to validate their success in the virtualization industry. Be sure and download their free tool for VMware and Hyper-V backup and also check out the Veeam Community podcast.