Mike Laverick sent me an email the other day to try and help him promote the VMUG Feed Forward program which is designed to help encourage new members in the community to step up and participate in VMUG events. I was a VMUG leader for several years and one of the challenges is to find people to speak at the events and share their experiences and knowledge. Sure you always get the vendors that will speak at events as they pay to sponsor it but it is also nice to get customers and people who are not paying to be at the event to give their own unique viewpoints.

The challenge with this is many people have a fear of public speaking, if you could talk to them one-on-one they could probably do a great job of saying what they have to but in a larger group setting many people become uncomfortable. The Feed Forward program tries to mentor and help those who might be reluctant to speak at VMUGs to encourage them to step up and provide them with the advice and confidence they need to be successful at it. Some people are naturals at public speaking but I think for most of us we really have to work hard at it to be good. I thought I’d offer some advice based on my own personal experiences with public speaking that might help others that struggle with it or are just getting started.

It’s OK to be scared

I never had really done any type of public speaking at all before I started getting into virtualization. I really never had the desire to do it but sometimes opportunities come up and I’m not one to pass them up no matter how much I might not like it. My first opportunity came about 7 years ago, I was a regular contributor to Tech Target’s Search VMware site and they wanted me to do a webinar for them. Despite never having done one I said yes and started preparing the content. A webinar is a bit easier to deliver as you do not have a public audience in front of you and this one was being recorded only and would be played back later. The day of the webinar I was nervous, anxious and a bit scared leading up to the webinar time, once it started I settled down a bit. It didn’t go as smooth as I would of liked but I made it through it OK. To this day I tend to be a bit nervous before any type of public speaking but as soon as it starts it all falls away and once I get rolling I’m as comfortable as can be.

Know your content

I can’t stress this one enough, if you know your content and know it well you will be just fine, if you don’t know the content then will you will struggle and fumble it. I guarantee the more comfortable and knowledgeable that you are on the material that you are presenting will make a big difference in how smooth you deliver it.

Practice makes perfect

Most of the time I’ll do a dry run, just me speaking out loud going through the whole presentation as if I was delivering it live. By doing this you get a better feel for how the presentation will flow and also see what material might not work right or may need fixing.

Don’t expect to be good at it overnight

It took years and dozens of speaking engagements before I was really comfortable with doing it. You won’t notice yourself getting better at it overnight, it’s something that just takes time as you keep doing it. I guarantee you will get better over time, it may take years but you’ll slowly get better and better at it until one day you realize that you’re quite good at it and even better you enjoy it.

Listen to yourself afterwards

If you want to improve you need to listen and critique yourself, you may have certain speech habits that you are unaware of that may turn off your listeners. Things like saying Right or OK all the time or stumbling and filling in with Umm. Once you realize that you are doing it and how often you are doing it you can try and mentally prevent yourself from doing it next time you speak.

Watch your speed

Some people talk real slow others talk real fast when they are speaking, I tend to talk fast which can make it harder for people to follow what I’m saying. I mentally have to tell myself to slow down a bit when I’m speaking to make sure people can keep up. Once you get going it’s easy to forget this, as a visual reminder write SLOW DOWN on a sticky note and put it in front of you to remind yourself.

Read your reviews

Nobody likes to hear negativity and criticism about themselves but sometimes it’s the only way you can get better. Many events like VMworld and webinars will gather feedback after the session. It can hurt to read it sometimes but it can be very constructive to get the opinions of the people that you are speaking to understand what you need to do better. Don’t take the feedback too personally, sometimes you might get people that are jerks but do your best to see yourself from the audience viewpoint and learn from it.

Don’t be intimidated

It’s easy to get intimidated if you are new to it and you have someone like Duncan Epping or Scott Lowe in the audience watching you. Try and block it out so you don’t get too nervous and start stumbling, it might not be easy but if you fixate on it you’ll get even more nervous.

Engage the audience

I don’t do this as often as I should but engaging the audience can help give you confidence and makes it more enjoyable for them. Build mental break points into your presentation where you stop and ask the audience a question on a specific topic and have them respond verbally or via a show of hands. Doing this can make you more comfortable as you are interacting and becoming closer to them.

Move around

Instead of hiding behind a podium the whole time try walking around a bit in front of or towards the audience, again this gets you closer to the audience and moving around may make you feel more comfortable.

Get help

Having a co-speaker can make it easier as it takes part of the spotlight off you and it allows you to interact in a more comfortable manner. Try and mentor with someone that who is an experienced speaker and can give you advice and feedback.

Hope this helps anyone looking to get into speaking or who is trying to get better at it, if I can help in any way just let me know. If anyone else has any speaking tips feel free to sound off in the comments. You can find out more about the VMUG Feed Forward program here.

I’m doing a webinar for SolarWinds this week, the info on it is below and I hope to see you there…

The role of the virtualization admin is changing. While their responsibilities to operate and manage the virtual environment continue to grow, they are also becoming the convergence point for other IT teams in the virtualized IT data center. In practical terms, this means that in addition to managing all the changes that occur in the virtual environment they now have to deal with application owners, storage specialists, business owners, database administrators and business leaders.  This will require improved visibility into the extended virtual environment along with innovative management & monitoring approaches. Eric Siebert, virtualization blogger and VMware vExpert, will provide his Top 10 Virtualization Management Survival Tips to help you not only survive but thrive at the center of the of the new virtualized IT world. Join us Wednesday, May 14th @ 1 PM CDT. Spots are limited so save your spot today!

Not for top blog though, the VMworld 2014 session public voting has opened and I’d appreciate your consideration for my sessions. Last year I presented my “Top 10 Thing you MUST know about Storage for vSphere” session which was well attended. I’d thought I’d up the ante this year and submitted one called “50 Things You Didn’t Know About Storage for vSphere That You Should Know”, my other session is in a deep dive format going into a lot of technical detail on storage for vSphere. I also was able to persuade Vaughn to add me to his All-Flash Storage panel to represent HP. If you find my sessions interesting, please give me a green thumb in the voting. You can easily filter my sessions by putting Siebert in the keyword field when on the public voting website.

50 Things You Didn’t Know About Storage for vSphere That You Should Know

Abstract
Storage is an absolutely critical part of a vSphere environment and is one area that you can’t afford to not know that well. If you start making assumptions and un-educated guesses about the storage for your vSphere environment it will come back to haunt you. Having a solid understanding of the role storage plays in a virtual environment is the key to being successful with vSphere. This technical session will help educate attendees on a wide variety of important storage related topics for vSphere. Come join Eric Siebert, a noted author, blogger & 6 time VMware vExpert with over 9 years experience with VMware virtualization and learn 50 things about storage for vSphere that you probably did not know.

This session will flow in a fast-paced format that will cover 50 quick tips, tidbits, stats and facts on many different technical & educational topics related to storage for vSphere environments. We’ll include a lot of fun facts and focus on things you probably didn’t know about storage for vSphere that you probably wish you knew. You’ll learn one new thing every minute in this session and walk away armed with all sorts of useful (and possibly some useless) information to enhance your storage knowledge so you impress your friends and co-workers.

Storage Demystified: Uncovering the Inner Workings of Everyday vSphere Storage Technologies

Abstract
Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes when you do a Storage vMotion? Why disk blocks are zeroed? How VM snapshots work? What the different types of virtual disks are? How the UNMAP process works? Why SSDs wear out? How storage acceleration technologies work? We all work with vSphere on a daily basis but many of us don’t really understand the “magic” behind vSphere storage technologies. Aren’t you a little curious? We take for granted that these features work but understanding how they work can enable you to make better decisions when working with them. Knowing what actually goes on behind the scenes can also help when troubleshooting storage related issues.

The goal of this session is simple: Demystify the world of storage in vSphere and do it in a simple, clear-cut way that anyone can understand. We will take a dive deep into some of the storage technologies and features that are part of vSphere, illustrate the processes and steps that happen when you use certain features, and explain the technology in an easy to understand manner. We will also cover a lot of fun facts you probably never knew about storage for vSphere. Come and learn from a VMware vExpert with over 9 years hands-on experience with VMware virtualization and walk away with a much clearer and deeper understanding of how storage stuff works in vSphere.

Well not entirely true, apparently there were so many links in one post that every time I edited it and added more it triggered GoDaddy’s security mechanism’s that lookout for spam and malicious behavior. I use their Linux hosted plan for this site and they use ModSecurity, an open source firewall as their security platform. ModSecurity kept temporarily blocking my IP address whenever I edited my VSAN links post, I’ve been constantly calling into their support to get this resolved. Finally last week my IP was blocked for an even longer time so fed up I called and escalated it. I know from doing research that they can whitelist IP addresses so I was finally able to get them to do that so I shouldn’t have problems again unless my IP address changes.

I did also end up moving to another server platform as well though, I was on their legacy 2G platform which was probably some pretty old servers and moved to their 4G platform which is newer server hardware. The whole move was seamless and I didn’t have to do anything at all. You may have noticed during the top blog voting that my site was very slow and at some point not responding so hopefully this new server platform will be able to keep up better.

I have added a ton more VSAN links and continue to add more every week so be sure and check out my huge VSAN links page for everything you ever wanted to know about VSAN.

I’m pleased to announce StratoGen as a new sponsor to vSphere-land.com. If you aren’t familiar with StratoGen I’d like to take a moment to tell you who they are and what they provide.

More and more companies are looking to host either part or all of their VMware environments with a hosting provider for various reasons. There are a lot of advantages to this, the obvious ones are centered implementing BC/DR solutions and reducing CAPEX & OPEX costs. Whatever your reason is for doing it, StratoGen is equipped to handle any size VMware hosting need.

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% up-time 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, Private Cloud Hosting and VMware Hosting.

If you’d like to learn more about Stratogen and the VMware hosting services they provide visit their website and if you’d like to experience their offerings first hand they also offer a free 7-day trial.

Another year, another top blog voting in the books. I’m glad I only do this once a year as the entire process from start to finish is long, tedious and very time-consuming. Now that it’s over I can finally start playing the new Diablo 3 expansion I got last week. Here’s some general notes on whats happening now that the voting is over and the results are posted.

• I’ve updated the vLaunchpad with the new results, because there are SO MANY blogs now (325+), I’m now publishing the top 100 blogs instead of the top 50 blogs to give more people some recognition instead of being lumped into that giant mass of 250+ non-top 50 blogs. The top 100 is up to date, I’m still updating some of the other blogs on the page and adding some additional blogs that cropped up at the last minute. So if you don’t see yourself on their be patient for another week or so.
• Nutanix has made a nice gesture and wants to reward the bloggers that made the top 50 this year with a special gift. If you made the top 50 be sure and follow @Nutanix on Twitter and DM them your address info so you don’t miss out.
• I’ll be sending out the prizes courtesy of Veeam for the 5 bloggers that were picked randomly from the top 50 by the end of this week. Each of those bloggers that won are also giving away the same type of prize that they won to one of their blog readers so watch out to see how you can win as well. Chris Wahl has a post on his giveaway for a Pebble Smart Watch, Christian Mohn has a post on his giveaway for a Google Chromecast, Eric Shanks has a post on his giveaway for a Sony MDR-X10 Headphones, watch for upcoming posts from Mike Preston and Duncan Epping on their giveaways.
• If you made the top 50 and want to add some bling to your website to let your readers know it be sure and check out these officially sanctioned badge images made by Eric Shanks. There is one for the Top 10, Top 25 and Top 50.
• If you haven’t seen the special Top vBlog 2014 Countdown Show that we did via Google Hangouts be sure and watch the replay.

Well that’s all for now, back to Diablo 3, see you all again next year for Top vBlog 2015 edition.

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…