So the voting has ended, the results have been tabulated and here they are. There were over 80 new blogs on the ballot this year and 4 new blogs to make the top 25. This year there was over 1300 votes compared to around 1200 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 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.

Special thanks to TrainSignal for sponsoring it again this year, be sure and check out their website for their new unlimited IT Training For Only $49 a Month.

Here are the overall voting results…

And here are the top blog category winners…

…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 vChat episode that we are recording on Friday with John Troyer and should be available on Monday. While you’re waiting here’s a few tidbits of information on this years voting:

• There were over 1300 votes this year
• 47% of the votes were from the US, next highest was 13% from the Netherlands followed by 6.5% from the UK and 3% from Germany
• We had voters from 60 different countries including Mongolia, Uruguay, Slovakia, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Iceland, Estonia, Egypt, Bermuda and the Isle of Man
• There are 243 blogs in the voting this year, last year there were 187
• There were some fierce competition this year in the top 10, there were 8 position changes in the top 10
• There were 7 blogs in the top 25 that were not in there in 2012
• There were 13 blogs in the top 50 that were not in there in 2012
• There were 4 blogs that were newcomers this year in the top 25
• There were 9 blogs that were newcomers this year in the top 50
• There is 1 blog new to the top 10
• One blogger in the top 50 moved up 86 places from last year, another one moved up 110 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…

Voting closes at midnight tonight, so far the voting numbers have surpassed last years with almost 1,500 votes collected since the voting began. The results this year should definitely be interesting with newcomers like Cormac Hogan making a big splash. I’ll tabulate the results by applying weights to the votes and we’ll be ready to announce the results on a special vChat episode with John Troyer that we will record soon.

So if you haven’t voted yet, what are you waiting for, git-r-done!

After fixing a few technical bugs with my survey, my annual top VMware/virtualization blog voting is just about ready to launch. This is no small effort and involves a ton of work collecting data, building forms, processing data, updating websites, building surveys and much more. It all costs me money paying for the services of a professional survey company. 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 and make all this possible.

Zerto

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.

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.

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. Easy to deploy and simple to administer, VMTurbo Operations Manager assures application performance, operational efficiency and optimal resource utilization.

Veeam

Veeam Backup & Replication^TM Cloud Edition turns leading public storage clouds into easy-to-use data repositories for your backups. Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition provides the same powerful, easy to-use and affordable backup and recovery of virtualized applications and data you get with Veeam Backup & Replication, but with the added capability of automatically storing your VMware or Hyper-V VM backups with any of 15 leading public cloud vendors, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 or Glacier, Rackspace, and HP Cloud Services.

SolarWinds

Are you on the hunt for virtualization management software that’s powerful, affordable, and easy to use? You’ve found it! SolarWinds award-winning virtualization management software delivers unified capacity planning, VM sprawl control, performance monitoring, configuration management, & chargeback automation across your entire VMware® and HyperV® infrastructure.

TrainSignal

TrainSignal is a Chicago-based company that makes award-winning computer training for IT professionals. We work hard every day to produce premium quality computer training designed to give IT pros in-depth knowledge, build hands-on skills and promote career advancement. Our instructors include some of the top names in IT, who have the credentials and awards to back up their expertise. You’ll find courses from Microsoft MVPs, VMware vExperts, Citrix CTPs, certified experts in Cisco and CompTIA, and more. TrainSignal instructors also make, produce and develop 100% original content that can’t be found anywhere else.

The voting will open tomorrow, so check back here for the announcement.

It’s time to do the annual top blog voting, last year we had over 1,200 votes that shaped the top 50 list that is published on my vLaunchPad. Just like last year in addition to the traditional top 50 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 if your blog fits one or more of the categories, if it does not then don’t nominate it as all blogs on the vLaunchpad will automatically be included in the general top blog voting.

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 good percentage of posts be Storage related)
• Best Networking Blog (Must have good percentage of  be Networking related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have good percentage of  posts be Cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have good percentage of  posts be VDI/EUC related)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have good percentage of  posts be Scripting related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• 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 started in 2012)
  
• 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 2/4. Once it closes I will use the nominations to build the survey for the top blog voting which will begin shortly afterwards.

Tis the season for home labs and Veeam will fill your vStocking with a brand new dream home lab. The lab features the bigger HP ML310e G8 servers that are expandable up to 32GB of memory, have 4 PCI slots, up to 8 SFF drives or 4 LFF drives, 2 built-in gigabit NICs and built-in HP iLO.  They are also on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List. So if Santa didn’t bring you a home lab this year here’s your chance to win one. All you have to do is head on over to their site before  Jan. 14th and fill out a form to register to win.

If you’re looking for help and ideas for your own home lab be sure and checkout my massive collection of home lab links. Also Chad Sakac just did a nice post on his own home lab that he recently built. I’ll also be doing a series of upcoming posts detailing my experiences with home lab equipment.

We’ve recently posted vChat #33 with myself, David Davis & Simon Seagrave. This holiday edition episode was recorded on 12/21, the day of the Mayan Apocalypse, we discuss the latest in virtualization, cloud computing, home labs, iPads, storage, our predictions for 2013. and much much more. Enjoy!