I while back I started a top 10 list for VMware blogs that you must read. I updated the first list about 6 months after it was originally published as new blogs appear all the time and old blogs sometimes fall to the wayside. I utilize a combination of criteria when picking blogs for my list:

1. The first is posting frequency, if a blogger has not posted in many weeks or months I generally disqualify them. I’m looking for bloggers that post at least 2-3 times a month.
2. Next is posting quality, if a blogger is generally just repeating news and things other people have written I also tend to disqualify them. I look for the bloggers that produce quality, informative posts and aren’t afraid to share their own opinions
3. Next is post length,  short posts are OK for some things but the really long posts that contain lots of information score more points with me.
4. Finally the length of time that the blogger has been posting, I generally don’t include ones that have been around for less than 3 months until they’ve established themselves.

Not to long ago when I re-did my vLaunchpad I decided to expand the top 10 list to the top 20 as it became increasing difficult to pick just 10 of the best ones as many new blogs have appeared. I also did a bit of re-shuffling of the order as there were many new great blogs on the list. So without further ado here’s the latest top 20 VMware blogs that you should read, links to them are also all available on my vLaunchpad along with icons for the RSS feed and Twitter account of the blogger.

1. Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping)
2. Blog.scottlowe.org (Scott Lowe)
3. NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof)
4. Virtualization Pro (Various)
5. Virtualization Evangelist (Jason Boche)
6. VM /ETC (Rich Brambley)
7. Mike D’s Virtualization Blog (Mike DiPetrillo)
8. RTFM Education (Mike Laverick)
9. Professional VMware (Cody Bunch)
10. Virtual Geek (Chad Sakac)
11. Planet VM (Tom Howarth)
12. Gabe’s Virtual World (Gabe Van Zanten)
13. Rational Survivability (Christofer Hoff)
14. Musings of Rodos (Rodney Haywood)
15. VMware Tips (Rick Scherer)
16. The VM Guy (Dave Lawrence)
17. VCritical (Eric Gray)
18. Virtual Black Hole (Steve Beaver)
19. Virtual Future (Sven Huisman)
20. Ken’s Virtual Reality (Ken Cline)

Next week will be the one year birthday of the weekly VMTN community roundtable podcast. The brain child of John Troyer from VMware, the podcast was originally slated as a forum for some of the VMTN moderators to talk about some of the current hot topics in the VMTN forums and whatever other popular subjects came up. The first episode on 5/23/08 was a just couple of us guys from the VMTN forums talking about various topics, after a while the podcast became more popular as more people found out about it and the format shifted to talking about specific topics each week and special guests were invited who were related to the topic for the week.

On the podcast we mainly talk about technical stuff as most of the participants are admins, architects and technical gurus and have no tolerance for marketing and sales talk. John moderates the podcast and schedules special guests which include VMware employees, vendors, industry experts and well-known bloggers. Some of the regular participants who have been involved since the very beginning include myself, Edward Haletky, Ken Cline, Steve Beaver and Jason Boche. Other well-known participants include Eric Sloof, Duncan Epping, Scott Herold and many more.

Over the past year we’ve had a few bad moments, mainly because Talkshoe is a public forum, including technical issues (no audio), call crashers yelling obscenities and weird background noises and echoes but the podcasts produce some great technical information as the participants ask some great and tough questions of the guests. This past week was all about what is new with storage in vSphere and Paul Manning from VMware was the special guest.  The podcast turned out to be a great one and lots of insider information about the new storage featues of vSphere was shared.

You can listen to the podcast live each week at Talkshoe’s website and also download a MP3 recording of it after it is finished, additionally the podcast is available on iTunes. While the podcast is going on there is an active chatroom where listeners can chat and share information and opinions. After each show John also posts notes and links to the VMware VMTN blog. So be sure and check it out each week and if you can’t make it to the live show listen to the recordings, all of the past 48 episodes are available to listen to.