Before I highlight my sessions I wanted to mention how crazy it’s gotten trying to get session submissions approved for VMworld. Back in the ole days (2008) when I first presented at VMworld, there weren’t a lot of bloggers, there were a lot less partners and VMware had a lot less products. Fast forward to today and there are hundreds of bloggers (200+), hundreds of partners and VMware has a boatload of products. As a result they get a crazy amount of submissions each year and with very limited session slots it’s extremely difficult to get one. What really impacts it the most is that VMware has gotten so big with so many products that they need a lot of session slots to cover them all, that doesn’t leave much for partners, who are guaranteed some slots and that leaves hardly any for bloggers. It’s a shame as there are so many great session submissions each year but there are so few slots to fit them in.

Which brings me to the public voting, VMware lets public voting have an influence on the approved session outcome. Public voting is just a percentage of the methods used to approve sessions, a big part of it is the private content committee judging that is done. With the content committee, every session is given a look over and scored by the committee. Where it becomes extremely difficult is with public voting, there are so many sessions on the ballot that it quickly becomes overwhelming and nobody has time to go through them one by one. Therefore many people skim through them or look for specific sessions that they know about. What becomes really important is the title of your session, which is essentially the curb appeal that draws people in to take a closer look at your session. Many people don’t get past the titles and only look at interesting and catchy titles. When you are confronted with over 1200 sessions to vote on, you simply don’t have the time to look at them all. What I find that helps a bit is filtering on tracks, keywords or speaker names. It’s still a difficult task though, imaging voting for over 1200 people running for president, it’s just too much.

So with that I’d like to point out my sessions and let you take a look and see if you judge them worthy of your vote. I appreciate your consideration and vote or no vote I look forward to seeing you at VMworld anyway. Even if you don’t vote for me you should still get out there an vote.

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…

Blog	Rank	Previous	Total Votes	Total Points	#1 Votes
Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping)	1	1	843	6210	231
Frank Denneman blog	2	5	582	3557	46
Scott Lowe blog	3	2	511	2999	25
NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof)	4	3	501	2912	37
Virtual Geek (Chad Sakac)	5	4	463	2418	33
Virtually Ghetto (William Lam)	6	8	399	2267	47
Mike Laverick (RTFM Education)	7	6	438	2135	5
Virtu-al (Alan Renouf)	8	7	387	1847	9
Cormac Hogan	9	New	279	1629	27
vSphere-land (Eric Siebert)	10	10	344	1476	12
Virtualization Evangelist (Jason Boche)	11	9	277	1247	8
Wahl Network (Chris Wahl)	12	51	173	1173	39
Virtual Storage Guy (Vaughn Stewart)	13	12	194	1168	38
My Virtual Cloud (Andre Leibovici)	14	17	159	958	17
LucD (Luc Dekens)	15	14	134	762	12
ESX Virtualization (Vladan Seget)	16	20	111	744	30
Datacenter Dude (Nick Howell)	17	New	114	743	13
Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat	18	25	162	693	3
Gabe's Virtual World (Gabe Van Zanten)	19	15	117	637	18
A vTexan (Tommy Trogden)	20	30	96	609	14
Long White Virtual Clouds (M. Webster)	21	New	110	606	9
Kendrick Coleman	22	37	128	598	6
TechHead (Simon Seagrave)	23	18	95	529	18
Derek Seaman's Blog	24	New	93	513	5
Brian Madden	25	24	97	506	2
Around the Storage Block (Calvin Zito)	26	33	93	489	5
The SLOG (Simon Long)	27	11	97	483	0
VCritical (Eric Gray)	28	26	80	478	13
Wikibon Blog	29	29	135	476	1
Professional VMware (Cody Bunch)	30	32	85	473	6
VMGuru.nl (Various)	31	19	83	463	19
vReference (Forbes Guthrie)	32	13	81	453	14
vSamurai (Christopher Wells)	33	39	94	445	7
IT 2.0 (Massimo Re Ferre)	34	48	84	427	3
Erik Bussink	35	New	58	398	12
2 VCP's (Jon Owings)	36	44	70	393	1
Chris Colotti's Blog	37	21	77	388	5
vClouds (Marco Broeken)	38	149	67	388	16
mwpreston dot net (Mike Preston)	39	125	63	377	8
vInfrastructure Blog (Andrew Mauro)	40	54	64	376	3
Technodrone (Maish)	41	45	59	366	13
Justin's IT Blog	42	49	62	361	14
Viktorious.nl (Viktor van den Berg)	43	New	61	360	13
vConsult (Duco Jaspars)	44	New	51	343	19
Punching Clouds (Rawlinson)	45	New	82	341	0
WoodITWork (Julian Wood)	46	60	73	341	5
Chris Wolf blog	47	36	88	337	0
Virtualize Tips (Brian Suhr)	48	47	51	325	6
The IT Hollow (Eric Shanks)	49	New	48	323	16
J Metz (J Michael Metz - Cisco)	50	28	75	319	0
The Saffa Geek (Gregg Robertson)	51	103	66	309	1
The Lone Sysadmin (Bob Plankers)	52	31	57	305	10
VMware Tips (Rick Scherer)	53	22	62	304	4
UP2V (Marcel van den Berg)	54	159	44	301	13
VMware Videos (David Davis)	55	38	53	297	8
A Crazy Penguin (Andy Wood)	56	70	53	294	1
Hypervisor.fr	57	63	49	294	3
VirtualGeekCH (Various)	58	113	43	292	8
Nickapedia (Nicholas Weaver)	59	16	50	286	1
Virten.net (Florian Grehl)	60	New	63	285	1
Storage Mojo (Robin Harris)	61	New	55	285	1
Virtual Langer (Jason Langer)	62	New	51	283	5
The Storage Architect (Chris Evans)	63	40	53	279	1
VDICloudn.nl (Arjan Timmerman)	64	New	46	273	2
Mikes.eu (Roy Mikes)	65	New	48	272	6
VM Guru (Scott Herold)	66	43	64	266	1
Storagezilla (EMC - Mark Twomey)	67	New	53	264	1
Pivot point (Scott Drummonds)	68	23	55	262	0
StorageIO (Greg Schulz)	69	46	52	259	2
Virtual Blog (David Hill)	70	New	58	259	4
Virtual Admin Notes (Anton Zhbankov)	71	71	43	257	12
The Virtualization Effect (NetApp)	72	New	65	255	3
vNinja (Christian Mohn)	73	57	60	243	1
Geek After Five (Jake Robinson)	74	New	45	240	2
The Lower Case W (Matt Liebowitz)	75	56	38	237	9
VMpros.nl (Sander Daems)	76	80	39	233	8
What Would Dan Do (Dan Brinkmann)	77	74	43	231	7
50 mu (Rob Koper)	78	New	34	230	1
Hu's Blog (HDS - Hu Yoshida)	79	66	30	229	16
The Virtualization Practice (Various)	80	50	38	228	10
vExperienced (Edward Grigson)	81	118	43	224	4
VMwareMine	82	New	36	224	7
Planet VM (Tom Howarth)	83	68	48	221	2
Mike D's blog (Mike DiPetrillo)	84	35	45	220	1
Virtual Patel (Manish Patel)	85	New	48	217	3
Rickard Nobel	86	109	48	217	1
vTesseract (Josh Atwell)	87	73	49	213	2
Burdweiser (James Burd)	88	143	30	212	11
Backup Central (W. Curtis Preston)	89	65	43	211	1
IT Blood Pressure (Dwayne Lessner)	90	156	41	210	3
Virt for Service Providers (Jeramiah Dooley)	91	123	40	208	1
View Yonder (Steve Chambers)	92	146	41	207	2
Musings of Rodos (Rodney Haywood)	93	185	38	205	1
VMFocus (Craig Kilborn)	94	New	30	205	12
Vuemuer.it (Luca Dell'Oca)	95	New	34	202	4
The Foglite (E. Rowe/A. Scorsone)	96	New	31	200	11
Tom Fojta's Blog	97	New	38	192	1
vFrank (Frank Brix Pedersen)	98	121	38	192	1
Virtual Aleph (Manlio Frizzi)	99	New	32	192	11
Knudt Blog (Brian Knudtson)	100	140	39	192	1
VMdamentals (Erik Zandboer)	101	98	32	190	1
ICT-Freak.nl (Arne Fokkema)	102	76	37	188	1
Ken's Virtual Reality (Ken Cline)	103	152	36	186	0
vHorizon (Dale Scriven)	104	New	39	186	3
Aaron Delp Blog	105	59	42	186	1
VMware & Veeam Blog (Karel Novak)	106	New	32	185	7
vElemental (Clint Kitson)	107	130	47	185	1
Rickatron Blog (Rick Vanover)	108	58	34	183	4
Penguinpunk.net (Dan Frith)	109	New	37	182	2
The VM Guy (Dave Lawrence)	110	69	40	181	3
Vinf.net (Simon Gallagher)	111	108	41	179	1
Ivo Beerens	112	83	41	178	1
Malaysia VM (Various)	113	166	37	177	1
VSpecialist (Michael Poore)	114	75	35	177	6
By The Bell (Steve Kaplan)	115	119	32	175	3
vCloud Info (Carlo Costanzo)	116	126	34	174	6
vDestination (Greg Stuart)	117	112	36	174	3
Clouds Of Change (Brian Gracely)	118	New	32	173	3
Jase's Place (Jase McCarty)	119	94	32	173	1
Arnim van Lieshout	120	61	36	170	1
Rational Survivability (Christofer Hoff)	121	85	29	170	2
vSential (James Bowling)	122	168	29	168	6
Virtualization Spotlight (P. Redknap)	123	107	24	165	12
VM Today (Joshua Townsend)	124	122	31	165	2
A Day In The Life (Adam Baum)	125	99	37	164	0
ValCo Labs (Josh Coen)	126	167	32	164	1
Virtual Noob (Chad King)	127	117	41	162	0
Demitasse (Alastair Cooke)	128	131	31	162	3
The Data Center Overlords (Tony Bourke)	129	100	28	161	1
Virtual Tech (Dan Fallon)	130	New	33	159	0
yoyoclouds (Yohan Wadia)	131	New	40	159	2
HyperVizor (Hany Michael)	132	27	32	158	4
Messaging-Virtualization (Andrey Pogosyan)	133	New	29	158	3
Run-virtual (Richard Garsthagen)	134	105	35	158	1
vNoob (Conrad Ramos)	135	163	36	158	2
Virtual Future (Sven Huisman)	136	153	31	157	2
Virtual Planet (Ricky El-Qasem)	137	97	29	155	3
vNugglets (Allen Crawford)	138	New	33	155	1
Deep Storage (Howard Marks)	139	New	31	154	0
Virtual Lifestyle (Joep Piscaer)	140	137	38	154	2
Virtual Insanity (S. Sauer/A. Sweemer)	141	72	31	152	0
Ray On Storage (Ray Lucchesi)	142	53	33	151	0
VMware Front Experience (Andreas Peetz)	143	162	25	149	7
VM Dude (Frederic Martin)	144	New	31	145	2
GestaltIT (Various)	145	34	24	141	2
Jonathan Medd's Blog	146	91	30	141	3
Peeters Online (Hugo Peeters)	147	161	32	140	0
Peacon Blog (James Pearce)	148	136	26	140	1
Double Cloud (Steve Jin)	149	67	21	139	1
Running-System (Andi Lesslhumer)	150	New	21	138	3
vXpress (Sunny Dua)	151	New	31	137	1
MY Vmware Blog (Jeremy Chivers)	152	New	35	136	0
Poshoholic (Kirk Munro)	153	116	27	135	1
The HyperAdvisor (Antone Heyward)	154	102	30	135	1
Hans De Leenheer	155	New	21	132	1
Gerbens Blog (G. Kloosterman)	156	173	22	131	1
Another Day In IT (Bobby Stampfle)	157	New	28	128	1
Dmitry's PowerBlog	158	New	24	128	0
Storagebod (Martin Glassborow)	159	82	24	127	1
Adventures in a Virtual World (Paul Grevink)	160	New	27	127	2
Aravind Sivaraman	161	New	28	126	0
Storage Soup (Tech Target)	162	New	27	126	0
VirtualClouds (Hugo Strydom)	163	New	31	125	0
Phil the Virtualizer (Philip Ditzel)	164	New	28	124	2
DiscoPosse (Eric Wright)	165	New	20	123	2
vmDK (Damian Karlson)	166	96	33	123	1
Virtual Bits & Bytes (Niels Engelen)	167	New	27	122	1
Everyday Virtualization (Rick Vanover)	168	90	21	122	1
The Eager Zero (Michael Stump)	169	New	23	119	3
Thankfully the RAID is Gone (G. Chapman)	170	New	19	119	1
The SAN Man (Archie Hendryx)	171	New	21	117	2
Stuart Radnidge	172	165	28	116	1
Virtualised Reality (Barry Coombs)	173	93	25	116	2
Robert van den Nieuwendijk's Blog	174	145	22	115	2
VMware Training & Certification (S. Vessey)	175	64	30	114	1
Andi Mann - Ubergeek	176	92	23	114	4
SOS Tech (Josh Andrews)	177	New	23	111	1
Tim's IT Blog (Tim Smith)	178	New	24	111	3
Virtual VCP (Rynardt Spies)	179	87	24	111	1
The Solutions Architect (Michael Letschin)	180	New	21	110	1
ThinkCloud.nl (Martijn Baecke)	181	164	24	110	0
Stu McHugh's Virtualisation Blog	182	New	25	105	2
Infoworld Virtualization Report (D. Marshall)	183	124	18	105	4
Virtualization Eh (Mark Achtemichuk)	184	New	21	99	0
VM/ETC (Rich Brambley)	185	41	26	97	0
Everything Virtual (Simon Davies)	186	88	18	97	3
Blue Gears (Edward Haletky)	187	139	20	96	0
Shogan.tech (Sean Duffy)	188	New	19	96	0
Enterprise Admins (Brian Wuchner)	189	183	17	95	1
GeekSilver's Blog	190	184	23	95	0
Storage Tuning (Jamon Bowen)	191	New	22	95	0
Jume (Bouke Groenescheij)	192	154	17	94	0
Virtual Management (Marco Giuricin)	193	New	21	94	0
Ruptured Monkey (Nigel Poulton)	194	55	17	93	1
Juanma's Blog (Juan Manuel)	195	81	17	92	2
M80ARM - Virt. Warrior (Michael Armstrong)	196	New	22	92	0
Virtually Mike Brown (Mike Brown)	197	New	27	92	0
Cloud-Buddy (Bilal Hashmi)	198	133	18	91	1
Virtual SMB (Will Huber)	199	115	19	91	1
Blue Shift Blog (Kevin Kelling)	200	148	20	91	1
Orchestrate This! (Magnus Ullberg)	201	New	18	90	0
VMexplorer (Matt Mancini)	202	142	16	90	1
blog.rack.org.au (Craig Waters)	203	New	19	89	1
VM Trooper (Trevor Roberts)	204	New	18	89	1
VM-Ice (Larus Hjartarson)	205	New	19	89	0
Default Reasoning (Marek Z)	206	New	17	88	1
VirtuallyLG (Lorenzo Galelli)	207	155	21	88	0
VMAdmin (Fletcher Cocquyt)	208	New	25	88	0
VM-blog.info (Mourad)	209	New	20	87	0
VMworld.net (Andi Lesslhumer)	210	89	21	87	0
VMBulletin (Rick Schlander)	211	111	18	87	2
vPourchet (Valentin Pourchet)	212	New	19	86	1
VMware Admins (Eric Sarakaitis)	213	132	22	85	0
ITuda (Lieven D'hoore)	214	New	14	83	1
DeinosCloud (Didier Pironet)	215	181	15	83	1
It's Just Another Layer (Ian K.)	216	175	17	83	2
Cosonok's IT Blog (David Cookson)	217	New	17	81	0
I'm Tellin' Ya Now! (Mike Foley)	218	New	19	81	1
VM Admin (Andy Barnes)	219	114	18	79	1
Elastic Sky (Paul McSharry)	220	New	15	78	0
vKnowledge.net (Mario Mack)	221	New	20	77	0
VMwire (Hugo Phan)	222	New	17	77	1
Virtual Potholes (AJ Kuftic)	223	New	16	77	2
VMwise (Kanuj Behl)	224	160	13	76	2
Virtualization Buster (J. Franconi)	225	134	11	75	2
Virtually Speaking (Dan Kusnetzky)	226	157	17	71	0
VMnick (Nick Fritsch)	227	New	15	70	1
The Virtual Headline (Pete Del Rey)	228	New	12	66	2
vReality (Tomi Hakala)	229	187	17	65	0
Cloud Computing Infrastructure (Bill Carter)	230	New	10	61	0
Storage Nerve (Devang Panchigar)	231	42	14	60	0
Cloud Jock (Todd Mace)	232	New	10	59	1
Eprich (Paul Richards)	233	186	11	59	0
Eck Tech (Adam Eckerle)	234	New	11	56	0
Virtualizing the D.C. (Tony Wilburn)	235	172	14	55	0
InfoTech Consulting Blog (Yendis Lambert)	236	New	13	52	1
doOdzZZ's Notes (Abdullah Abdullah)	237	New	11	50	0
VMwarewolf (Richard Blythe)	238	171	13	47	0
TechProsaic (Hal Rottenberg)	239	127	10	47	1
Virtualization Information (S. Snowden)	240	110	7	44	3
Roger Lund IT/VMware Blog (Roger Lund)	241	170	10	35	0
SearchServerVirtualization Blog (Various)	242	86	10	35	0
Virtualization Team (Eiad Al-Aqqad)	243	101	8	25	0

And here are the top blog category winners…

Favorite Storage Blog	Votes
Cormac Hogan	319
Virtual Geek	291
Virtual Storage Guy	265
Around the Storage Block	123
Hus Blog	55
Stephen Foskett	53
Jases Place	45
Hans De Leenheer	43
Wikibon Blog	31
Penguinpunk.net	28
None of these listed here	121
Favorite Scripting Blog	Votes
Virtually Ghetto	282
Virtu-al	215
LucD	183
VM Dude	65
VMpros.nl	62
vNoob	61
Technodrone	50
Jonathan Medd	42
Phil the Virtualizer	36
Enterprise Admins	34
DiscoPosse	32
Shogan.tech	23
Robert van den Nieuwendijk	22
None of these listed here	268
Favorite Podcast	Votes
vBrownBag	323
Chinwag	127
vChat	124
The CloudCast	82
Get Scripting	62
vCatchup	62
Virtualization Security Roundtable	51
Data Center Insiders	50
Adapting IT	46
CloudViews Unplugged	46
APAC Virtualization Roundtable	31
None of these listed here	371
Favorite New Blog	Votes
Cormac Hogan	343
Mike Laverick	155
The IT Hollow	79
Viktorious.nl	74
Virtual Patel	74
VMware & Veeam Blog	67
VMFocus	59
My VMware Blog	40
vKnowledge.net	31
Another Day in IT	30
Running-System	27
blog.rack.org.au	22
vXpress	22
Cloud Jock	20
Virten.net	19
Aravind Sivaraman	18
Messaging-Virtualization	18
doOdzZZ's Notes	9
None of these listed here	265
Favorite Independent Blogger	Votes
Wahl Network	153
NTPro.nl	145
ESX Virtualization	61
VMGuru.nl	58
Mikes.eu	52
vReference	49
LucD	48
Technodrone	39
Erik Bussink	34
WoodITWork	34
Derek Seaman	32
The Saffa Geek	31
Viktorious.nl	26
VM Dude	26
Another Day in IT	24
What Would Dan Do	24
vCloud Info	23
vInfrastructure Blog	23
vExperienced	21
VirtualGeekCH	21
VMpros.nl	21
VMware & Veeam Blog	21
By The Bell	20
Virtual Aleph	17
vNoob	17
VSpecialist	17
Penguinpunk.net	15
VMFocus	14
mwpreston dot net	13
Robert van den Nieuwendijk	13
vDestination	12
Virtual Langer	12
VMware Front Experience	12
Enterprise Admins	10
blog.rack.org.au	9
Vuemuer.it	9
DiscoPosse	8
ValCo Labs	8
Virtualised Reality	8
Cloud Jock	7
Default Reasoning	7
Jonathan Medd	6
My VMware Blog	3
Shogan.tech	3
Virten.net	3
None of these listed here	166

• 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…

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

There are over 200 blogs dedicated to VMware and virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was a year ago and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

So please take all this into account when casting your votes, here are some more details on the voting:

• You can pick 10 of your favorite blogs and also rank them in your order of preference after you pick your 10. The results will be weighted with #1 ranking getting 10 points and #10 rankings getting 1 point. Point totals will be tabulated and from them the top 50 will be determined.
• Blogs are listed on the ballot  in alphabetical order, the current top 50 blogs are highlighted with their current ranking in parentheses, the current top 10 are also bolded so they stand out. So please go through the whole list when making your choices (Duncan ended up on the bottom).
• Again this year we also having voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The choices of which blogs to include in the categories was the result of this survey and my best guessing. I did cut down on some of the categories this year to keep it simple. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.
• Voting will run until 3/1, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special vChat episode with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer.
• Duplicate vote protection is enabled, we’ll be using geolocation, IP addresses & cookies to protect against duplicate votes. This isn’t Chicago, please be honest and fair when voting, any suspicious votes will be tossed.
• If you are not familiar with a blog you can click on it in the survey to view it or use my vLaunchpad to see links to them all. Try not to pick blogs based just on names but also take content into account. There are a lot of good blogs currently not in the top 50 that deserve to be there.

So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey to cast your ballot and reward the best bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them know that you appreciate them.

Special thanks to Train Signal for sponsoring the voting!

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.

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.

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.

Virtualization continues to be one of the hottest technologies in the data center as companies increasingly virtualize their physical infrastructures. The evolution of virtualization has been changing at a very rapid pace mostly due to VMware’s efforts in creating their vision for a software defined data center built on virtualized technologies. 2012 proved to be another big year for VMware and virtualization and featured new product releases, glimpses of the future, leadership changes, licensing changes, increased focus on clouds & VDI and more. Join virtualization industry expert Eric Siebert as he reviews all the big things that happened related to VMware and virtualization in 2012.

Head on over to this page and sign-up and I’ll see you there!