I live in Denver and our regional VMUG is coming up at the end of the month on 5/30 so if you live there be sure and register for it. I’ll be there, I’m sure Scott Lowe will be there as he lives in Denver as well and John Troyer from VMware will be giving the afternoon keynote.

You can view the full list of upcoming regional VMUG’s here. I’ll also be attending the Minnesota, Indianapolis, Chicago and Kansas City VMUGs later this year.

1. You may be familiar with VMware Labs as they pump out a lot of those great Flings that are unofficial free tools that perform specific functions in a vSphere environment. They also have a publications section that has 50+ hardcore technical papers on topics like VisorFS, which explains the ESXI architecture in detail and vIC which explains Interrupt Control for VM storage device I/O. VMware has rolled a lot of these great publications up into a Technical Journal that they recently published.

2. You can find all of VMware’s patent listings at this website which helps explain exactly how a lot of their technology and features work. Here you can find out the technical details behind their DataMover component of the hypervisor which is responsible for moving and copying VM data for operations like Storage vMotion. You can also find out all the details on how their Fault Tolerance feature works as well.

3. In addition to problem solving articles, the VMware KB has a lot of great articles in it as well but finding them can be pretty challenging.  To find them you can search on types of documents and select technical articles that are not specific to problems and issues such as Best Practices, How-To’s and Information documents. Their is also a KBTV video blog as well that gives you video instruction on many of the popular KB topics.

4. The VMworld website has all of the recordings and materials from previous years VMworld’s. You can only access the previous year if you attended or purchase a subscription to them. But the years before the previous year are always made free after each VMworld and still contain a lot of good content. For example you can see all of the 2010 sessions here.

5. VMware has a video library for their Technical Publications on YouTube so if you don’t like reading about something you can see it in a visual manner instead. Most of the videos are fairly short (under 5 min), it would be nice if they could make these longer and put more information in them but they are still good to watch.

6. VMware has first rate documentation, it’s now available in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats, download it all and put it on your Kindle, E-Reader or iPad so you always have it with you. It’s broken into specific guides now for areas such as storage, availability, networking, security, resource management, etc. This documentation is not just how to install and use the products, their is a lot of great information as well that is very educational.

7. Of course don’t forget the great technical papers that VMware frequently publishes, some great recent ones include Storage Protocol Comparison and another comparing Stretched Clusters to SRM.

8. Then there is the VMTN forums which is where a lot of topics get discussed, but there is also a Documents section in each of the forums that contains some great information that is more focused then the discussion threads. For example here is the Documents for the vSphere forum and for the vCenter forum.

9. Finally if there is one blog you must read besides Duncan’s, VMware’s vSphere Blog is it. The vSphere blog has become an aggregate for may other VMware technical blogs that focus on specific areas like storage, ESXi, DR/BC, Networking and Automation. Some of VMware’s great technical minds like Cormac Hogan, Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, William Lam and Kyle Gleed.

If you have any other good VMware technical information sources let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

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 great, 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 great new vSphere 5 and View 5 training offerings.

Here are the overall voting results…

Blog	Rank	Previous	Total Votes	Total Points	#1 Votes
Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping)	1	1	697	5440	243
Scott Lowe	2	3	480	3034	25
NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof)	3	4	419	2592	45
Virtual Geek (Chad Sakac)	4	2	381	2298	46
Frank Denneman	5	6	373	2214	19
RTFM Education (Mike Laverick)	6	5	337	1775	6
Virtu-al (Alan Renouf)	7	9	294	1599	10
Virtually Ghetto (William Lam)	8	25	288	1522	21
Virtualization Evangelist (Jason Boche)	9	8	283	1392	15
vSphere-land (Eric Siebert)	10	7	264	1267	9
The SLOG (Simon Long)	11	11	225	1258	23
Virtual Storage Guy (Vaughn Stewart)	12	15	218	1245	48
vReference (Forbes Guthrie)	13	19	219	1123	14
LucD (Luc Dekens)	14	21	174	1055	20
Gabe's Virtual World (Gabriel Van Zanten)	15	10	204	995	19
Nickapedia (Nicholas Weaver)	16	24	171	948	14
My Virtual Cloud (Andre Leibovici)	17	39	150	914	25
TechHead (Simon Seagrave)	18	14	166	904	17
VMGuru.nl (Various)	19	13	179	815	21
ESX Virtualization (Vladan Seget)	20	23	138	804	19
Chris Colotti	21	-	119	733	28
VMware Tips (Rick Scherer)	22	18	155	718	5
Pivot Point (Scott Drummonds)	23	17	114	615	1
Brian Madden	24	-	96	581	6
Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat	25	-	116	562	1
vCritical (Eric Gray)	26	16	112	483	0
Hypervizor (Hany Michael)	27	12	97	467	4
J Metz (J Michael Metz - Cisco)	28	-	87	447	3
Wikibon Blog (S. Miniman/D. Vellante)	29	69	94	395	1
A vTexan (Tommy Trogden)	30	-	72	386	14
The Lone Sysadmin (Bob Plankers)	31	65	62	383	12
Professional VMware (Cody Bunch)	32	58	73	381	4
Around the Storage Block (Calvin Zito - HP)	33	-	62	378	4
GestaltIT (Various)	34	43	91	377	0
Mike D's Blog (Mike DiPetrillo)	35	22	84	373	3
Chris Wolf	36	41	83	364	1
Kendrick Coleman	37	30	79	355	2
VMware Videos (David Davis)	38	-	58	309	3
vSamurai (Christopher Wells)	39	-	45	308	6
The Storage Architect (Chris Evans)	40	-	56	306	1
Storage Nerve (Devang Panchigar)	41	-	53	304	1
VM/ETC (Rich Brambley)	42	20	74	298	0
VM Guru (Scott Herold)	43	-	71	292	1
2 VCP's (Jon Owings)	44	45	70	287	5
Technodrone (Maish Saidel-Keesing)	45	32	41	283	14
StorageIO (Greg Schulz)	46	-	52	276	7
Virtualize Tips (Brian Suhr)	47	-	51	276	4
IT 2.0 (Massimo Re Ferre)	48	38	50	272	1
Justin's IT Blog	49	-	45	268	9
The Virtualization Practice (Various)	50	49	41	265	7
Wahl Network (Chris Wahl)	51	-	36	252	12
Sudrsn's Blog (Sudharsan)	52	-	35	249	14
Ray On Storage (Ray Lucchesi)	53	-	46	243	1
vInfrastructure Blog (Andrew Mauro)	54	-	42	237	7
Ruptured Monkey (Nigel Poulton)	55	-	42	233	0
The Lower Case W (Matt Liebowitz)	56	85	37	228	6
vNinja (Christian Mohn)	57	-	53	225	1
Rickatron Blog (Rick Vanover)	58	83	44	222	0
Aaron Delp	59	48	49	221	1
WoodITWork (Julian Wood)	60	-	48	220	3
Arnim van Lieshout	61	27	42	215	1
The Cloudcast.net (Brian Gracely)	62	-	33	215	8
Hypervisor.fr	63	29	34	212	3
VMware Training & Certification (Scott Vessey)	64	42	46	210	2
Backup Central (W. Curtis Preston)	65	-	44	208	1
Hu's Blog (HDS - Hu Yoshida)	66	-	27	207	14
Double Cloud (Steve Jin)	67	44	35	203	3
Planet VM (Tom Howarth)	68	35	46	201	3
The VM Guy (Dave Lawrence)	69	26	33	196	1
A Crazy Penguin (Andy Wood)	70	110	34	195	2
Virtual Admin Notes (Anton Zhbankov)	71	37	26	191	12
Virtual Insanity (S. Sauer/A. Sweemer)	72	28	42	189	6
vTesseract (Josh Atwell)	73	-	32	188	5
What Would Dan Do (Dan Brinkmann)	74	-	36	186	3
vSpecialist (Michael Poore)	75	-	35	184	3
ICT-Freak.nl (Arne Fokkema)	76	-	43	181	0
Hands On Virtualization (Barry Coombs)	77	-	28	177	1
Virtualization Security (Tripwire)	78	66	33	176	0
Virtualization, Data Center & Networking	79	-	38	175	1
VMpros.nl (Sander Daems)	80	34	31	175	6
Juanma's Blog (Juan Manuel)	81	-	23	173	11
Storagebod (Martin Glassborow)	82	-	32	172	2
Ivo Beerens	83	61	28	171	2
Virtualization Pro (E. Siebert/Various)	84	-	37	169	0
Rational Survivability (Christofer Hoff)	85	52	30	165	1
SearchServerVirtualization Blog (Various)	86	68	35	165	2
Virtual VCP (Rynardt Spies)	87	63	39	163	0
Everything Virtual (Simon Davies)	88	-	29	161	5
VMworld.net (Andi Lesslhumer)	89	-	27	160	4
Everyday Virtualization (Rick Vanover)	90	40	35	157	2
Jonathan Medd	91	-	32	156	0
Andi Mann	92	97	34	154	0
Virtualised Reality (Barry Coombs)	93	64	34	154	4
Jase's Place (Jase McCarty)	94	47	34	153	1
That's My View (Christoph Hardin)	95	-	27	141	0
vmDK (Damian Karlson)	96	-	29	138	0
Virtual Planet (Ricky El-Qasem)	97	90	34	137	1
VMdamentals (Erik Zandboer)	98	-	29	136	2
A Day In The Life (Adam Baum)	99	114	28	135	0
The Data Center Overlords (Tony Bourke)	100	-	27	135	0
Virtualization Team (Various)	101	87	31	134	0
The HyperAdvisor (Antone Heyward)	102	101	23	132	1
The Saffa Geek (Gregg Robertson)	103	-	26	132	1
VirtualPro (Craig Stewart)	104	75	31	130	1
Run-virtual (Richard Garsthagen)	105	46	21	129	1
Virtualization Stuff (Mark Mac Auley)	106	108	29	127	0
Virtualization Spotlight (P. Redknap)	107	-	23	125	0
Vinf.net (Simon Gallagher)	108	96	24	124	1
Rickard Nobel	109	-	24	119	1
Virtualization Information (S. Snowden)	110	94	23	119	1
VMBulletin (Rick Schlander)	111	106	25	118	1
vDestination (Greg Stuart)	112	59	25	117	2
Virtual Geek (Cedric Megroz)	113	-	22	117	3
VM Admin (Andy Barnes)	114	84	28	115	0
Virtual SMB (Will Huber)	115	-	22	114	4
Poshoholic (Kirk Munro)	116	-	22	113	0
Virtual Noob (Chad King)	117	-	28	113	1
vExperienced (Edward Grigson)	118	-	26	111	2
By The Bell (Steve Kaplan)	119	31	17	109	2
The Storage Anarchist (Barry Burke)	120	-	18	109	1
vFrank (Frank Brix Pedersen)	121	81	20	108	2
VM Today (Joshua Townsend)	122	102	22	108	0
Virtualization for Service Providers	123	-	19	106	1
Infoworld Virtualization Report (D. Marshall)	124	74	17	101	1
mwpreston dot net (Mike Preston)	125	-	17	101	1
VMware Info (Carlo Costanzo)	126	54	17	101	4
TechProsaic (Hal Rottenberg)	127	71	19	100	0
Lewan Professional Services Team Blog	128	-	13	99	6
Going Virtual (Brian Norris)	129	80	22	96	1
vElemental (Clint Kitson)	130	-	23	96	1
Demitasse (Alastair Cooke)	131	-	14	93	2
VMware Admins (Eric Sarakaitis)	132	-	24	93	1
Cloud Buddy (Bilal Hashmi)	133	-	19	92	0
Virtualization Buster (Jonathan Franconi)	134	113	20	91	2
vMacken (David Owen)	135	-	20	91	0
Peacon Blog (James Pearce)	136	-	19	90	1
Virtual Lifestyle (Joep Piscaer)	137	70	16	90	1
Beaver's Virtual Dam (Steve Beaver)	138	104	18	87	1
Blue Gears (Edwad Haletky)	139	93	20	86	0
Knudt Blog (Brian Knudtson)	140	78	18	85	0
Virtual Jay (Jay Rogers)	141	111	20	85	0
VMexplorer (Matt Mancini)	142	-	17	83	0
Burdweiser (James Burd)	143	-	14	82	0
Lori MacVittie	144	100	13	82	1
Robert van den Nieuwendijk	145	-	19	82	2
View Yonder (Steve Chambers)	146	33	20	79	0
VMnerds (Jéré­mie Bri­son)	147	-	19	79	0
Blue Shift Blog (Kevin Kelling)	148	112	19	78	0
Virtual Clouds (Marco Broeken)	149	-	20	78	0
J.F.V.I. (Chris Dearden)	150	73	17	74	0
Virtual Troll (Heino Skov)	151	79	17	74	0
Ken's Virtual Reality (Ken Cline)	152	62	17	73	0
Virtual Future (Sven Huisman)	153	57	13	72	0
Jume (Bouke Groenescheij)	154	56	17	70	0
VirtuallyLG (Lorenzo Galelli)	155	-	19	69	0
IT Blood Pressure (Dwayne Lessner)	156	-	16	68	0
Virtually Speaking (Dan Kusnetzky)	157	103	16	68	1
vPerformance (Anders Hansen)	158	-	17	68	0
UP2V (Marcel van den Berg)	159	-	10	67	2
VMwise (Kanuj Behl)	160	86	15	67	0
Peeters Online (Hugo Peeters)	161	60	19	65	0
VMware Front Experience (Andreas Peetz)	162	-	11	65	2
vNoob (Conrad Ramos)	163	-	17	65	1
ThinkCloud.nl (Martijn Baecke)	164	-	15	64	0
Vinternals (Stuart Radnidge)	165	36	16	64	0
Malaysia VM	166	88	14	63	0
ValCo Labs (Josh Coen)	167	-	11	62	0
vSential (James Bowling)	168	-	11	62	0
Deshifrator	169	-	12	61	1
Roger Lund IT/VMware Blog (Roger Lund)	170	55	14	61	0
VMwarewolf (Richard Blythe)	171	67	15	61	0
Virtualizing the D.C. (Tony Wilburn)	172	115	15	59	0
Gerbens Blog (G. Kloosterman)	173	50	14	58	2
Elastic Vapor (Reuven Cohen)	174	95	11	57	1
It's Just Another Layer (Ian K.)	175	105	12	56	0
vNotion (Anton Gostev)	176	51	13	56	0
Virtual Hints (Matt Lorimer)	177	99	15	53	0
Tech-Tap (Dave Convery)	178	-	9	52	1
VMworldz (Scott March)	179	82	11	51	0
vKnowledge (Ted Steenvoorden)	180	92	13	48	0
DeinosCloud (Didier Pironet)	181	98	12	42	0
Mourad Boubchir	182	-	5	37	3
Enterprise Admins (Brian Wuchner)	183	-	9	33	0
GeekSilver's Blog	184	-	6	30	0
Musings of Rodos (Rodney Haywood)	185	77	7	29	0
Eprich (Paul Richards)	186	-	5	27	0
vReality (Tomi Hakala)	187	-	8	24	0

And here are the top blog category winners…

Favorite Storage Blog	Votes
Virtual Geek (Chad Sakac - EMC)	354
Virtual Storage Guy (Vaughn Stewart - NetApp)	158
Around the Storage Block (Calvin Zito - HP)	61
StorageIO (Greg Schulz)	59
Nickapedia (Nicholas Weaver)	55
Hands On Virtualization (Barry Coombs)	52
Hu's Blog (Hu Yoshida - HDS)	42
Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat	40
The Storage Architect (Chris Evans)	37
vTexan (Tommy Trogden)	34
The Storage Anarchist (Barry Burke)	26
Ray On Storage (Ray Lucchesi)	22
J Metz (J Michael Metz - Cisco)	20
Storage Nerve (Devang Panchigar)	17
Storage Mojo (Robin Harris)	15
Ruptured Monkey (Nigel Poulton)	8
Wikibon Blog	8
Other not listed	106
Favorite Cloud Computing Blog	Votes
Hypervizor (Hany Michael)	206
DoubleCloud (Steve Jin)	124
The Cloudcast.net (Brian Gracely)	121
IT 2.0 (Massimo Re Ferre')	119
Andi Mann - UberGeek	112
Rational Survivability (Christofer Hoff)	63
DevCentral (Lori MacVittie)	40
Other not listed	352
Favorite End User Computing (VDI) Blog	Votes
Brian Madden	262
My Virtual Cloud (Andre Leibovici)	235
vTexan (Tommy Trogden)	87
Virtualize Planet (Ricky El-Qasem)	56
What Would Dan Do (Dan Brinkmann)	53
Wahl Network (Chris Wahl)	52
That's My View (Christoph Hardin)	51
Virtualize Tips (Brian Suhr)	47
IT Blood Pressure (Dwayne Lessner)	46
Demitasse (Alastair Cooke)	19
Other not listed	228
Favorite News/Information Website	Votes
vSphere-land.com (Eric Siebert)	284
SearchServerVirtualization.com (Tech Target)	148
Virtualization.info	128
VMware Training & Certification (Scott Vessey)	90
SearchVMware.com (Tech Target)	88
VM Blog (David Marshall)	72
Virtualization.net	64
Virtualization Review	44
Virtual Strategy Magazine	37
Virtualization Admin	26
Other not listed	187
Favorite Scripting Blog	Votes
Virtu-al (Alan Renouf)	247
Virtually Ghetto (William Lam)	223
LucD Notes (Luc Dekens)	154
DoubleCloud (Steve Jin)	56
vElemental (Clint Kitson)	52
ICT-Freak.nl (Arne Fokkema)	47
Technodrone (Maish Saidel-Keesing)	46
vTesseract (Josh Atwell)	38
Jonathan Medd's Blog	31
Robert van den Nieuwendijk	21
TechProsaic (Hal Rottenberg)	17
Other not listed	204
Favorite Podcast	Votes
vChat (Simon Seagrave, David Davis, Eric Siebert)	182
Professional VMware BrownBags (Cody Bunch)	177
vSoup (Chris Dearden, Christian Mohn, Ed Czerwin)	108
The CloudCast (Aaron Delp, Brian Gracely)	76
Hands On Virtualization (Barry Coombs)	74
Nekkid Tech (Greg Knieriemen)	70
vKernel.tv	53
Virtualization Security (Edward Haletky)	50
APAC Virtualization Podcast (Alastair Cooke)	41
Other not listed	306
Favorite Official VMware blog	Votes
VMTN Community (John Troyer)	198
VMware vSphere Blog	135
ESXi Chronicles	123
Vroom! (Performance)	114
VMware Storage Blog	84
Office of the CTO Blogs (S. Herrod/others)	67
VMware vCloud Blog	55
vSphere PowerCLI Blog (Scripting)	55
Virtual Reality (VMware perspective)	51
VMware End-User Computing Blog	45
Uptime (Business continuity & DR)	23
VMware Vision	21
VMware Networking Blog	20
The Console (VMware management)	16
VMware Security Blog	14
Other not listed	116
Best Videos used in a Blog	Votes
NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof)	351
VMware Videos (David Davis)	253
RTFM Education (Mike Laverick)	146
Professional VMware (Cody Bunch)	107
The Cloudcast (.net) Video Channel (Brian Gracely)	74
Other not listed	206
Favorite New Blog	Votes
Hands On Virtualization (Barry Coombs)	96
vTesseract (Josh Atwell)	92
vInfrastructure Blog (Andrew Mauro)	82
The Cloudcast (.NET) (Brian Gracely)	72
vElemental (Clint Kitson)	67
Cloud Buddy (Bilal Hashmi)	64
Virtual Noob (Chad King)	46
vNoob (Conrad Ramos)	45
Virtual Geek (Cedric Megroz)	43
Virtual SMB (Will Huber)	43
What Would Dan Do (Dan Brinkmann)	43
Robert van den Nieuwendijk	38
mwpreston dot net (Mike Preston)	28
VMware Front Experience (Andreas Peetz)	19
ValCo Labs (Josh Coen)	16
Mourad Boubchir	13
Deshifrator	12
Other not listed	318
Favorite Independent Blogger	Votes
NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof)	180
RTFM Education (Mike Laverick)	110
ESX Virtualization (Vladan Seget)	62
Gabe's Virtual World (Gabe Van Zanten)	57
vReference (Forbes Guthrie)	54
The Storage Architect (Chris Evans)	40
Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat	35
Professional VMware (Cody Bunch)	32
VMware Videos (David Davis)	31
StorageIO (Greg Schulz)	29
Technodrone (Maish Saidel-Keesing)	29
Wahl Network (Chris Wahl)	28
Wikibon Blog (Stuart Miniman)	27
vNinja (Christian Mohn)	26
WoodITWork (Julian Wood)	24
Cloud Buddy (Bilal Hashmi)	23
VMware Training & Certification (Scott Vessey)	21
Virtual Noob (Chad King)	18
Jonathan Medd	16
Ray On Storage (Ray Lucchesi)	16
vInfrastructure Blog (Andrew Mauro)	16
Virtualised Reality (Barry Coombs)	16
VMnerds (Jéré­mie Bri­son)	13
VMpros.nl (Sander Daems)	13
VMware Front Experience (Andreas Peetz)	12
Demitasse (Alastair Cooke)	11
IT Blood Pressure (Dwayne Lessner)	11
Deshifrator	8
Virtual Clouds (Marco Broeken)	8
Mourad Boubchir	7
ValCo Labs (Josh Coen)	6
mwpreston dot net (Mike Preston)	4
Other not listed	153

HP is sponsoring the Unofficial, Official Community Tweet-up at VMware Partner Exchange. If you don’t know what a tweet-up is it’s basically a fancy name for a party that is geared towards people on Twitter who follow each other so they can meet in person and socialize. But don’t worry, if you’re not on Twitter you can still attend, Twitter is a great communication tool and you might find yourself signing up once you find out more about it.

The party is Monday, Feb 13th from 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm right after the Welcome Reception ends and is being held at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville which is a short walk south of the Venetian on the same side of the street. There will be free food and free drinks courtesy of Calvin Zito from HP and it should be a fun time. We will also be giving away a HP MicroServer to one lucky attendee which will make a great part of any VMware home lab (I have 2 of them in mine).

Attendance is limited to 150 people so you must RSVP to attend, so head on over to Twtvite and RSVP, you can do this even if you don’t have a Twitter account. See you at PEX!

There are over 180 blogs dedicated to VMware virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was over 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 with the current top 25 blogs highlighted in bold & underlined text, so please go through the whole list when making your choices (Duncan ended up on the bottom).
• New 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. 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 2/7, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special podcast with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer live at VMware Partner Exchange.
• Several random voters will be picked to win a copy of the Train Signal’s  new vSphere 5 and View 5 video training courses.
• Duplicate vote protect 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 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 25 that deserve to be there.

So what are you waiting for, head on over to http://vote.vsphere-land.com to cast your ballot and reward the best bloggers for their hard work and dedication by letting them know that you appreciate them. In case you need it here’s the direct link to the survey as well.

Special thanks to Train Signal for sponsoring the 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 more than 50% of posts storage related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have more than 50% posts cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have more than 50% posts VDI/EUC related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have more than 50% posts Scripting related)
• 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 must be less than a year old)
  
• 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 1/17. Once it closes I will use the nominations to build the survey for the top blog voting which will begin shortly afterwards.

So I thought that can’t be right in vSphere 4.1 the version of vShield that was included was vShield Zones 4.1, how can it be version 1.0 now. In vSphere 4.1 there was the Zones version and the App version of vShield, you could upgrade from Zones to App by buying the licences for it and once you applied them Zones became App which provided more features that were not part of Zones.

So I was having lunch with Rob Randall, VMware’s security guru last week and asked him about it. Turns out they are no longer providing the updated vShield Zones as part of the bundle with Enterprise/Plus licenses. They did a switch-a-roo and are now providing the old version 1.0 Update 1 instead. I’m guessing they thought they were giving too much away for free with the updated vShield Zones which was not all the much different from vShield App and as a result people were not upgrading to App. This is disappointing as there is a huge difference between the 4.1 version of vShield and the  1.0 version. The biggest difference is version 1.0 does not use the VMsafe APIs and only worked inline between vSwitches in bridged mode. So if you are upgrading from vSphere 4.1 to vSphere 5 and you are using vShield Zones be aware that you are going to lose it after you upgrade. Your only options are to switch to version 1.0 (not very appealing) or cough up the dough to buy vShield App licenses. This VMware KB article breaks the bad news to you.

If you want to read more about vShield and the differences between the 1.0 and 4.1 versions as well as the differences between Zones & App I did a detailed multi-part series on each that you can read.

• Series on vShield 1.0
• Series on vShield 4.1

Storage I/O Control was introduced in vSphere 4.1, taking storage resource controls built into vSphere to a much broader level. In vSphere 5, Storage I/O Control has been enhanced with support for NFS data stores and clusterwide I/O shares.

Prior to vSphere 4.1, storage resource controls could be set on each host at the VM level using shares that provided priority access to storage resources. While this worked OK for individual hosts, it is common for many hosts to share data stores, and since each host worked individually to control VM access to disk resources, VMs on one host could limit the amount of disk resources on other hosts.

The following example illustrates the problem:

• Host A has a number of noncritical VMs on Data Store 1, with disk shares set to Normal
• Host B runs a critical SQL Server VM that is also located on Data Store 1, with disk shares set to High
• A noncritical VM on Host A starts generating intense disk I/O due to a job that was kicked off; since Host A has no resource contention, the VM is given all the storage I/O resources it needs
• Data Store 1 starts experiencing a lot of demand for I/O resources from the VM on Host A
• Storage performance for the critical SQL VM on Host B starts to suffer as a result

How Storage I/O Control works

Storage I/O Control solves this problem by enforcing storage resource controls at the data store level so all hosts and VMs in a cluster accessing a data store are taken into account when prioritizing VM access to storage resources. Therefore, a VM with Low or Normal shares will be throttled if higher-priority VMs on other hosts need more storage resources. Storage I/O Control can be enabled on each data store and, once enabled, uses a congestion threshold that measures latency in the storage subsystem. Once the threshold is reached, Storage I/O Control begins enforcing storage priorities on each host accessing the data store to ensure VMs with higher priority have the resources they need.

Read the full article at searchvirtualstorage.com…

So instead of messing with copying files through the guest OS layer using a copy utility, I prefer to copy them through the virtualization layer using an ISO file. By using an ISO file I can easily mount it on the VMs CD/DVD drive and then access the files without having to copy them to the VM’s file system. This is the same method by which VMware Tools is installed on a VM, the VMware Tools install binaries are mounted from a special mount point on the host disk partition to the CD/DVD drive of a VM so they can be installed. You’ll notice if you create a VM without a CD/DVD drive that you won’t be able to install VMware Tools and will receive an error if you try.

So you might think, creating an ISO file, isn’t that a pain in the butt as well. It’s actually very quick and easy and once you create it you can use it over and over on any VM to install applications with and copy files to VMs if needed. You can keep a collection of them on your workstation and mount them from your local disk or you can copy them to a host datastore and mount them from there. I sometimes create toolkit ISO images that contain many of the typical applications (i.e. Sysinternals, disk tools, etc.) that I use when troubleshooting problems within a VM. Windows still does not have the native ability to read or write ISO files but there are a number of free tools that you can create ISO files with such as ImgBurn, CDBurnerXP (works on Win7) and ISO Recorder. I usually use ImgBurn but ISO Recorder is even easier as you can select the files/folders that you want to include in the ISO file and launch it via the Windows Explorer menus like below.

Next you simply select a directory and a name to save your ISO file in, click Next and your ISO file will be created.

You can now mount it inside the VM using the virtual CD/DVD drive of the VM by browsing to the ISO file you just created so you can access all the files inside the ISO file from within the VM.

That’s it, quick and easy, takes less than a minute to complete and much easier then having to copy files through the guest OS of the VM.