Time to vote for your favorite VMware-related blogs!

It’s that time of year again…  Eric Siebert at vSphere-Land runs what has become the authoritative list of VMware-related blogs.

In late 2008 I popped on the list for the first time in the number 10 spot, and in 2010 when he expanded it to the “Top 25” I climbed into the 2nd spot, something I was insanely humbled by, but also insanely proud of.

There are some incredible bloggers out there.   Of course there’s always the vets – Duncan Epping (Yellow Bricks), Scott Lowe, Simon Seagrave, Alan Renouf and so many others it’s impossible to list.   2010 had some relative unknowns just absolutely elevate their blogging game – the standouts to me were Frank Denneman (killer posts on NUMA, and numerous posts on DRS/VM HA/FT) and Nick Weaver (just look at the wordpress plugin, the UBER work!)

For those of you that don’t do it – it’s completely a labor of love.  I expect that none of us do it because we’re paid to do it.   VMware in a significant way is supported by a massive community, and a group of passionate fans.

If you’re wondering if it’s a lot of work – it’s more than you can possibly imagine :-) 

But – on the other hand, it has huge payoffs.

• In 2010, I passed 1,000,000 page views (am now at around 1,300,000) – I can’t believe that many people read what I write.
• I regularly visit a customer or partner and am meeting them for the first time – but find out they read the blog, and in a weird way, we have a pre-existing relationship.   For those of you that do know me, my “blog voice” is actually just me – so if you read Virtual Geek, in a sense you do know me.   Yes, I’m ALWAYS this boring and long-winded :-)
• It helps me with my own learning.   While I am a senior executive at a FT500 company (EMC is #166), my secret deep dark fear is that I lose touch with the core technology, and stop learning.   I use the blog as a forcing function for me to stay sharp.
• It enables me to bypass the normal corporate communications baloney – both about problems (publicly posting bugs/workarounds), and also about good things (where sometimes I think something cool is getting overlooked).
• It helps me push the whole company in strange ways – the whole movement to make all our Virtual Appliances publicly available in “non neutered” format, as an example, is fueled by the power that derives directly from YOU as the reader.

Eric suggests that “length of post” is a factor, so I should win handily :-)  Seriously, while my posts are legendary for their long-winded, circuitous, “heavy slog reading”, “filled with charts and demos” nature, I think “quality of post” matters more than length.

For your consideration, the 5 posts in 2010 I think did the most to help or the community (not EMC centric):

1. vSphere 4.1 - What do the “vStorage APIs for Array Integration” mean to you? (for sharing raw content, for being IMO one of the best VAAI posts, and very cross-linked and cross-leveraged)
2. Official Virtualgeek 2010 Survey results (for fascinating direct customer feedback)
3. Solving a weird “slow performance” cloning issue… (for exposing a wart, and using it to explain a broader topic on IO size and VMware operations)
4. Oracle, x86, VMware and update on support (for putting my money where my mouth is on something people need to be up in arms over)
5. An important vSphere 4 storage bug and workaround (for exposing a wart, suggesting workarounds – While technically posted in Dec 2009, throughout 2010, this topic was painful for many VMware shops)

For VMware/EMC customers/employees/partners, here were some of the ones that I think helped the most (that were more EMC centric).

1. Your Virtual Machine Teleporter is ready Are you (for making the “federation” part of the joint VMware/EMC picture more clear – back in May, then through to VMworld we continue to flesh this out)
2. ITaaS Future Tech from EMC and VMware (visually demonstrating UIMv2 and vCloud Director to the world back in May)
3. EMC Unified Storage – Next Generation Efficiency Details (for making all the coolness in Zeus/Barossa, aka FLARE 30/DART 6.0 clear)
4. VMworld 2010 – Hands-on-Labs = 7,640,306,790 IOs served (for exposing some of the crazy madness behind the madness that was the VMworld 2010 HoL)
5. Mega Caches, Automated Tiering – or both? (aka applying a “marketing decoder”) (for discussing an important topic in next-gen storage design models)

Please take the 5 minutes to vote at vSphere-land whether it’s for me, or for any of the folks who are working hard (Eric’s site – Eric, I nicked the vote button as it was perfect, hope you’re cool with that) here: