Yes, it is that time of the year again… vSphere-land.com’s voting for the top virtualization blogs has started again. Of course I am hoping to end up somewhere at the top of the list again, but I realize like no one else that this is not a given. The competition once again is huge, there are a couple of new-comers which has published some outstanding work. Personally I am a huge fan of Cormac Hogan’s work and I hope he will make it in to the top 10 this year, I sure as hell voted for him! Of course I expect my friends like Frank Denneman, Alan Renouf, Massimo Referre and William Lam to also hit the top 10.

I am hoping each of you will select the top-10 blogs again based on quality, relevancy, longevity and frequency. (I personally find length of the article irrelevant, content is King!) I always use the yearly voting to look back at what happened the last 12 months. What happened in 2012, what has kept me busy?

For me 2012 started with Partner Exchange. Presented a 2-hr workshop on how to design a Cloud Infrastructure, together with Dave Hill (he is on the list as well, so vote for him ) and guests Frank Denneman and Chris Colotti. On top of that Chris Colotti and I presented a DR solution for vCloud Director based environments. This is something that people had been waiting on for a long time. I came up with the process/concept for this and also published a whitepaper on this topic. The same concept can be used for VMware View environments by the way, white paper out soon! I published a whole bunch of other white papers (1, 2) this year as part of my Tech Marketing responsibilities, of which the vMSC Best Practices paper is probably the most read and best received. I managed to get a couple of sessions approved at VMworld and had a blast presenting with my buddy Lee Dilworth. Also being a VMworld “Expert” was once again an awesome experience, I especially enjoyed the group discussions. I also presented as a couple of VMUGs (belgium, ireland, uk) and last but not least, published the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive… which happened to be the most sold book at VMworld San Francisco.

Along the way I managed to crank out an article or two hundred, and my blog went down during the vSphere 5.1 launch due to the massive amount of traffic. I can tell you that my hosting company was surprised as they thought it was a DDOS attack, but then they figured out it was just a massive amount of people hitting my site on the same day. I guess thanks for that

I did want to list my 10 top articles over the last 12 months in no particular order:

• Back To Basics: Install, Configure and use vSphere Replication
• VXLAN Essentials (3 posts): configuring, requirements and usecases
• The number of vSphere HA heartbeat datastores for this host is 1 which is less than required 2 (this is one that proofs that you don’t always need to write lengthy deepdive articles)
• vSphere HA fail-over in action – aka reading the log files
• Thinking about a Stretched vCloud Director Deployment
• IOps
• vSphere Metro Storage Cluster – Uniform vs Non-Uniform
• The vSphere 5.1 HA Deepdive Page

Thanks again to Eric Siebert who spends a MASSIVE amount of time going through the voting, filtering out discrepancies and making sure it all is done in a fair manner! Make sure to bookmark his website, add it to your RSS reader and follow him on twitter. So what are you waiting for, head on over and take the survey!