Voting for the 2013 top virtualization blogs – A year in review

When Eric Siebert opens up the voting for the top VMware & virtualization blogs you know another (blogging) year has passed. First of all I want to thank Eric for organizing this year in year out. I know he spends an awful lot of time on this. Thanks Eric!
Its amazing to see that there are more than 200 blogs dedicated to virtualization and that each month new blogs appear. Unfortunately I don’t have the time to read them all but I do want to show my appreciation for the blog sites that I usually visit. Best newcomer is an easy one, Cormac Hogan. The content is absolutely great and he should be in the top 10. Then we have the usually suspects, my technical marketing colleagues and buddies: Alan Renouf, Rawlinson Rivera and William Lam. I start of the day by making coffee, checking my email and logging into yellow-bricks.com. It’s the de facto standard of the virtualization blogs. Duncan’s blog provide not only technical in-depth articles, but also insights in the industry. Who else? Eric Sloof of course! Always nice to read to find out that your white paper is published before you get the official word through company channels. 😉 Two relative unknown blog sites but quality content: Erik Bussink and Rickard Nobel. These guys create awesome material. One blog that I’m missing in the list is the one from Josh Odgers. Great content. Hope to be able to vote for him next year.
When reviewing content from others you end up reviewing the stuff you did yourself and 2012 was a very busy year for me. During the year I published and co-authored a couple of white papers such as the vSphere Metro Cluster Case Study, Storage DRS interoperability guide and vCloud Director Resource Allocation Models.
I presented at a couple of VMUGS and at both VMword San Francisco and Europe. The resource pool best practice session was voted as one of the top 10 presentations of VMworld. And of course Duncan and I released the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive, also know as 50 shades of Orange. ☺ I believe it’s the best one of the series.

In the mean time I ended up writing for the vSphere blog, appearing on a couple of podcast and writing a little over a 100 blog articles on frankdenneman.nl. I then to focus on DRS, Storage DRS, SIOC and vMotion but once in a while I like to write about something that gives a little insight peek of my life such as the whiteboard desk or the documentaries I like to watch. It seems you like these articles also as they are frequently visited.
In my articles I try to give insights in the behavior of the features of vSphere, this to help you understand the impact of these features. Understanding the behavior allows you to match your design to the requirements and constrains of the project/virtual infrastructure your working on. During my years in the field I was always looking for this type of information, by providing this material I hope to help out my fellow architects.
When publishing more than over 100 articles you tend to like some more than others. While it’s very difficult to choose individual articles, I enjoyed spending time on writing a series of articles on the same topic, such as the series Architecture and design of datastore clusters (5 posts) and Designing your (Multi-NIC) vMotion network (5 posts). But I also like the individual post:
• vSphere 5.1 vMotion Deepdive
• A primer on Network I/O Control
• vSphere 5.1 Storage DRS load balancing and SIOC threshold enhancements
• HA admission control is not a capacity management tool
• Limiting the number of storage vMotions
I hope you can spare a couple of minutes to cast your vote and show your appreciation for the effort these bloggers put into their work. Instead of picking the customary names please look back and review last year, think about the cool articles you read that helped you or sparked your interest to dive into the technology yourself. Thanks
I can’t wait to watch the Top 25 countdown show Eric, John and Simon did in the previous years.