Yeah, I know – totally now unseasonal and inappropriate blogpost title. It’s that time of year when Eric Siebert starts the voting process for Top vBlog of the year. As you might know I was in the top ten for some years with my “RTFM Education” site. Last year was the first year really of “mikelaverick.com” proper. For a while I was having to blog over on the communities website, as I saw out a period of “non-compete” with TechTarget who acquire the ye olde site back in 2009. Anyway, I hope many of you will vote for me again – and keep me in that all important top 10 slot!
Probably my biggest contribution in 2013 was my mega-blogpost series all about vCloud Director. It ended up being some 70 odd parts in total. I do hope to carry on with a new series all about vCloud Automation Center. Recently, I’ve been side-tracked by trying to use Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 in anger. The theory was to get outside of my “VMware Bubble” to really see what the competition is capable (or should that be incapable!) off. I hope folks have found those post insightful and balanced. I tried to carry on with my “warts and all” style which has been a hallmark of my documentation in the past. Nine times out of ten, its my good self that is cause of all the problems – but I figure as I’m human I’m allowed to make mistakes, what matters is ‘fesssing up to those – in the hope that others will learn from those experiences. More recently, I’ve embarked on a Back To Basics series of posts – revisiting every aspect of the vSphere 5.5 platform, together with companion PowerCLI examples. That was inspired by me feeling I was getting disconnected from core virtualization from VMware. I hadn’t serious written about vSphere since the 4.0 book I wrote – I’d become so focused on SRM, View and latterly cloud – that I felt I need to do something to keep my vSphere knowledge sharp and up-to-date. More recently I’ve been recently revisiting those Back To Basics posts with demo videos and discussion videos too!
On the community front I continue to attend and support the VMware User Groups program – not just by speaking myself but by trying to mentor the membership to speak as well, a process I’ve dubbed #FastForward. One of my most popular posts last year was about using AutoLab on BareMetalCloud.com, as well has hosting some “skinny linux” distributions on mikelaverick.com. Both of these efforts are about helping the community learn more about VMware Technologies with low upfront cost, and will minimal resources.
I’ve got some other big plans for 2014 which lie at outside of the blog, but are content related. It’s early days yet so I need to keep quiet about those for now. But keep in touch with the blog to find out more in the coming months.
So please take a little time to spend your vote. This year the voting is weighted – so vote for me in the No1 slot is 10 points, a vote for the No2 slot is 9 points and so on…
http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-the-2014-top-vmware-virtualization-blogs.html