How about… Facebook integration.  If you’re on Facebook, you can now interact with VCritical along with the 900 million objects that you and your friends are already desperately trying to keep up with.

The North Face Backpack Giveaway

To celebrate the new VCritical Facebook Page, I’m offering a special giveaway:  The North Face Yavapai Backpack ($70 value) — perfect for travel to VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas!

To Enter: Visit the VCritical page and “Like” it.  Simple.

One lucky winner will be randomly selected from the list of Facebook users that like VCritical.  Note: this is not the same thing as liking this article, which can be done by clicking the small button below.

Contest ends March 19, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

Prize ships to US/Canada only and must be claimed within five days of notification.  Giveaway sponsored by CSN.

Related posts:

1. vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen!
2. Book Review: VCP4 Exam Cram [Giveaway!]
3. VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land
4. What’s New (and What’s Vapor) in SCVMM 2008

eG Innovations

Since 2001, eG Innovations has been a pioneer in end-to-end IT performance monitoring. The eG VDI Monitor, part of the eG Enterprise suite, offers end-to-end monitoring for virtual desktop infrastructures including the connection broker, virtualization platform, user terminal, network and storage tiers.

In the white paper, Optimizing the Deployment and Management of Virtual Desktop Infrastructures with the eG VDI Monitor, key differences between Virtual Desktop monitoring and Virtual Server monitoring are examined.

eG’s CEO, Srinivas Ramanathan, demonstrates the eG VDI Monitor in this 3 minute video.

eG’s monitoring solution is one of only eight VMware Ready certified monitoring tools in the market and it is also available as a hosted service: eG Enterprise on Tap.

Besides VMware and VDI infrastructures, the eG Enterprise suite also supports monitoring for 120+ applications.  And unlike other monitoring tools, you don’t need to buy separate modules or plug-ins to monitor new applications thanks to eG’s universal agent technology.

CSC and Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation are two of many organizations that are standardizing on eG Innovations for their VDI performance monitoring needs.

ManageEngine

Flexible Virtualization Management for Today’s Complex IT Infrastructure

Today’s virtualized world is a complicated mixture of physical, virtual and cloud entities.  However, managing them need not be complicated if IT departments have a flexible management solution in place.

ManageEngine Applications Manager is an integrated virtualization and application performance management tool. It provides virtualization monitoring as well as deep-dive component monitoring of the entire hybrid IT infrastructure, including physical and cloud components.  It tracks performance of VMware & Microsoft Hyper-V servers, helps troubleshoot performance problems, reduce VM downtime, and helps in capacity planning.

ManageEngine Applications Manager’s uniqueness lies in the ability to track metrics of virtual machines along with application-specific performance metrics. Furthermore, by supporting both VMware and Hyper-V, Applications Manager helps manage multi-vendor virtualization technologies from a single management console.

Last year, ManageEngine Applications Manager was a finalist at ‘Best of InterOp’ in the virtualization category. By March 2011, Applications Manager plans to further enhance their virtualization offering by providing automatic provisioning of virtual resources based on threshold breaches within physical resources, such as the number of active sessions in a Tomcat server.  This is the kind of flexibility that organizations will need their management tools to have, if they are to effectively manage their IT infrastructure.

Veeam Software

Veeam has started 2011 off strong with a few whitepapers including one by Sean Clark, “The Essential Guide to Legacy-Free Disaster Recovery”, that focuses on the shortcomings of traditional data protection and explains the reason why now is the time to revamp your VMware data protection strategy.  You can also watch the previously recorded “5 New Ways to Use SureBackup” webinar with vExpert Rick Vanover, and catch the upcoming webinar: Essentials of Legacy-Free VMware Data Protection hosted by VMware vExpert Sean Clark.  See what is coming up next in the full webinar schedule.

Zenoss

Join Zenoss for a live engineering walk through of vCloud monitoring with Zenoss Enterprise.  Learn how Zenoss Enterprise monitors performance, availability, and utilization inside and outside.

If you are planning to deploy a private, public, or hybrid Cloud, or just want to learn more, see how Zenoss Enterprise can help when it comes to giving you the insights required to manage dynamic infrastructures.  Here are a few of the topics Zenoss will discuss:

• Mapping internal and external vCloud dependencies
• Managing capacity, performance, and availability management across vCloud, vSphere, storage, OS, and application
• Leveraging Cloud provider and consumer access controls

Zenoss will discuss the challenges of deploying vCloud and show hands-on how Zenoss Enterprise automatically models each server, VM, vApp or vDC as it is instantiated – all in 30 minutes!  Guaranteed to be light on fluff and heavy on real world use-cases with full access to Zenoss product experts to answer your questions.

Event Details
Date: Wednesday, February 2
Time: 2:00 pm EST/ 11:00 am PST
Duration: 30 minutes

Zenoss Enterprise IT management software is designed to meet today’s datacenter operations challenges. It is a single product that provides full stack coverage of networks, servers, applications, services, and virtualization. Functionally, it provides complete operational awareness by combining discovery and inventory, availability and performance monitoring, event management, and reporting. And since it’s built with open source technology it has the reliability, cost, and support benefits that come with an active community of thousands of users.

Thanks for Reading!

I hope you found this update interesting and worthwhile.  Thanks for reading VCritical!

Interested in sponsorship opportunities?  Contact me for more information.

Related posts:

1. Best of 2010
2. RHEV Manager — It’s not just a clever name
3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not Enterprise Virtualization
4. Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?

I was pleased to earn recognition as a top virtualization influencer and managed to hold on to a spot in the vSphere-land Top 25 VMware Blogs roster.  This year I also published The VCritical Manifesto to clearly disclose my motivation.

Before getting into the lists, I’d like to thank the readers, subscribers, followers, and especially the superb lineup of VCritical sponsors — a veritable who’s who of enterprise management: eG Innovations, ManageEngine, Veeam, and Zenoss.

While many posts from previous years have proven to be evergreen, and among the most heavily trafficked, these are the top posts on VCritical published in 2010:

Top 10 — Page Views

1. VMware ESXi 4: SD Flash in BL460c G6
2. The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
3. Taking snapshots of VMware ESX 4 running in a VM
4. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization HA [ha ha]
5. RHEV Manager — It’s not just a clever name
6. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not Enterprise Virtualization
7. Linux apps run directly on Windows with virtualization!
8. Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?
9. It’s not Hyper-V — it’s the drivers!
10. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: Pentium II Inside!

Top 10 — Reader Comments

1. It’s not Hyper-V — it’s the drivers!
2. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization HA [ha ha]
3. The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
4. These are not the files you are looking for
5. RHEV Manager — It’s not just a clever name
6. Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?
7. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not Enterprise Virtualization
8. Linux apps run directly on Windows with virtualization!
9. Multiple hypervisors? What about multiple SANs?
10. What is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization?

Unfortunately, Red Hat garnered a disproportionate share of attention this year due to their misleading marketing claims.  Thankfully the effort was not in vain, as detailed in the RHEV Wrap-Up.

Personal Favorites

I always enjoy working on VCritical articles; some of my personal favorites for the year are:

1. Does Microsoft really support Linux on Hyper-V?
2. Cloudy with a chance of vaporware
3. Automating SSL Certificate Deployments for HP iLO

Your Turn — Chime In!

If you are publishing a 2010 “Best-Of” post on your blog — or would like to share a favorite post from the year — submit a link here for others to enjoy!

Related posts:

1. What is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization?
2. These are not the files you are looking for
3. RHEV Wrap-Up
4. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not Enterprise Virtualization

Thank you for supporting VCritical in the latest round of vSphere-land top virtualization blogs from Eric Siebert.

I am very pleased to be voted into the #12 slot among a huge selection of talented professionals, moving up one notch from my previous position at lucky #13.

The message is clear — I will continue writing about VMware and competitive topics and I very much appreciate your ongoing support!

Best regards,

Eric

Related posts:

1. Vote VCritical — for change
2. vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen!
3. Best of 2010
4. Got Gravatar?

Top 6 posts — by page views

1. VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself — still the #1 Google result for “ESX 4″
2. Create ESXi 4 USB flash drives with Workstation
3. Yes, NIC teaming is not unsupported
4. Hands off that CSV!
5. The VMware ESXi 4 64MB Hypervisor Challenge
6. Hyper-V Linux Smokescreen

Top 6 posts — by reader comments

1. Hands off that CSV!
2. VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself
3. Layers and Layers of FUD
4. Microsoft tries deception, gets caught
5. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
6. Live Migration “significantly more complicated”

As I was pulling together these stats, I was not all that surprised to find that the more competitive posts tend to be the ones with the most comments.  The how-to posts ranked higher by page view — because they are linked to by many others around the blogosphere.

My sincere thanks go out to all of the readers, commentators, and fellow virtualization bloggers.

Related posts:

1. Live Migration “significantly more complicated”
2. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
3. Pimp My Hypervisor
4. One-hundredth VCritical Post

Content

Based on feedback and subscriber/reader metrics, the current blend of technical and competitive articles seems to be about right, so I plan to generally keep doing things the way I have for the foreseeable future.

I welcome any comments on the type of content you would like to see on VCritical — feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Traffic

As the following chart illustrates, I have been fortunate to experience month-over-month growth since inception.

My current policy is to not publicly disclose traffic statistics, but for perspective, each y-axis tick represents multi-thousands of page views.  I use several methods to measure statistics and this WordPress Stats module is the most conservative — it only measures actual blog page views from real users.

Blog Infrastructure

I started out with self-hosted WordPress as the platform for VCritical and have not regretted that decision once.  I did, however, need to change hosting companies twice in the past year.  That was painful, but now I’ve settled on what seems to be a sufficiently robust provider — you get what you pay for.  Thankfully, the cost is more than covered by Google ads and sponsorship.

Thanks

The virtualization space is really starting to heat up — I look forward to the next round.  Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading, subscribing, and following me on Twitter!

Related posts:

1. Got Gravatar?
2. Thinking about blogging?
3. Best of 2009
4. Incoming Google Traffic: Introduction

On WordPress blogs, these images are generally made possible through a service called Gravatar.  Most of the Top 20 Blogs at vSphere Land use WordPress — if you plan on commenting on the VM blogs, why not take a moment to set up a Gravatar for yourself?

I’m pointing this out in case folks are under the impression that they must have a special account on VCritical to display an avatar next to their comments — it’s all handled by Gravatar.

Do you have a Gravatar?

Related posts:

1. Thinking about blogging?
2. First year of VCritical
3. Upgraded to WordPress 2.7
4. Best of 2009

Congratulations are in order to all of the hard-working bloggers on the list — especially the top two, holding on to their positions from last time: Duncan Epping and Scott Lowe.

Although the VCritical grassroots campaign was not effective against the masters, it did muster up a small victory from position 17 up to lucky number 13!

See the full Top 20 at Eric Siebert’s vLaunchPad.

Previous Top 20 Blog List

Just for reference, here is the previous list of top blogs prior to July 2009.

Related posts:

1. VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land
2. Vote VCritical — for change
3. Not another virtualization blog!
4. Twitter Century Mark

The candidates are out virtually knocking on doors — Duncan Epping, Eric Sloof, Rich Brambley, and several others are already campaigning for your vote.

Friends, if you have not voted yet, won’t you consider a vote for VCritical?

There are still plenty of important positions available in the VCritical cabinet — supporters will be rewarded for their loyalty.  Just look at these exciting opportunities:

• Secretary of NIC teaming
• ISO image anti-proliferation Ambassador
• VM Encapsulation Czar
• Truth in Linux Support Director
• And more…

We face a difficult time in the virtualization industry, with unprecedented challenges ahead.  That’s why VCritical needs your vote now more than ever.  A vote for VCritical is a vote for change.  Well, maybe not, but it sounds kind of nice.

Don’t forget to vote.

Related posts:

1. vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen!
2. One-hundredth VCritical Post
3. VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land
4. Best of 2009

Over the past few months, VCritical has climbed in the Google search rankings for certain virtualization-related queries.  One especially notable search term is SCVMM, since there are quite a few articles written about that product on VCritical.  In fact, VCritical normally appears on the first page of Google search results for SCVMM — result number five at the moment.

Google’s search ranking algorithms are secret, but results are normally useful, accurate, and seemingly fair.

Today I thought I’d try the new Bing search engine and see if VCritical comes up on the first page of SCVMM results.  Uh, no –  half-way down page three — quite a discrepancy.

Does anyone know who is behind this new search engine?  If I didn’t know better, I would say it’s Microsoft — but they are already busy with that other search engine that refuses to take off.  But it looks an awful lot like Google’s interface.  Hmm.

How does that old saying go?  “Freedom of the press — to anyone that can afford to buy one.”  The same applies to Web search engines, evidently.

Related posts:

1. Incoming Google Traffic: Introduction
2. Best of 2009
3. First year of VCritical
4. Not another virtualization blog!