It was a very exciting week as I announced that I will be transitioning to a new team. Of course that wasn’t the only exciting thing this week. A lot of bloggers have been waiting for Eric Siebert to reveal the new Top 25 blogs... On twitter it was noticeable that some of the bloggers started to get nervous about their position. I am honored to be in such an amazing list. Anyway enough blabbering... check out the top 5:

• Eric Siebert - And the winners of the top VMware/virtualization blog are…
  Well I’m not saying, watch the presentation to find out, I’ll be doing another post later on with the full results as well as some detail on the process I used to sort through the votes and score them to determine the winners. Congratulations to all the winners, there were many newcomers to the top 25 blog roll. I’ll be sending you graphics that you can display on your website to reflect your achievements.
• Simon Gallagher - Using the VCE/vBlock concept to aid disaster relief in situations like the Haiti Earthquake
  Whilst providing physical, medical, food and engineering relief is of paramount importance during a crisis, communications networks are vital to co-ordinate efforts between agencies, it is likely that whatever civil communications infrastructure, cell towers, landlines etc. are badly impacted by the earthquake so aid agencies rely on radio based systems, however as in the “business as usual” world the Internet can act as a well-understood common medium for exchanging digital information and services – if you can get access.
• Chris Hoff - Cloud: Over Subscription vs. Over Capacity – Two Different Things
  This complicates things when you consider that at this point scaling out in CPU is easier to do than scaling out in the network.  Add virtualization into the mix which drives big, flat, L2 networks as a design architecture layered with a control plane that is now (in the case of Cloud) mostly software driven, provisioned, orchestrated and implemented, and it’s no wonder that folks like Google, Amazon and Facebook are desparate for hugely dense, multi-terabit, wire speed L2 switching fabrics and could use 40 and 100Gb/s Ethernet today.
• Scott Drummonds - Virtual Storage Design: Application Consolidation
  Fixed recommendations for consolidation ratios are cancerous.  Whether we are talking about vCPUs per core, virtual machines per host, or VMDKs per LUN, there is no single number the represents the “right” ratio.  Accurate guidance requires workload characterization and fine tuning using vSphere’s performance counters.  Today I want to highlight one experiment that shows application choice impacting VMDK-to-LUN consolidation.  The inescapable conclusion is that sequential access data must be separated from random access files!
• Scott Lowe - Resetting the Root Password on VMware ESX 4.0
  Because this is a lab environment we just wanted to assign a simple password that anyone on the team could easily remember. (I’m sure the security purists out there are screaming right now.) Unfortunately, once I had the ESX host booted into single user mode, the passwd command insisted on making me use a complex password. There didn’t seem to be any simple way around the restriction.

· A vCenter Server error is seen in the Plugin Manager window when the vCenter Client fails to process the Virtual Server Service Status...