The deadline is fast approaching – Tuesday, February 7. The bloggers that talk about VMware, virtualization and cloud computing (see a subset over at Planet V12n) work hard and bring a lot of value to their readers. 

If you're a blog reader, head over to Eric Siebert's joint at vote.vsphere-land.com and put down some votes for your favorite read! 

Voting now open for the top VMware & virtualization blogs | vSphere-land

There are over 180 blogs dedicated to VMware virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was over a year ago and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

In a recent evaluation of ten of the leading cloud solution vendors (including Microsoft, Red Hat, Amazon, Rackspace and others), the Taneja Group determined that VMware stands out as the clear cloud leader due to its broad portfolio of virtualization and cloud management solutions, service provider ecosystem, and cross-cloud enabling tools and interfaces.

The Hopkinton, MA based Taneja Group are a boutique analyst firm that focuses on the storage industry, storage-related aspects of the server industry, and eDiscovery. Using the VMware-CSC service provider partnership as an example, the Taneja Group highlights what sets VMware’s hybrid cloud service provider program apart:

• A true enterprise hybrid cloud offering
• Fast time to deployment
• Transparent and auditable security
• Dedicated infrastructure
• Multi-tiered enterprise SLAs
• Global consistency and reach
• And finally, our enterprise hybrid cloud expertise.

You can read a detailed blog post about this study on the vCoud blog at blogs.vmware.com/vcloud – that article also includes a link to the full study.

On the Console blog, our CTO Steve Herrod has posted about Cloud Foundry and how it helps you preserve multi-cloud choice and flexibility. He goes into some detail of why companies would want to have multi-cloud setups, such as the ability to grow your platform over time if and when you need it, avoiding vendor lock-in, and meeting different compliance and geographical needs.

Cloud Foundry can deliver this flexibility and the rapid growth of its ecosystem is proof. These days, we have several public cloud providers on board, such as enStratus, Virtacore, and Tier 3, as well as a number of private cloud distributors, including Dell, Canonical, and Scalr.

As many suggest, 2012 will be the year of PaaS, and avoiding vendor lock-in will be a big factor for many businesses. Read more about how Cloud Foundry can help you achieve just that on blogs.vmware.com/console

The London VMUG has announced the winners of the Best Community Presentation Awards for 2011. Our congratulations go out to Stuart Radnidge, Jonathan Medd, and Julian Wood who have all stepped way out of their daily jobs and family commitments to share their experience and know-how with the community. Way to go folks!