Suit Yourself

As most of you are aware, VMware has announced that they are offering ESXi for free. This move is clearly intended to counter the bulldozer of marketing muscle and general software industry dominance that is Microsoft. It’s not a bad plan, after all VMware is the big deal in virtualization. Customers are used to ESX and used to paying a premium to get it. So will this increase proliferation, at least initially? You bet.  read more »

We all work in real-time; we all have a vision for how our virtual implementation should operate. Platform providers such as VMware and Microsoft are espousing the concepts of the cloud, dynamic IT and RTI(the real-time infrastructure). I know I harp on real-time a lot. The main reason for this is the evolution of virtualization technology. The reason we built our product to deal with real-time scenarios is because the infrastructure operates that way.  read more »

Let’s be honest, what we all want is for the system to take care of itself and let us know if we have to deal with anything. What we really want is to be able to show some auditor something like “It’s all here in the report. There is no way that pre-production machine was anywhere near my production servers”. 

What else do we really want out of our management products?  read more »

Over the past few months I have been taking a hard look at the offerings from VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix. VMware has been incumbent for a long time. With the release version of Hyper-V, I’ve spoken with a number of shops that are planning on giving it a try, especially the companies who use System Center heavily. However, it is interesting to me that companies who heavily use Citrix XenApp (Presentation Server) utilize an ESX environment instead of a XenServer one to accomplish virtualize it.  read more »

When you set out to start a company one thing you should ask yourself is “what does the customer really want” The short path is to develop really interesting technology with the hopes that customers will buy. The long path is to determine what customers really need before you start to write code. For this company, I with my co-founders decided that we were going to do this right the first time. We anticipated we would make market adjustments and remain flexible, while still answering the core question of what the customer really wants.  read more »

When I’m out on the road speaking with customers and prospects, one of the things I get asked about (being a policy-based management company) is "How do I know what is being utilized from the VM's perspective and can I tie that to a policy?" The first part always seems odd to me since the framework guys like VMware let you know when resources have been allocated by the hypervisor to you. When I talk to these customers about what more they are looking for, the answer becomes intuitively obvious.  read more »

I spoke at the Citrix Synergy show last week and had the opportunity to speak with several of the players in the virtualization space. My personal motivation for attending the show was getting a better understanding of what level of management is required to successfully pull off a Virtual Desktop implementation. One of the items that I understand to be of particular pain to a customer is how you pass an audit and more fundamentally, how do I know what’s happened once my virtual desktop has dissolved for the day.  read more »

Last week, I spoke at the VMware Virtualization Forum in San Jose. This gave me the opportunity to speak with more of you and convey the value our customers have realized with our products. A number of attendees came up after I spoke to ask me for a copy of the presentation because their boss "needed to see it"—which meant they were feeling the pain. It was gratifying to hear the guys in the trenches (system administrators, system analysts, system engineers and IT architects) validating that they liked our approach to solving a real pain they had.  read more »

Last week I spoke at the VMware Regional NYC conference and had the opportunity to present how one of our healthcare customers has been able to get a real handle on their Virtual Infrastructure by using our products. It was very cool to see reaction from the audience when I spoke about some of the features that gave this customer insight into what they have. A lot of people came back to our booth to talk about Discovery & Assessment, Virtual Lineage and Policy-Based Management. We also were giving away very cool glowing synthetic ice cubes that you can freeze and put in your beverages.  read more »

In virtualization today, understanding configuration is the key to unlocking the potential of a virtualized datacenter. It is the road to realizing the dramatic results we all have been chasing.  read more »