September 2nd, 2009
Doing the VMware Dance Day 3
VMware Day 1 Summary
The first official day of VMworld found me running from meeting to meeting. I did find a short time to walk the show area. This offered the opportunity to speak with several users of virtualized environments and various vendors who are part of the VMware ecosystem.
Customer Conversations
When the users of virtualized environments discussed why they embarked on their individual journeys, the reasons differed. Consolidation figured prominently in their discussions. Few were seeking better performance or higher levels of reliability. Some were seeking the dramatic cost savings described in industry market.
A few of them told me that they were seeing a difference. Others indicated they were just beyond the pilot project stage and hadn’t seen dramatic savings as of the moment. When I asked them if they had developed a virtualization architecture or had just started with products and built around them, it became clear that many organizations are starting with a specific product and worked from there. I suspect that this group will face issues as they move to broaden their use of various types of virtualization technology.
Trade Show Area
The trade show area was busy every time I had a moment to visit. It was striking to compare the trade show area of VMworld to that of OpenSource World/NGDC/CloudWorld. Although I didn’t spend the time to speak with everyone, I spent a few moments with:
- Althor Networks,
- Appistry,
- Aprius,
- Citrix
- Fortisphere,
- Liquidware Labs,
- Microsoft
- Neocleus,
- OpSource,
- Platform Computing,
- rPath,
- Stratus,
- Tranxition,
- Virtual Computer
- VMLogix,
- Virtual Instruments and, of course
- VMware
Hmmm. Where was Oracle?
In most cases these vendors where demonstrating products that they had mentioned in previous meetings. I saw quite a very very innovative products. I was surprised how many people recognized me and came over to say hello. I guess I didn’t offend them too much when I posted something on their product announcement briefing.
Some Vendor Concerns
Some mentioned that they were becoming concerned that VMware was becoming more and more similar to Microsoft in a few areas and they were feeling concerned. These people would point out that they invested heavily to develop a product, become partners with VMware and then VMware would field a competitive product. A few jokingly pointed out that VMware appeared to be presenting ideas that they had developed several years ago. We’ll have to watch how VMware fields a coooperative/competitive set of programs.
Final Comments
I promised to tell you what I learned during my discussions with the executives of Virtual Instruments. They’re offering some really interesting tools that act like “X-Ray Glasses” and allow IT administrators to look into the operations of their SAN in amazing detail. Most of their customers, it appears, find that they’ve not configured their SAN properly and are wasting resources, creating bottlenecks and, after using the tools from Virtual Instrurments, they were finally able to see the problems. I guess they’re showing people that “you have to see it to manage it.”
Daniel Kusnetzky is a member of the senior management team of The 451 Group. He is responsible for research and publications on a broad array of technology topics. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements. You can follow Dan on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Virtually Speaking via Email alerts or RSS.
