At the VMworld Press & Analyst Event in the panoramic Ghost Bar, we took a good look at the skyline of Las Vegas. After a few cocktails we ran into Aaron Andrews, Director Distributed Systems Windows at First American who was very open in sharing his extensive virtualization experience and expressed his personal views. Even without the drinks, this was quite a refreshing experience after a long day of corporate lingo and marketing speech in the VMworld exhibition booths.
A few notable quotes:
Education is the toughest business in any virtualization project.
Getting users to understand that it is not their hardware, but ours. They are using it as a ‘unit of consumption.
Break the barriers between all the disciplines, such as security, networking, storage, virtualization windows, Linux…
We looked at everybody: KVM, Xen, Microsoft and VMware. We choose to standardize on VMware about ten months ago. We selected them, because there is somebody I can call. At that point Microsoft answered: ‘what are you talking about’…
At VMware, there is always somebody I can call: ‘you guys are in trouble, I am gonna kick your ass’…They are very responsive to that…. That is also why Microsoft and VMware are finally in that Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) together.
We had our challenges over the years with VMware vSwitch and now with the Cisco releases I can ask what is going on to Cisco.
Multi-platform VM migration is missing it the Virtualization vendor offering, despite OVF, being released.
Déja vu: The new mainframe is back…
By the time it got completely dark, Aaron’s bold statements had attracted the attention of Mike Mitsch, the general Manager of the NEC Enterprise Servers – IT Platform Group. Being in Las Vegas their discussion ended in a bet on a much speculated announcement regarding Citrix and Microsoft this Friday. Mike Neil at Microsoft can be reassured that Mike Mitsch chooses his side…
The bookmakers in Sin City are ready and so are we. Where do you put your money?
Aaron is the man!
One thing is for sure …he didn’t *virtualize* his drinks!