View from a VMware System Engineer

A had a chance last week to talk to a System Engineer (Pre-sales) Manger for VMware, Doug Steen.  Doug has been employed by Nash Finch and Oracle. He has a great  understanding of VMware and the current market.

The first topic was how do you get different silo to buy into VMware. This is a very crucial concept.  The CIO, CFO, CEO see the bottom line dollar(s) and hour(s). The hard-core networking team with CISCO tattoos will not even think about the word/concept of NSX.  The storage team with NetApp, EMC, and/or HP posters covering every wall will not even talk about vSAN.  The compute member do not want to lose servers.

All of these teams see one thing.  If we virtualize the Data Center, this will cause less IT related jobs and/or job loss.  Doug brought up a good point. “You will get your weekends back.”  There will be less need to schedule outage windows.  No more 2-3 am network change. No more disruptive SAN firmware upgrades.

The second topic was if Doug and I owned a company and there were no requirements on the data, where would you see the Data Center in ten years.  As you noticed we already stated no requirements.  No PCI(Payment Card Industry) no PI(Personal Information).  In this case, the cloud. This could be a hybrid cloud or a full internet based cloud.  There might be the possibility for a couple of small servers that might be required on site.  The first server(s) that come to my mind are Windows Domain Controller.  Azure is getting very aggressive on that topic.  They only issue that I see is the current internet speed.  Active directory replication is very network intense.  In testing, we see that a minimum of 5MB download and 5MB upload is required.

The third and final discussion we had, the difference between Amazon cloud, Azure, and VMware cloud. I could not come up with anything.  All of them did the same thing. Doug had mentioned that everyone that he had talked to had one thing to say. With Amazon and Azure it was a one way input.  Once everything is setup in Azure and/or Amazon there was no way to transfer those virtual machines to another cloud provider. VMware was to only vendor that could do this.  You can take any of the VMDK file and then convert it.

I am completely up for comments on these topics.  If we are wrong in any of these areas please leave me a comment and some documentation to prove your concept.