So now that I've had a chance to digest what I took in at VMWorld last week, I now see a much different future for IT organizations than I've seen before. The thing I like about it, is that this new vision didn't come from industry observers and pundits, but from customers who are taking sizable risks and accomplishing amazing things.
System virtualization really is the greatest thing since sliced bread and a lot of conference attendees told me so. They significantly simplify the management of their servers and applications by placing them into a consistent environment on top of VMWare ESX 3.0. Why would you want to manage lots of different physical systems, with all their quirks and personalities, when you can manage a much smaller set of servers running VMWare and providing consitent, vanilla virtual system configurations for all your applications? The answer is loud and clear - you wouldn't.
I talked to customers from Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and the US who are creating new, large server infrastructures on top of VMWare because it saves huge amounts of administrative time. I'm not joking when I say that we haven't seen a technology shift this radical since refrigeration became widespread. Once a system and application is placed in the VMWare environement it's functionality is sealed and preserved. The system hardware underneath the virtual system stack can change without impacting the performance or availability of the application. IT workers really like having control and not having to worry about new technologies screwing up the works. There is no way these people will ever go back to working the old-fashioned way.
A couple of times I heard VMWare customers at the conference say things like: "I don't care if they fire me, I'm not going to go back and make everything stupid again", or "I keep losing my best people because they can get better job offers after they learn how to do this - but its not as serious a problem as it used to be beause our virtual environment doesn't need as much attention."
One of our favorite customers, David Siles from Kane County, IL gave a presentation where he stated - among many other things - that one of the best reasons for putting applications on VMWare was to get disaster recovery protection for them that was too difficult or expensive to achieve in their native operating environments.
Wade O'Harrow, one of our SE's from the southeast was there and completely in his element as a VMWare animal. He kept describing our technology as "doing the same thing for storage as VMWare does for servers." I admit it took me awhile to figure it out, but I finally did get it. In an EqualLogic SAN, the individual storage systems are really secondary to the logical storage pools that customers create. Volumes can be moved among the underlying storage hardware resources - more or less independently of what those resources happen to be. You need disk drives for virtual storage just like you need processors for virtual servers, but each disk drive just gets less and less important in the scheme of things.
It seems weird to say that the great thing about our systems is that you don't have to depend on them individually to run your data center, but I'm getting used to this idea very rapidly as customers tell me that they don't depend on any of their servers either.
