Has been a busy week.
- The on-going saga about Oracle/VMware support has been fast and furious.
- The VMware SE conference
- EMC VMware Academies are rolling out globally – to read about what’s happening in them and when they are near you…..
If you’re curious about any of these, read on….
Oracle on VMware
This seems to be coming to a boil, which I think is probably a good thing, and overdue. Rest assured, we’re trying to be professionals here, and for every minute of blog posting, there are hours of work, testing, validation, trying to build bridges, and solutions to help our customers work around this point of great frustration. Stay tuned.
But – if you’re using Oracle, and using VMware - together or not, it’s worth looking at what’s going on…
- Jeff Browing (our OracleStorageGuy) started the ball rolling here, and with a followup here
- Chuck picked it up here.
- I picked it up here.
- Alessandro at Virtualization.info picked it up here
- The Register picked it up here
Interesting reading. If you’re a customer – please post (to mine or Jeff’s, or Chuck’s – just don’t suffer in silence!). I really hope we can move past this and get into “solution” territory – and we are working hard behind the scenes on it. I don’t claim EMC is perfect here – our ESM is incredibly broad, but omissions are omissions because we can’t prioritize it (low customer demand), but we try hard, do RPQs (ond off customer requests), and it gets bigger every day. Conversely - Oracle’s (#1 market leader) position on VMware (#1 market leader) is “No”.
VMware SE Conference
The VMware SE conference happened in the Bay Area this week. It’s a great testament to Enis and Carl that they made this a priority – it highlights that they share my view of the importance of the technical field folks. To my VMware colleagues, I’m sorry I missed it – I really wish I could have been there. I’m in europe this week where we had our EMEA analyst event (thank you all for coming!) and for customer meetings (otherwise I would have also gone to Allesandro’s Virtualization Congress)
To my team that supported the event (Wade, Bernie, Scott) – THANK YOU! I heard from many that the EMC partner session was a highlight, the only one that wasn’t slideware. all the demos live, with no net, all on Virtual Appliances was awesome! I’m very proud of our global team of VMware Specialists – and you guys are a shining example. For anyone who has tried that before you KNOW that it’s always last minute – and this was no exception, but you guys pulled it off with aplomb, and I never had a moment of doubt.
If you’re a VMware SE - where you there? Was it as cool as it sounded? What did you like/not like the most? Do you want the virtual appliances? :-)
VMware/EMC/Cisco Academies
Globally, most EMC TCs (these are our generalist technical field folks) need to take the formal VMware vSphere partner training and certification test, which is awesome.
One thing we have also always done is what we call a “VMware Academy”. This is a high-intensity 2-day boot camp, where we cover the latest from VMware, the latest solutions from EMC (and this time the latest solutions from Cisco also). We share, learn, discuss tools, resources, design, reference architectures, best practices. We carefully planned this year – and the Americas VMware Specialist team pulled off a 17-city marathon to 500 people in the four days after the vSphere launch, starting on April 21st itself. Again, my hats off to the team – you are an inspiration!
While I’ve been in the UK with customers I also conducted a VMware Academy myself – you can read a 3rd party view… thanks for crashing Mike! Next week, I’m doing one in Munich on Monday and Tuesday, and one in Paris on Wednesday and Thursday. If you’re an EMC person, a VMware person, a Cisco person, or at our partners – while the classes are full – you can crash the party as far as I’m concerned – will be standing room only :-) Drop me a line! APJ is coming in June – stay tuned.
These sessions are personally exhausting, but important. When I took this gig – one of my first priorities were the field technical resources and engineering. The field folks are the tip of the spear in any technology company. They need to know what they are doing, how to integrate, design for the specific customer, avoid pitfalls, deal with competitors, everything. Engineering has to build innovative products – and little was needed there – just a bit of directional guidance.
For those of you that can’t make them – Global Ed is recording them and will make them available along with the vSphere install and configure; deploy, secure and architect, SRM deployment classes, and excellent CLARiiON/Celerra/Symmetrix classes that are available.
EMC world is the week after next – much, much more coming on the EMC/VMware front!
Re: Oracle; I've read the top blogs on this subject (Chad's, The Reg's and Chuck Ellis's) - great reads.
Also, a clear message that the hypervisor field is becoming cutthroat - Oracle ramming their OVM down every customer throat is not cool (although may make sense from Larry's perspective?).
He who owns the hypervisor owns "The System"??? It is definitely shaping up to be so.
Posted by: Paul Wegiel | May 10, 2009 at 08:56 AM
Last week "we" decided on going VMware for windows VM, and Oracle VM for Linux, we will see what happens once we start testing.
Posted by: David | May 10, 2009 at 05:03 PM
@David - are you running just Oracle software? I would be curious to see what made you decide to implement two different hypervisors (2x support, training, etc., costs). Was it getting Support from Oracle?
Posted by: Paul Wegiel | May 11, 2009 at 08:34 AM
Well it wasn't me that decided, and yes from what I understand the Xen fanboys here wanted something Xen and because Oracle wont support a oracle DB under vmware, that leaves only 1 solution.
Posted by: David | May 12, 2009 at 03:43 PM
This is probably why Oracle downplays compatibility/support for VMware;
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/oracle_vm_roadmap/
Posted by: Whoryder | July 22, 2009 at 06:17 AM