Official Virtualgeek 2010 Survey results

Thank you to all that participated in the Virtualgeek 2010 Survey (originally at this post).

It’s the second year running – and I think I’m going to keep doing it… it’s very useful, great data, great input – all 100% anonymous.   In future years, perhaps I’ll put some sort of small award for survey completion, I really appreciate the effort people put in with no formal thank you.

This year, in the 3 weeks the survey was up, there 125 fully completed (and 21 partially completed) submissions… For perspective, that’s not a ton, but I’ve seen 3rd party analyst reports with similar or fewer samples.

First of all… while there was no "here’s a Fry’s Electronic’s/Apple Store coupon” (hey I know my audience – I’m that way myself) for completing the survey, I’d like to extend my personal THANK YOU to all those who gave their input.

Believe it or not – it get’s a pretty wide read internally – so you really are having your voice heard.

Now, on to the results….

…but before the results – a few caveats:

• I don’t claim that this is scientific.  For crying out loud, it’s a blog :-)
• I’m sure that the responses are partially skewed since it’s a blog (skews towards “the community”, people with too much time on their hands, people who tend towards the techncial, and likely people further along their virtualization journey than your average shop)
• I’m sure that the responses are also partially skewed since I openly and proudly work for a vendor (EMC).  

That said, I try to keep the stuff on the blog pretty applicable to non-EMC customers also (sometimes I fail), so I’m happy that the survey has loads of non-EMC customers (see the “storage array type” question), and even some EMC haters (see some of the comments) in the mix. 

Hey, Virtualgeek will always be a place where reasonable (even negative, just not malicious) input is always welcome (though I think I’m going to have to do something about all the spam comment stuff)!

So – without further ado… read on for the results (including the raw data itself if anyone wants to further slide n’ dice).

Here’s the raw dump of the data:

20100821215158-SurveyExport.csv

Here’s the geographic distribution of the survey respondents (pretty good, IMO):

So – let’s look at the results to the questions (in some cases, I’ve used the graphs that surveygizmo does automatically (surveygizmo is a great tool, highly recommend it) – but with some of the question formats, it mangles the graphs (percentage reports on multiple acceptable answers), so those I did by hand using the raw data.

Q1: What version of vSphere/VI (or other Virtualization tech) are you running? (multiple responses accepted)

Survey says…

There’s a couple of commentary observations (remember, this is ALL just my opinion)…   The first is that it’s amazing how quickly VMware customers rev versions (i.e. how much vSphere 4.1 there already is).  It highlights that while upgrades aren’t fully automatic (vCenter server is always there in the middle), it is generally a much faster adoption cycle than other OSes.    Second observation – I think there’s a bit of “sample bias” here.  I would expect Hyper-V to make a stronger showing, so I’m attributing that in part to the nature of the survey.   But, on the other hand, there’s some grain of truth there.   BTW – if you didn’t see it, EMC released our Virtual Storage Integrator for Hyper-V, and our initial powershell pack – details here.   Third observation – who IS that poor sap running ESX 2.x :-)

Q2: How many VMs do you support?

Personally – no big surprises here.  The vast majority are in the 50-1000 band, with the largest group being the 101-500 VMs.   I see a lot of that.   There were 4 customers who had more than 5000 VMs, and 2 that had 0-10.   I’m glad there’s a wide spread – Virtualization is good for everyone – the biggest of the big, and the smallest of the small :-)

Q3: Where do you define yourself on VMware’s Journey?

For those of you that haven’t seen it (and for those of you that haven’t – get your mind ready for VMworld – by the end, you’ll be crying out the “Journey Stages” randomly in your sleep with mushy grey matter oozing out your ears) – VMware’s "Journey” has 3 phases that follow the rough definitions I put up there.  (there’s no official Stage 4, I thought “hey, why not put that in there :-) “)

This result was a little surprising in one sense, and not at all in another.   In my experience, customers actually skew (in reality – not where they rank themselves) slightly “less far along” the journey than they themselves describe themselves.   This isn’t a bad thing, and likely has something to do with human nature. 

I talk to a lot of huge users of VMware with thousands of VMs (in large enterprises) that depend on VMware, and describe themselves as very advanced.  BUT, when you ask if they are really virtualizing mission-critical stuff, stuff with SLAs, and non-server workloads (like clients), evaluating public cloud options, and developing on next-gen app frameworks designed for cloud use cases, often they look at you like you’re mad… They call themselves “very advanced”, but are better characterized as “very big users in the first stage – virtualizing a huge number of craplications”.  Conversely, there’s a lot of smaller shops that literally have it all nailed – self-service, total infrastructure automation, clear understanding of costs (show-back if not charge-back), and starting to use public could and are working on hybrid cloud use cases.

I’m sure that there’s another factor to though that is there’s some sample bias (blog readers are perhaps more likely to be further along).

Q4: Client (Desktop/Laptop/mobile device) Virtualization - are you doing it?

This is a telling one – and highlights that there’s a long way to go here.  Add up the two “No” variants, and it’s majority.   There’s a lot of piloting going on – we have to demonstrate: 1) lowering the acquisition costs; 2) solution complexity; 3) end user experience in a broader set of use cases.   Expect this to be a big part of VMworld.

It’s telling to look at the comments in the answer to the next question:

Q5: What's your take on client virtualization - whether you're doing it or not?

(I made no edits to any of the comments, including spelling corrections)

• View not yet mature enough
• WIth the PCoE enabled monitors customers are loving the simplicity! Long way to go, but....
• Good for corporate desktops
• Has benefits but it's not ready
• not hosting provider
• Would love to but there are a ton of political battles
• It is the future and the time to embrace is now! The PC is dead
• yes
• client=VDI? more work for less return. Mgt decision. Though I see the benefits, I do not see the benefit:cost ratio as being positive.
• Still an immature technology
• All about the storage. $ of EFDs / cache key since storage profiling can be tricky
• It comes in handy for testing with different OSs, pretty easy to set up, have run into a couple hiccups in the past
• We'd have to explain it to management first
• needs further infrastructure improvement (e.g. vmsafe)
• I'll take it. w00t!
• working but problems with user devices
• vmware view
• Has promise for certain parts of our computing infrastructure. Would like to pilot and see how it would work in our infrastructure.
• Da bomb
• expensive and complicated for what value ?
• Not sure early adopter fee is worth it right now.
• The dollars spent on client virtualization would be better spent in other areas.
• With offline it's a great thing
• hardware requirements too narrow for now.
• Less/cheaper hardware to buy and support
• Looks cool.
• Good to do, difficult to gague business buy in (budgets revolve around PC's not VDI)
• Good for 80% of company
• no robust enough for production
• Do not yet see business case in my environment
• only for large corporations with security of data the driving reason.
• Will use it in certain academic use cases where the ROI makes sense
• A good thing, but not in current environment (politically and econonically)
• very interested - coming to vmworld to learn about it
• not ready for prime team
• It is a critical part of virtualization strategy.
• Interesting, need to see it in action
• Virtualizing a crap OS doesn't help. Trying Thinapp everywhere. ;)
• Too expensive
• No
• medium
• I would very much like to investigate it thoroughly
• Great idea - lots of details to work out
• Vmware View
• lots of rough edges but lots of promise
• It's the future, but the products are not completely ready (Win 7 support crucial, profile virtualization also)
• could be good but expections are are too high
• JUST DO IT!!!!
• ROI is unclear, still young technology
• No
• It is a good thing
• Don't know enough about it yet
• It may be the future
• has unique benefits
• I'm still waiting for it to mature. Maybe next year we'll being seriously considering it.
• VDI
• not a reality for some time to come for my customers
• Too early stage. Will take years until it is ready so I prefer other people will try it first
• Good for some tasks, waiting to see if it can support developers.
• It is a way to leverage your current investment and reduce TCO.
• ease of adminsitration
• Still trying to define our product offering internally.
• The current solutions aren't quite robust enough for us yet. PCoIP is a big let down
• none
• Expensive to get going, but we can see the long term benefit
• Takes a lot more effort than Server virtualization. Much harder to get Group policy and applications right.
• testing
• Not as compelling argument as server virtualization, but potentially as big Opex if not CapEx savings
• No. Waiting View 4.5
• great, but early days. solutions not 100% yet
• Needs to provide value for money and better experience to users
• It will be an important part of our future.
• I think there's a lot of value to be had and looking forward to moving beyond pilot stage
• Not there yet
• great internally, needs to work "in the friggin cloud" - PCoIP through a security server? Linked-clone technology not tied to AD(VC)?
• It's not right for our use cases - the economic justification isn't there
• Cost Structure is still too high for large scale deployments
• business doesn't have a need at this time.
• value proposition difficult to define
• Not worth it at the moment
• can't wait to get started
• No valid ROI
• Not convinced it works yet
• The tough part seems to convince our users that thin desktops aren't the devil anymore.
• No need for it
• I love it
• We are testing it
• Remote Access Only
• Definitely want to try it
• Lots of potential money/time savings. I still have to drag some other teams along into the 21st Century, however.
• A lot of hurdles still exist for legacy applications
• Want to see it happen! Need better networks in office areas.
• This will be widely supported in the near future
• Not sure if it is cheaper or easier once all costs are added up. Still need hardware on client side. Mgmt is still unsure about it.
• May be useful.
• more difficult than marketing hype!
• There is a place for it
• no

Q6: What storage protocol(s) support your virtualization environment? (multiple responses accepted)

Always a crowd favorite :-)   FC dominates (as it has historically), but the biggest gainers over last year are iSCSI and NFS.  This jibes with my personal experience:

• new customers (with no existing shared storage experience) tend to go for iSCSI.
• customers with experience with enterprise-class NAS (usually EMC Celerra or NetApp – though of course there are others) are realizing just how good NFS can be for many (if not all) VMware use cases.  
• We’re starting to see a solid chunk of FC refreshes going FCoE’s way.

A FASCINATING slice at the data another way – I looked to see how many used more than one protocol.

The majority (60%) of customers surveyed use more than one storage model/protocol – which, if you ask me, is smart – as I’m fond of saying, each protocol has “superpowers” and “kryptonites”.   Most storage vendors are moving to a position where they support multiple protocols.

Q6: Which storage vendor(s) support your virtualization environment? (multiple responses accepted)

Thank you customers :-)   Seriously, I’m sure that the results skew a little towards EMC based on sample bias.   That said, it doesn’t seem out of whack to me.   NetApp is the competitor I see the most out in the field (and IMO is the EMC competitor that focuses the most on VMware and virtualization), and Dell/Equalogic is clearly doing well also.   HP/EVAs get sold a lot bundled with servers.   Saw a fair number of listings where customers were using EMC and NetApp together.   Glad to see EMC Celerra (NAS and Unified) making a strong showing.  While EMC’s brand is more “brand associated” with block storage – that’s not all we do, clearly :-)

I also sliced this data to show how many customers used 1 vendor vs identifying several:

Fascinating to see so many customers using more than 1 array vendor (in fact, add them up and the majority use more than 1).

BTW – if you as the reader are tempted to dismiss this outright as “sure.. an EMC guy’s survey shows them in the lead” (as all vendors, us included, are tripping over each other to say they are winning in the virtualization space), here’s the results from The Enterprise Strategy Group Research August 2010 2010 Server Virtualization Survey.

I’ve seen these for the last 3 years, and if anyone says they are winning/losing in this space, it doesn’t jibe with the data I’ve seen – it’s been remarkably consistent across quarters/years, analysts, segmentation.

There’s loads of progress being made by many vendors, and we know we have to continue to fight furiously, innovate like mad, and win – on our own merits – each and every one of us.  Every customer makes their choice, and we’re here to serve.

Q7: In your primary storage, what are your primary challenges?

(this question had the survey takers ranking the following topics on a range representing degrees of frustration).   The color coding is done by me to highlight interesting things, since there’s a lot of data on this table.

I’ve highlighted some patterns that stood out to me (green being that lots of votes were for “not so bad”, red and orance being lots of votes for “bad”, or a fair amount for “REALLY bad”).

This one, I have to say, was FULL of surprises for me.   First of all – seems like we’ve made good progress on making configuring storage (even in the case where the VMware admins and the Storage admins need to cooperate) easier.  In past years, that one was very bad, and skewed towards “makes me want to poke my own eyes out”.  Still work to be done, but between vCenter plugins, and integrating storage mgmt tools with vCenter APIs (Unisphere now, Control Center now, SMC soon), we’re putting a dint into the problem.

Not surprised to see that “Dealing with the cost of storage” is high.   We all (as a vendor community, not any one of us) have a lot of work to do there.   While there’s point technologies to be applied here (thin, dedupe, compression, auto-tiering, mega caches, big dense SATA configs) – there’s something more here IMO.   We need to do more, but also make the technologies simply more “invisible” – core data services that all work together, and work together in a transparent way.

There’s also IMO opportunities for macro-level innovation on this topic.  I’m lucky enough to be privy to all sorts of crazy R&D, and we’re working on it furiously – scale out commodity hardware is going to have to be a big part of the answer.  There’s going to be a bunch of sessions at VMworld where on the EMC side we will open the kimono a little bit (I will in SP9820), and I believe VMware will as well - look for Jay Judkowitz’s session - (TA8218)

I was blown away (also emphasized in some of the comments) how much pain there is in capacity management – particularly figuring out how much you’re GOING to use.  Fascinating.   BTW – when I talk to customers, I’m often surprised they don’t know/don’t leverage: a) the new vCenter managed datastore reports; b) Unisphere/Navipshere’s reports – which give you some VMware-level info too; c) solid 3rd party tools.   All three are either free or so close to free…  Clearly this is an area for more work.

Relationships between VMs and storage (for capacity and performance) is a perennial pain point, but seems like it’s shifting to the left (ergo better) compared with previous year’s results.

One very result that was very painful (but clear) to me is the last one “I know about tons of coolness that is possible but we just don’t use it”.  I think this needs to be a clear call to all of us vendors (VMware included) that it’s not just about the feature, but how easy it is to get to the value.

Good info – thank you.

Q8: What neato storage features are you using in your Virtualization environment?

Interesting results – highlights (IMO) that we have a long way to make more advanced features more broadly used.   Glad to see vCenter plugins are widely used – our plan is to expose more, and more through vCenter plugins, and simplifying and integrate our plugins so getting the value is simpler.  Expect great things on this front in Q4 (we’ll be previewing at VMworld).

Q9: Which server vendor(s) support your virtualization environment?

No suprise to see Dell and HP battling out for first place, interesting to see Cisco making a strong showing.   My personal opinion (I’m sure there are others that will disagree), I think IBM’s missing an opportunity.  They have some great x86 server assets that to me they just aren’t investing in, and seem to be conceding that market.  While they are right that x86 servers themselves are a commodity, HOW THEY ARE USED is not.  There are services opportunities, management tool opportunities, VMware integration opportunities, go-to-market opportunities to make a good business from a commodity.  I just can’t by into the “forget software mainframes, run it on the real mainframe using zVM” (though I’ve had one customer argue that point with me). 

Q10: The age old server question - are you blades or rackmount?

Glad to see pragmatists making a strong showing :-)

Q11: Backup - where do you stand?

This one is fascinating in two ways. 

I’m a big fan of “snap and replicate” as a baseline for either applications that are ok with both: a) short retention policy (not because long retention isn’t possible, but rather it gets costly); b) little need for complex recovery models (while possible to recover files in VMs and application-integrated recovery, it’s generally not as simple as the other architectures for backup).   Also, when I say “baseline” for those cases, heck, maybe it’s all you need.   And for the others, snap and replicate is a great augment (as a very fast “oh oh, I just deleted something” recovery mechanism).

But, for many use cases, you need the other approaches.   What’s really the standout to me is the “love it/hate it” ratio and how it correlates with architectural model.

People with “oldey timey” agents in guests hate it more than they love it.   People who use solutions that leverage the vStorage APIs for Data protection love them overwhelmingly (3rd party solutions are loved proportionally more than VDR, but VDR is not bad either).  It highlights the upside when you leverage the core architectural changes.   I think there’s a lesson to be learnt there.   VCB in it’s first go-around architecturally looked like “SAN-based backup for VMware”.   Ergo, not really changing the architecture of traditional proxy backup.   VADP still has proxies, but by making them VMs, leveraging SCSI hot-add, and CBT, then adding the VDDK bits for single-step restore – there’s no comparison in what can be done.   Don’t get me wrong – a lot to do here, but highlights why people dig things like Avamar (and other VMware Ready backup apps) as much as they tend to do.   Conversely, I’ve never found a customer happy with TSM in a VMware environment :-)

Q12: Backup - what media technology is your workhorse?

Wow.   A long, long way to go.   Those poor bastards stuck with tapes and trucks :-)

Q13: Is "security" in your virtualized environment something that is an issue?

If anyone thinks that security is not front and center as a barrier to virtualization and cloud adoption – even if only in perception rather than reality – you can see from this they are way off.   Don’t get be wrong, people blow the “security” thing out of proportion without knowing what they are talking about (see this great post from Chris Hoff on the topic).   in a nutshell – only 28% of respondents said “it’s not an issue”.   So… What’s the issue for the majority of folks?

I have to confess, I asked this question knowing what we’re releasing next week, but I didn’t expect the results to be so strongly weighed in the direction they did.   I wish in retrospect I had made a “what do you think” here – a more open-ended option.    The respondents needed to rank each of the areas listed on a scale of 1-7 (1 being a high priority, and 7 being a low priority).  The table summarizes the data – listing them in the order of the total number of respondents who ranked that item as a higher priority.

I’ve put in the squares highlighting the votes that really shifted the stack ranking.

I expected VM encryption (both in fight and at rest) to rank much higher.  

I also expected more people to still be worried about VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) attacks (the “attack the hypervisor, get all the guests” vector) – but looks like people (not just me) think that’s a bit overblown.

The biggest issues were figuring out how to PROVE you're hardened, even more than actually knowing HOW to harden

Will be interesting to see people’s reaction to our little thing coming….

Q14: Disaster Recovery - what's your story?

Interesting here on two notes – what a continued SRM opportunity there is!  (77% of the respondents!).   When you consider how successful SRM has been, just goes to show how much more it could sell.   I wish I had asked why people don’t use it if they aren’t, but are doing DR (there are some reasons, but usually they aren’t the ones used as the reason not for doing it).

I love that 5% response :-)

Q15: What's something about the virtualization space in general that frustrates you and you think the vendor community could do better?

Ah – these are my favorites… The open-ended questions…  Here are the (unedited in any way) comments:

• Make block based storage as easy to manage as File
• VMware need to partner to help build scale. Otherwise the skills wont be avaiable for wide system adoption
• Storage management standardisation (what happened to SMI?)
• Costs, support and integrations
• more plugs wiht vcenter
• VCE support could be better and more up to date on version testing
• Release finals sooner to 3rd parties
• Actually FIX problems. Stop selling a 'solution', and FIX the DAMN PROBLEM!
• Apart from marketitecture / FUD, bundling cloud infrastructure as a unit of sale. It's not about the stack, it's about the service. That's even speaking as a VCE guy.
• I guess I'm curious why using distributed switches is better. I could understand if your whole environment was virtual, but we still need to have a physical switching architecture for our physical stuff.
• Help us beat management over the head with a big stick
• chargeback, capacity planning
• the virtual appliance adaption rate. VMware needs to lead the way (with EMC) in providing virtual appliances of vCenter. This could be done with a linux based server version (was announced in 06, never materialized) or by handing it off to spring now to develop.
• Backup/Disaster recovery is too complex
• Dunno
• The push to virtuilze desktops. Ths should only be used in specific use cases (Nurse workstations, Call center, etc).
• EMC and Netapp stop fighting like little kids.
• More in GUI...less command line
• Too much marketing and not enough facts.
• At last - you're finally asking: "Figuring out how much we're GOING to use" :-)
• Tired of Vaughn Stewart bitching
• Need tools to provide end to end view
• not sure
• BACKUP AND RECOVERY
• provide complete packages
• lack of solutions and high cost
• VMware being the leader and coming up shorter on every release, Bugs that is.
• Standards ... All vendors should folow the same
• VMWqare licenses
• I think that the only major step to be addressed from a cost based perspective is proper backup for vm's, at a decent price tagg for SMB's. Avamar is great but lavishly expensive for SMB's.
• For some reason, even though EMC talks about NFS as a viable protocol (as does the rest of the world) nobody really seems to want us to use file based protocols for VMWare. I can't figure out why. There's no question it's easier to manage a file than it is to manage a datastore on a LUN...but why the reluctance to really embrace NFS in a hard core manner like your competitors?
• virtualization is easy, doing it right is hard
• Tie it all together. All the arrays (single or multi-vendor), fabric, vCenters, SRM, replication strategy, etc.
• Addressing the SMB space
• ESXi support
• solution tiering (small to large)
• Lack of information/support with focus on SMB's that have the 1-guy-does-it-all. I think vBlock is a great idea, and I wish there was more SOLUTIONS provided than components.
• capacity forcasting
• Quit fuding other vendors products
• Storage performance information, should have a dashboard similar to the cpu and memory
• The fact that software vendors still do not "certify" on virtual platforms just because they don't actually test their product on a VM.
• Better tools to display performance and usage metrics, make the vCenter plugins actually work
• licensing
• Better and easier integration with vCenter for single pane of glass.
• name change, therefore confusion
• Licensing - between vendor (like you VMware) or ISV shiting licensing models to suit THEIR bottom line not mine
• Vcenter as VA, plugins for Emc storages coming in time, cheaper licenses, multiple vcpu FT
• HP could be better at providing information
• more and better vSphere Plugins
• The management and reporting capabilities are still lacking plus the nickle and diming over features
• Too many "insiders" and the average Joe doesn't know what's going on
• Needs to focus more on the SMB
• I'm confused about the right backup strategy - so many conflicting messages
• the many layers of storage spindle/disk > LUN > VMFS > VMDK - makes it hard to design!
• vendor FUD, better/easier integration
• Realtime processing (aka SIP support)
• Optimization! Help point out what can be improved in your environment without 3d party plugins, like vmdk alignment.
• Licensing issues, Oracle and Microsoft SQL tied to physical CPUs
• prices are too high
• Longer support of older systems (e.g. we can't use new cool features because we have older clariions (3) in some sites and newer (4) ones in main site and they replicate so have to keep flare code at a older levels.)
• I could use more/better reporting tools. Audit is a BIG concern in my industry (Electric Utility) and reporting could help.
• allow you to capture your configuration such as VM details ,Datastore a VM is on, network config, etc. in a simple report almost like doing a screen capture of your environment.
• Upgrades that don't require down time.
• constantly telling customers how it "just works" vendor hype pi$$es me off!
• Toomany 3rd parties promising Nirvana and delivering...

Q16: What's something you think I SHOULD have asked on this survey, but didn't? Why?

I loved some of these two.   Clearly a lot of people have a great sense of humor – and that there’s never a bad time for a Monty Python reference :-)   Again, all comments listed, no edits/spelling fixes.

• Active-Active data centers?
• How do you manage your virtualised environment? vCenter only, Microsoft SCOM, EMC Ionix, CA VA for IM, ...?
• Do you think cloud is just a buzzword generated to repackage existing business?
• Are you coming to my vmworld party?
• you should have asked about formatting web pages.
• What % of your estate is virtual and where do you LOB apps sit. And if I work for an integrator or am an end user (Integrator, these figures are for custs we support)
• chargeback models
• more cowbell
• Ask the funding question as part of each quesstion. I want to use X but funding prohibits me from doing it.
• have you spoke with your storage vendor about when they will have support for VAAI?
• Can't think of anything
• You should have asked if customers have a positive, or negative opinion of EMC. It might be enlightening.
• nada
• not sure
• Just that some answers are not 1,2,3, or 4, but actually 2.75. But you know that :)
• How do you feel about EMC as a company and its products
• My Name..... :-)
• No
• What's missing from our software and VMWare integration
• what do people do with their old servers, storage etc after they are virtualized
• What do you like on your pizza? ;)
• future storage requirements for vmware
• I'd like to have the answers segregated between SMB and Enterprise customers. I have a fully virtualized infrastructure with around 160VMs between 12 hosts. My abilities are limited because of the breadth of systems I need to support, versus Enterprises that are composed of teams.
• What is the airspeed velocity of a swallow? Why? Because it's funny and has no relevance.
• whats the answer to all questions! :-)
• What is your biggest concern in your Storage Environment?
• Do you use EMC kit for non VMware stuff, if you DON'T use it for VMware and why
• What method of data replication are you using?
• Maybe "What is your favorite new feature in vSphere?" or an weighted list of favorite features
• Favorite Virtualization Vendor (any category)
• Nothing about integration - e.g. vblocks, etc
• What are you doing about convergence of fabric?
• What is the meaning of life?
• Dunno
• Do you have issues with ISV licensing
• don't know
• Dunno...
• Oracle/Sun servers.
• ??
• n/a
• what is the biggest benefit that virtualisation has offered you to date?
• Maybe around networking practices?

So there you have it… All the survey results.  Some really interesting stuff in there.   My big take-away is a reinvigorated passion – we as vendors need to make “getting the value” easier.   We are only just beginning to really get cooking on technical integration on the VMware front here at EMC – we’re going to be “dialing it up to 12”.

But – also humbled – so, so much to do!!!!

What do you think?

Comments

[Christopher Kusek]

Love - Love - LOVE the transparency of the survey!

I would love to see another one of these again with a collective in the 500-1000 range for another view of diversity of responses!

Perhaps a collaborative initiative to promote it :)

But nonetheless, absolutely amazing content, responses and thank you to everyone who filled this out!

[Maish Saidel-Keesing]

Thank you Chad for publishing this information.

The data will be very valuable to EMC and other vendors to see what they can do to improve and where their efforts should be directed at.

But it also provides good information and directions for the VIadmins as well.

[Yogesh Sharma]

Would it be possible for the report findings to be published as a downloadable (printer friendly) PDF?

Thanks,

Y

[Account Deleted]

Excelent Report, amazing advantage of EMC in the storage segment.

[Ajay]

Fantastic reading! Amazing Chad. Thanks a lot. Good to see EMC rocking the virtual world! :)

[daniel]

Nice results, a little tip tho, since it's "all 100% anonymous" you should probably remove the IP address from the raw data.

[BlueShiftBlog]

Love the survey and thanks for posting this!

One quick note about the use of vCenter plugins. When I filled out the survey (in a rush) I was thinking of more generic plugins such as VUM as opposed to more robust SAN-integration plugins. I suspect that I may not be the only person that made this error.

[Chuck Hollis]

Chad -- you've got another career in the making should you decide to be an industry analyst :-)

No, seriously, great questions, reasonable methodology, wonderful interpretation, great transparecny -- a must-read for anyone doing work in this space!

Congratulations!

-- Chuck

[Jason Jensen]

Nice. Thanks for posting these results.

One question: What are these vCenter managed datastore reports that you refer to?

[Jonas Irwin]

Chad - this ranks up there as one of your best posts. How long did it take to put this one together?

[Bryant]

On one of the last feedback items, someone asks for the answer to all questions... The answer to the ultimate question is 42.
Thank you, Douglas Adams!

[Ossie]

Hi Chad
You've mentioned the new vCenter Managed Datastore Reports now a couple of times (this post and 5 Best Practices Webcast) but what exactly are you referring to?
Thanks