VMware Partner Welcome Reception

Well its 6:52 AM Pacific time and I’m feeling pretty good after last night’s partner reception and night cap. Vendors were on best behavior since it was the first night and Sean followed suit.

My general observation last night was that the technical guys and gals all stayed home from the vendor side of the equation. So coming from the technical side of things, I was a little perturbed to have marketing and sales guys trying to answer my questions. I almost feel this was a conscious effort on the part of vendors to make it hard for tech guys to cut to the chase and determine the value of their solutions. Instead my technical questions were answered with sales FUD and memorized sales drone responses that didn’t entirely address my question, or addressed an entirely different question altogether. Vizioncore was the rare booth I made it to last night that had great technical representation.

Rpath was an interesting booth to attend and I think their product is worthy of a dedicated blog post later. In a nutshell, virtual appliances are the way of the future for deploying and managing software and all it’s dependencies and RPath helps enable developers to easily create virtual appliances.

I talked with a lot of the vendors in the management space last night: Akorri, VKernel, Veeam, and Vizioncore. Everyone is wanted to get into the predictive monitoring and trending space. One thing that looked nice with Akorri is their ability to provide interfaces into the guest OS (linux, solaris, Windows,,,) in addition to agents for ESX server. So this would open up the door to allow Akorri to also monitor and provide management for the physical servers within your environment as well. I’m always look for the one application to rule them all, so I will be looking into Akorri a little more.

I finished up my VMware management night with the Vizioncore folks, and enjoyed getting the lowdown from George and the crew. I like the things Vizioncore is doing today to help provide tools that improve management of a VMware infrastructure. Everybody loves and uses vRanger, but vReplicator and vCharter Pro are some very nice tools to have in the bag. They are relatively inexpensive and provide some good value for VMware administrators.

Well, I’m off to the first full day at VMware Partner Exchange. My focus today is VDI and all its glory. Also, we have Diane Green’s keynote this morning. It should be interesting and I’ll report more as it comes in.