One of my favorite things about VMWorld is the attendee mindset. People come here to have fun and socialize, and San Francisco is a great town, but they are here first and foremost to learn, explore, and grow from the event. The sessions are so numerous to choose from that many organizations send a few representatives, the labs are educational and practical. Where I see the best example of this mindset is at the vendor booth interactions. Yes, people like the free stuff, and love to win prizes, but there have been more meaningful and quality conversations I’ve had with dozens of attendees at the booth than in years past.
On to the technology – there are still so many, too many people still not virtualizing as much as they want to. My impressions and the industry analysis have both supported that this still revolves around the lack of virtualizing tier 1 applications. If there was a Family Feud style gameshow with admins playing, the top answer for “Things you might hear at VMWorld” would be “We’re not virtualizing Exchange yet”. Now I get it, you want to virtualize as much you can; but you can’t risk bringing the entire organization to a crawl for a poorly performing Exchange VM. So instead of solving for this, most just leave these systems as physical servers, but not for the right reasons. They do so out of fear and uncertainty, not out of the understandable necessity of keeping a system physical because it’s already taxing that physical systems resources to where virtualizing wouldn’t be practical.
In the category of “Things I say at VMWorld the most”, the top answer would be “We can take care of that for you” followed closely by “That’s in the product already”. For helping admins virtualize with confidence, we offer a native feature for P2V that we call Migration Accelerator – it protects your physical resource like it always does, but also automates conversions to VMs, so you can test and modify VM parameters as needed and ‘flip the switch’ when you know the VM is going to perform properly. It’s our deep application awareness (VSS awareness for AD, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint) that enables the migrations to be of higher quality and integrity. The worst case scenario isn’t a failed conversion – it’s finding out a week after you’ve decommissioned the physical Exchange server that your virtualized Exchange server is has some corruption.
As always, we offer you to try it for yourself, just visit www.backupexec.com and download the trialware to try it out for 60 days.
For the vExperts out there, we have an even better, special offer – FREE software, not just trialware.
Stop by the Symantec booth for your free copy of Backup Exec V-Ray Edition. It provides protection for your VMs, global dedupe, granular recovery of files and apps and much more!