Anyone with five minutes of IT experience knows that vendors sometimes publish bogus “benchmarks” that portray their products in the best of all possible lights. Virtualization guru and Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf recently uncovered a particularly spectacular example of this, courtesy of QLogic and Microsoft.

In a release, QLogic Corp., a networking technology provider, said it tested virtual machines running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and attached to a storage area network (SAN) via its 8 Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) host bus adapters, and saw near-native performance of 200,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS).

But, as Wolf discovered, what QLogic failed to mention was that it ran its tests against a very unusual SAN array: the Texas Memory RamSan 325 FC, which uses solid-state storage. Further, the benchmark used block sizes of just 512 bytes, compared with a more real-world block size of 8 K or 16 K.

This left Wolf feeling duped and betrayed:

If I was watching an Olympic event, this would be the moment where after thinking I witnessed an incredible athletic event, I learned that the athlete tested positive for steroids.

Wolf ran this benchmark by a colleague, who calculated that had the same benchmark been performed using “real disks” with latency of 7 milliseconds, it would have limited throughput to a much less impressive 9,142 IOPS. Hardly anything to write home about.

Thanks to Wolf for taking the time to look into this.

Word has it that Microsoft is finally getting it together and releasing Hyper-V, putting the tech world on notice that it is now safe to exhale.

Phew, we were all about to turn blue.

Has someone ever told you a story about some aging celebrity, and your first thought is, “Wait, you mean they’re not dead yet?’ I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I read that Hyper-V was coming out, I thought, ‘What do you mean, it’s being released? I thought that already happened!”

My mistake, I had confused the release with another important Microsoft — ahem, milestone — in March: the Hyper-V release candidate (RC).

Excuse me for being flip, but I was bored to tears by this whole Viridian-cum-Hyper-V saga long ago. Two years ago, when I first started covering virtualization, the big news was that Microsoft had made Virtual Server 2005 available for free. Immediately thereafter, VMware returned the volley and made its hosted virtualization platform VMware Server free too, eliminating any real advantage Virtual Server 2005 may have had over the better-established GSX. So much for that story line.

Since then, we’ve lived through name changes, (Viridian to Hyper-V), release candidates, pricing announcements (why $28 dollars, why not $25? $29.99?), delays (will Microsoft meet its 180-days-after-Longhorn deadline? Will it beat it?), feature cuts, feature clarifications (“Quick migration” anyone?), and countless press articles with VMware cast as David to Microsoft’s Goliath — or is it the other way around?

Everything except an actually shipping, nonbeta, nonrelease candidate product.

Until now.

As a journalist, I’m just happy that the wait is over, and we can all stop walking around on tenterhooks, expected to drop everything every time Microsoft comes knocking at our inbox with some virtualization-related announcement that may or may not pertain to the release of Hyper-V.

Now we can all get on with our job of waiting for Microsoft to update us on the status of all the product features that it excised from Hyper-V last year: quick migration, hot add of system resources, increased numbers of CPUs, etc. What a relief!

The VMware Certified Professional exam isn’t the easiest exam in the world, nor the hardest (many diverge on whether Red Hat, Citrix, or Cisco win that title for their premier certification levels), but it’s rapidly becoming one of the most sought-after enterprise certifications available. Since I’m still prepping for the test, and haven’t sat for it, I’m a little leery of making that statement, but I’ve sat through enough CBTs that are acclaimed for their similarity to the exam that I feel safe putting it out there, and I’ve taken the only class that VMware has geared towards the VCP exam. The question is why… Why is the VCP so valuable?

Because it’s a hot technology in the truest sense of the word, and one that isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. The story is slightly reminiscent of another darling of Wall Street, Citrix Systems, which appeared to fill in a void left by the need to remotely access applications and which has consistently improved its product lines and scope of business over the years. Interestingly enough, Citrix and VMware are about to go head to head in the market for virtualization customers following the CItrix / XenSource deal, and Citrix has always had a strong certification program (perhaps we’ll see some new certs, maybe CCXA - Citrix Certified Xen Admin or maybe CCVA - Citrix Certified Virtualization Admin). VMware, like Citrix, has made its mark with a single product (ESX), and then branched out to add more and more to the product line, always ensuring that there was a clear line of sight back from all of the added products to their main line (aka their “Core Competency” for those paradigm-shifting process re-engineering, value-adding self-empowered framework info-architects out there). This focus will make VMware an adopted technology almost everywhere, and another indicator of VMware’s “hotness” are their impressive number of customers. VMware claims 100% of the Fortune 100 and another 20,000 enterprise-level customers. That’s an impressive stock of customers in a relatively short lifespan.

Look no further than the IPO for proof that VMware is hot:

What do these numbers mean when you put them together? People are using the product at all levels of business, and business is expanding into new market spaces, new market locations, and new customers. This means jobs are open for qualified staff, contracts are available for qualified consultants, and in both cases, money is there to be made. Like the MCSE when Windows NT4 debuted, the CNE when Novell 4 debuted, and all of the other business-transforming certifications, having the VCP is ticket to a higher salary. In fact, the VCP is one of the hottest salary items out there, judging from this comparison I made using the tools at indeed.com (in US dollars, covering the US market):

Looking at those numbers, I’m astonished… a single-test exam cert beats out all but one of the other infrastructure certs in that list, including the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (seven exams at minimum), the Red Hat Certified Engineer (three exams, one of which is an on-site, hands-on lab), and the CCEA (five exams, one of which is also a hands-on lab). This is the market in a nutshell - the growth of virtualization is fueling a need, one that exceeds the need for other certifications, and so demand is driving up the earnings potential of VCPs just as much as the expertise level of the cert, if not more. In the long run, it will fade back in with the pack, but by then VMware will have undoubtedly expanded their certification program to include the typical technician/sysadmin/architect tier that most certification tracks fit into. The long and short of why the VMware’s certifications will remain higher than other certs is because all other non-hardware, IT-related products can run on top of VMware, inside guest machines. This in turn means that at the basic level, VMware will be more important than them all because it’s the root of the tree. Trained, certified people will command bigger salaries because VMware’s root-level position means it will also be the top of the food chain - hardware / virtualization / operating system / application.

This isn’t just a US trend, there are numbers from many countries as well. I qualified the chart above by it’s location because there’s also this graph from itjobswatch.co.uk that I’d like to share:

Want to travel the world? Get VMware certified and go to work for the right company!

The really great thing about the VCP is that it’s cross-disciplinary - you have to have (or learn) some good all-around IT knowledge to pass the exam. Much like Citrix’s exams, you need to know more than just the core product. For the Citrix CCA and up it’s takes Windows, networking, and Citrix knowledge. For the VCP exam you need to know a little bit about operating system administration, hardware configuration, shared storage, and networking in order to pass, because each of these plays a role inside the Virtual Infrastructure platform. Personally, I can’t wait to take the exam - it’s not going to have one little bit of impact on my current position or any probably future positions (I’m at the top of the food chain in my day job), but I want it for the same reason I hold a CCA - at heart I’m a generalist who loves to know how things work (the official line is “so that I can understand their impact on the business and their relevance to meeting the shared goals of our company’s mission”, but I have to admit, I also enjoy the learning and the tinkering for their own sakes).

It’s not just a certification, like the slew of them we can all put on out resumes to impress the next interviewer, it’s a career-enhancing move. Does the certification make you any more of an expert than you may or may not be? That’d be debatable on a case-by-case, person-by-person basis, but it’s definitely a mark that you know what’s hot, and aren’t “stale”. The hotness-factor of the VCP is high, the demand is there in the market, and the value a VCP can add to your career makes it worth the time and effort to earn.

Some time back, before I was invited on as a blogger for SSV, I was interviewed by the always-fun-to-work-with Adam Trujillo about Virtualization in the Data Center, and, like all good writers, Adam left the best question for last:

“What about hardware decisions — should data center managers be considering scale-up instead of scale-out?”

My response was:

“I personally prefer a scaled-up approach because there is a reduction in ongoing costs, such as power, space, cooling, and physical maintenance. Also, the complexity factor is reduced when there is less hardware to manage. An exception to that would be data centers without existing centralized storage — the initial acquisition becomes more expensive in scale-up operations if a SAN infrastructure is not already in place.”

I’m guilty of being one of those people that says “Durnit, why didn’t I say this or that?” or “Dangit, why didn’t I quantify that a little more?” even well after the fact, making me perhaps my own worst critic. In this case, I really felt I left some stuff unsaid. One item that irks me about that answer is that I should have made more mention of blades. I hate blades in their current incarnation. I think they’re the worst idea in IT - they’re hot, cramped, delicate, with slower components and limited expansion ports - if you name something about a blade, I can find a reason to hate it. That said, I shouldn’t have left them out of my line of thought - a good IT Manager needs to consider uncomfortable things, difficult things, even distasteful things, when looking at something impactful. Or so says the wisdom of Frank Hayes, to whose articles I often find myself nodding to the affirmative while reading. So, here goes.

Blades are hot - they have limited cooling options built-in. That’s often a “value-add” (choke) of specialized rack systems and chassis systems provided by third-party vendors. Here’s a few links to illustrate the point:

• Power and cooling woes undercut blade server benefits
• IBM feels the heat
• Heat relief for data centers using blades
• Concerns heat up over keeping blades cool

A rack of big-honkin’ boxes will make you feel toasty on the parts next to their fans. A rack of blades will cook you medium-well given enough time. To prevent the data equivalent of multiple mini-supernovas you need to install the correct cooling - the correct tonnage of AC, hot and cold rack aisles, proper ventilation, air temperature monitors, system heat monitors, etc. In many data centers, the cost of new construction (or re-construction) may very well exceed even long-term cost savings from server consolidation, and even if you can afford the construction and still come out with positive ROI, that cooling comes at a monthly utility cost - you must increase your power consumption to keep things cool.

That said, this is where virtualization has been proven out over the last decade as a way decrease the number of servers and offload them to blades. That may mean that you can remove enough servers to use your existing heat management systems in a more focussed way and not have to break the bank. Even if it’s a five-to-one ratio of servers removed to virtualization-equipped blades added, you’re coming out ahead. Add in centralized storage systems to connect to the blades and the scales may well tip back in favor of Mr. Heat Miser again, but probably not. Getting a ten-to-one ratio means blades are a winner. This is assuming a large server consolidation via virtualization project. If it’s not a big percentage of your boxes being affected, you’ll be back in the hot seat, quite literally.

Ever need five or more NICs for a virtualization host? I have. If I had blades, I’d be using three blades to get that done, assuming dual nics, and five or more on single-nic blades. That means more blades, more virtualization software licenses I don’t need, more hardware to fail, and more physical boxes when what I want to do is REDUCE the number of physical boxes. Right now server blades are still too young - many vendor’s products have all the components are included on the blade, and not modular enough. PC blade systems have it a little better - some limited peripheral connectivity at the user-site (see this link for one manufacturer’s solution), but still, it’s an entire box in a chassis with all the difficulties of expanding that micro-sized PCs and laptops have.

So, I think it’s safe to say that I still hate traditional blades. But I think they’ll be the saviour of the data center soon, and then I will love them. Why? Because here’s my ideal blade system: a truly modular system that will change everything about blades. The best part, it’s available now from several of the larger vendors. The changes are part of a new design “paradigm” (please note my bias against that word) - the end-result is a blade system where the blades can be NICs or other devices, as needed and plugged into the chassis, connected in either a physical layer with ye olde jumper or a software layer (in the chassis management software, perhaps). Lets say I get a blade and I need to put ESX on it, but I need six NICs because of guest system network i/o requirements… ok, I get another blade with a quad-NIC on it, plug it into the chassis, and configure it - voila, a single computer with five or six NICs in two blade slots, using one license. Or perhaps I need ten USB connectors for some virtualized CAD desktops, which require USB key fobs in order to use the CAD software - I plug in a server blade and a USB blade, configure it, and voila, one server, ten USB ports, one license. Expand that out far enough, and you can have whatever you need in terms of peripherals in a blade chassis. If you go to IBM’s website, you get a whole panopoly of choices - switchblades (that one always give me a chuckle) and NIC blades are readily available for expanding your blade chassis out to do more than just host some servers. HP upstages them a bit and has a great product out now that provides PCI-X and PCI-e ports. This is from their website:

“Provides PCI-X or PCI-e expansion slots for c-Class blade server in an adjacent enclosure bay.

• Each PCI Expansion Blade can hold one or two PCI-X cards( 3.3V or universal) ; or one or two PCI-e cards(x1, x4, or
• Installed PCI-X cards must use less than 25 watts per card. Installed PCIe cards must use less than 75 watts per PCIe slot, or a single PCIe card can use up to 150 watts, with a special power connector enabled on the PCI Expansion blade.
• Supports typical third-party (non-HP) PCI cards, such as SSL or XML accelerator cards, VOIP cards, special purpose telecommunications cards, and some graphic acceleration cards.”

This is interesting - a couple of PCI-e quad-NICs in one of an expansion unit and my NIC requirements are set. Or perhaps a couple of PCI-e USB add-in cards. Or a high-end PCI-X or PCI-e video card. Ok that gets troublesome when you need a lot of them - you can wind up with one blade and a chassis full of expansion slits containing video cards - the cost might not be worth it.

In any case, this dramatically changes my view on scaling up or out. Right now, I still stand for scaling up because blades don’t work in my enviornment - I have heat problems. I have space problems too, which blades could solve, but not with my heat problems. I prefer to buy larger-sized servers with lots of expandability (DL300 and 500 series, PowerEdge 2000 and 6000 series, etc.) and add in NICs as needed rather than buy blades or 1U boxes because I can do more with these larger-sized machines even though they take up more room. I fully expect that to change in the future - at some point I see myself stopping with the scaling up and starting with the scaling out - only I expect the “out” part of that will involve a lot less real estate and more options than currently available.

The need to hire qualified staff to design, implement and manage virtualized environments is growing, and that means hiring managers are having to shift focus towards this distruptive technology and be ready with good interview questions for their prospective hires.

1. Do you have experience in (VMware/Xen/Virtual Iron/Virtuozzo) implementations?

This is the no-brainer question, and the lead in to the others. If the prospective hire’s answer is no, stop right here, do not proceed past go, do not collect $200. Even a certified candidate may not have any experience, and an inexperienced candidate isn’t one you want for the job, since you probably have staff who would like to learn on the job or be trained, and already have the internal processes and procedure knowledge to edge out the competition from outside.

2. When implementing a virtualization environment, what do you consider the most important feature of the product to ensure overall success of the implementation?

This question is good for sorting out who sees the strategic value of virtualization and who is focussed on the technical aspects. A good answer will cover either failover functions or the ability to reduce costs, and relate how they will benefit the business in technical terms. Neither a techie or a managerial answer is right or wrong, but rather will help you sort the crowd of interviewees into the categories you are looking for.

3 . When you were at WidgetMakers, Inc. you list in your resume that you used VirtualBlahBlahBlah to aid your company in meeting the goal of DoingThisOrThat. Can you share with me what challenges you experienced and how you overcame them?

This is a typical interview question surrounding any product, and it needs to be asked for any product you are hiring somebody to work with.

4. How deep is your understanding of storage systems, and can you share an example of how you used this knowledge in a virtualized environment at WidgetMakers, Inc.?

and

5. How deep is your understanding of network switching, and can you tell me how you would use virtual switches in a broad virtualization implementation?

Cross-disciplinary skills are crucial for virtualization, particularly around storage. Many larger companies have storage administration teams, server administration teams, network administration teams. Being able to work with these groups doesn’t mean that the candidate can work with the technology, and its important that, if the position is technical, that they can do both.

6. Tell me about how you would configure a virtual environment to best take advantage of its features in a backup and disaster recovery framework?

Being able to understand how to use DR-friendly features like VMware’s vmotion and backup-friendly features like snapshots can make all the difference in candidate selection. It’s important for a candidate to know how to keep the business running, even if they don’t know the business itself yet.

7. Tell me about VirtualizationProductFeature, and what you think makes it valuable or not valuable.

This gets into the technical understanding of the product, a crucial point in both technical and managerial interviews. If a technical candidate blows this one, they need to go home. If a managerial candidate doesn’t provide a business-oriented answer, they need to go home or consider a technical position.

8. BadThing happens. Tell me how you would troubleshoot the situation and get it resolved.

A typical technical question, and one that should always be asked to both technical and managerial candidates. Managerial candidates may get some leeway in technical minutia, but absolutely must speak about their role as the manager and how they would deal with their technical staff to get the problem resolved. This is also a rinse-and-repeat question that should be asked a couple of times, using different BadThings.

There are also consultant-specific questions to ask, if that’s what you’re looking for. Things like:

1. How many VCPs do you have on your staff?

Until the other companies start with their own certs, the VCP is where the game is at.

2. How many virtualization projects has your company undertaken in the last year?

The default no-brainer.

3. Do you eat your own dog food? By that I mean does your company use the product internally as well as support it?

Also a no-brainer

4. What was your company’s most spectacular failure?

Everyone is going to tall you about their company’s great success. Make them squirm a bit and tell you about how they failed, then then ask:

5. What did you do to correct the situation?

This will tell you what kind of consulting firm you are dealing with. If they can be upfront with these two questions, if the failure wasn’t a show-stopper for your environment, and if they dealt with it right, they get high kudos.

Obviously there are many, many more questions to be asked of potential staff, managers, and consultants, so many that I’d like to encourage people to comment about questions you like to ask, would like to be asked, or think would be important - I’m looking forward to some audience participation!

News about Cisco’s new architecture and an open virtual machine format are the VMworld news of note for Burton Group senior analyst Chris Wolf.

Failing to pre-register for hands-on labs at VMworld can lead you in interesting directions.

Among the more intriguing products that will be demonstrated at VMworld is InovaWave’s VirtualOctane, the new VMware ESX version of its DXtreme, which was only available for Microsoft platforms (e.g., VMware Virtual Server and Microsoft Virtual Server). Announced this week, VirtualOctane uses an adaptive I/O optimization engine to dramatically improve performance of virtualized applications. With it, InovaWave claims it will be able to help companies either:

• Increase (as much as double) the number of virtual machines (VMs) per ESX host;
• Improve the performance of existing VMs; or
• Enable the virtualization of transaction-heavy workloads.

It’s on that last point that InovaWave is particularly bullish. For its beta users, InovaWave has recruited shops with “significant investments in ESX” to test out the use of VirtualOctane against workloads such as ERP, databases and high-volume messaging applications – “applications that heretofore have not been virtualized,” said Chris Ostertag, InovaWave president and CEO.

If DXtreme user experiences are any indication, InovaWave might be on to something. But InovaWave won’t be giving away all this goodness for free. When VirtualOctane goes GA in October, Ostertag anticipates it will have a price tag of about $3,500 per socket, effectively doubling the cost of a VMware ESX license. You get what you pay for, I guess.

XenSource is now going to be a part of Citrix, an interesting move that answers a question that a lot of Citrix aficionados, myself included, were wondering - “What is Citrix doing to remain relevant in the face of Virtual Desktops?”. Virtual Desktops are what this is really all about. Citrix is not a server company, it’s a delivery company. In terms of quality and speed, you can make the comparison that Citrix is the FedEx of bits and bytes, if you will, to Micrsoft’s US Post Office. Citrix, with its ICA protocol, is like FedEx in that it is faster, more full-featured, and more expensive than the trustworthy old Post Office of RDP. Citrix may make a line of server products, but their business is in getting applications into the hands of end-users regardless of distance, client operating system, link speed, and other factors that typically inhibit deployment. Whether this is done by granting remote access to applications over the web, over a proprietary protocol, or any other method has been irrelevant to Citrix for some time - they adapted quickly to the web, enabling ICA-delivered application delivery as early as MetaFrame 1.8 in the late 90’s. What was always a problem in the Citrix world was the full desktop - Citrix’s own CCA (Citrix Certified Administrator, a cert I hold near and dear) training pushes for application delivery over desktop delivery, and for good reason. Presentation Server, the successor to MetaFrame (which was the successor to WinFrame) runs on a Windows server, and there are as many inherent risks of letting people have remote desktops on a server as one can imagine, not the least of which is registry corruption and accidentally deleted files that can hose the entire server, as well as disk space issues. Imagine 50 users saving the same 200MB PDF or PPT of the company’s end-of-fiscal-year financial report on their desktop instead of a network file directory, and you can see how the problem would start. Couple in the complexities of antivirus / antimalware and you can picture the resource spikes every morning at 9am when 20 users log on and the AV program starts running it’s at-logon full computer scan 20 times. While some AV products are Citrix / Terminal Services aware and can be configured not to do this, that’s the exception, not the rule - most often the schedules need to be changed from the default of daily scanning on logon that many companies use and adjusted to only a once-daily at a fixed (off-hours) time. Then of course there’s the resource issue - one errant application that cpu-locks the box takes it away from everyone, because it’s all really just one computer. While Citrix has made many inroads to mitigating these problems, they still exist, and make full-featured Citrix desktops hard to manage and hard to justify on a large scale.

What XenSource adds to the Citrix portfolio is a virtual desktop platform without the caveats of the delivered desktop being part of the same server OS as the application - each desktop can be shunted off onto shared storage, is it’s own contained OS, and can be delivered seamlessly without other users vying for resources. There are still resource issues to contend with such as CPU locking, but because virtualization allows for greater restrictions on access to the physical hardware, these can mitigated faster and without large-scale interruption. The same applies to memory locking, but to an even greater extent - since a VM has X-amount of memory, you can lock it all up and not affect the other virtual machines much at all. No doubt Citrix is working on perfecting desktop delivery of Xen-based desktops over ICA. Likewise Citrix is no doubt working on integrating their already-impressive management tools (MetaFrame XPe even had a configurable chargeback function built in from it’s initial release!) to make managing Xen desktops easier. What’s further is that this gives Citrix a hedge against the possibility of Linux desktops making significant inroads into the enterprise market in the next few years. Instead of depending on Windows, Citrix has just become open to delivering multiple flavors of Linux, BSD, and many other operating systems to users who need them.

What about running Citrix on Windows on Xen host servers? I don’t think Citrix cares one way or the other if you do - it’s still a license for the software regardless of whether the host is virtual or physical, so other than a marketing play about getting scalability on virtual hardware, there’s not much advantage to be seen. Thin Clients? Citrix doesn’t sell them, but they have very cozy relations with all the TC vendors out there, especially Wyse. Wyse has already made great inroads with VMware virtual desktops, and it’s sure to follow that they’ll support Xen desktops as well.

What if I’m wrong? It’s a good possibility. And I’m sure that Citrix sees the other side of the coin - the death of the full-featured desktop as we know it, with a glorified web browser supplanting it. Indeed, this would be the ideal Semantic Web / Web 2.0 client operating system - all applications occurring in a browser, with nothing on the user’s side that can really break, or take a long time rebooting, or need a lot of skill to repair, or require complex driver slipstreaming into images, etc. etc. Just a browser and some horsepower to help the client-side of the web-applications get processed is all anyone would need for an all-web-application environment. This is basically just a distributed thin client, with a slimmed down OS and remote application delivery. This just happens to also be the business Citrix has been supporting for decades. Many of these applications, so thin to the end-user, are fairly large on the server side, and being able to provide virtualization of those apps will keep Citrix relevant when the user’s choice of client no longer matters because everything is designed for web delivery. Right now that’s a selling point for Citrix - they have an ICA client for almost every OS out there, giving people on Linux access to Windows apps without messing with WINE, giving remote users with limited bandwidth access to giant client-server applications. They have web-enabled gateways to allow this to happen over a browser (with a plugin). The trouble with ICA is that if the need for specialized software to connect to remote systems diminishes as more and more applications because browser-based, the need for such a system dependent on plugins and other protocols wanes, leaving Citrix’s ICA out in the lurch. So, either way the cookie crumbles, Citrix has a smart, effective strategy for maintaining relevence.

There are many questions unanswered, such as what will happen to future Xen development? Will Citrix close any new Xen code or keep it Open Source? What will happen to Virtual Iron? Will Xen fork? What will happen to the long-standing but sometimes strained relationship between Citrix and Microsoft? Stayed tuned… this is an interesting time for virtualization and Citrix followers, and I would expect a lot more blogging, reporting, and gossiping about what this means in the very near future. IT Managers should keep an eye on their Virtual Desktop initiatives, for sure. Overall, I would expect this to be a very positive thing for virtualization on the server, desktop, and application front. Disruptive, no doubt, but positive.

VMware finally staged its initial public offering (IPO) today, with EMC selling 10% of its stake in the company, or 33 million shares, and raising almost a $1 billion in the process. The shares were priced at $29 – higher than expected just last week – but by midday had shot up to over $50 per share.

To anyone who’s watched the company over the past couple of years, that the VMware IPO was a rollicking success should come as no surprise. Quarter upon quarter of consecutive growth. Tremendous goodwill from its partners and customers. A slew of imitators and competitors. A healthy ecosystem or start-ups hoping to capitalize on its success. Even entire websites devoted to the core VMware technology

More interesting, I think, is how VMware’s newfound semi-autonomous status will impact it product development, and more importantly, how the company deals with its customers?

Public companies are different from private companies, which are different from wholly owned-subsidiaries (even independently operated ones). Sure, right now, VMware can do no wrong, but how will having Wall Street breathing down its neck every quarter impact the company’s ability to create important and fully baked software? How will the emphasis on quarterly results influence the VMware sales force, and the way it treats its accounts? Will VMware’s status as a publicly traded company affect its relationships with its partners?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but will be looking out for clues over the coming months. In the meantime, if you have any theories, feel free to leave a comment, or shoot me an email.