Uncategorized

Still mulling over a Greene-less VMware

It’s been covered to death, but something about Diane Greene’s ousting from VMware’s top spot still doesn’t sit right with me. Not the ousting itself but the chatter about why. There have been conversations about why she was let go, ranging from EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci wanting greater control of VMware to questions about whether she was more of a technology person and less of a business person. In the end, the appointment of Paul Maritz is the really big news, at least in my not-so-humble opinion.

It goes back to “it’s not what but who you know,” and Maritz knows Microsoft. He knows Ballmer, Gates and every other player there. He was one of the most influential and instrumental executives in Microsoft’s history. His reach is wide when it comes to pulling people into the fold — not necessarily by bringing ex-Microsoft folks in as employees, but rather by having high-level working relationships with all the partners that Microsoft has worked with and that EMC and VMware have worked with or would love to work with. He also knows the PC Revolution firsthand, having seen the rise and fall of Novell’s NetWare, Banyan’s VINES and the host of minis and mains that these replaced, only to be replaced by Windows a few years later.

Tucci also knows Microsoft — EMC’s storage products center around the Microsoft world as much as any other operating system. Exchange data stores, SQL databases, file shares — all of these are EMC’s bread and butter in selling storage to the modern data center. Its software, even though some products compete (like Documentum versus Sharepoint PS), is built around a Windows-centric world.

Then there’s the history — Microsoft knows how to win. It buys what it can’t make on its own, then drowns the competition in price wars and advertising battles. Novell, once Microsoft’s bitter rival for network OS sales, now sells Linux licenses to Microsoft. Netscape is gone and the ghost of its second cousin twice removed, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, lives on to take what is really an insignificant chunk of Internet Explorer’s market share. Corel/Novell WordPerfect? Only if you’re working in a huge law firm will you see WP on an enterprise level.

Put these together and the fabled VMware versus Microsoft Hypervisor war starts to look less like an armed conflict between bitter rivals and more like a strategic partnership built through a demonstration of independence. Tucci’s no fool — Maritz is there for the day that the Redmond giant comes knocking. He’s there to build thin but sturdy roads between the two companies. He’s there to forge something like the Citrix/Microsoft alliance, where Citrix is an independent company but still acts in many ways like a subsidiary of Microsoft (or at least an extension). In Martiz’s VMworld keynote speech (not the parts about having “sins to atone for” in his early days of programming for the PC Revolution), he barely mentioned Greene and hardly touched on competition with Microsoft. He’s looking forward to the day when he can do what only Citrix has managed to do so far — preserve independence while under Redmond’s all-seeing eye.

In the end, we’ll see VMware’s VDC-OS as the dominant force in the virtualization space with Hyper-V as an acceptable but lesser alternative, much like Citrix’s MetaFrame/XenApp and Microsoft’s Terminal Services. I think this leaves one question: In the long run, what happens to Citrix now that it’s betting so heavily on Xen and taking on Microsoft and VMware directly in the systems virtualization market?

EG’s software a hit

EG Innovations took a Best of VMworld award for the application and infrastructure management category, and as one of the judges, it’s my pleasure to tell you why … eG gets it, and it gets IT. The “it” the company gets is business. There were a lot of entries in the category, ranging from desktop virtualization management, cloud computing management and traditional system/network management. EG stood out because its product took a real user problem (in the demo, customers who had problems depositing money via a bank website) all the way through the final root cause analysis, and did so in a clear, consistent fashion that was very easy to trace back to the relative obscurity of a Samba process gone haywire on a file server. The company’s service-level agreement (SLA) awareness was elegant, particularly in that a failure to meet an SLA was a source of system alerts. Its mix of agentless and lightweight agents and its ability to manage system alerts in real time was great, akin to many of the others in the category. In the end, the business awareness put eG over the top.

It was deep level, allowing IT staff to react quickly with appropriate (and relevant) technical information at their disposal to solve problems or initiate handoffs between departments if needed. The business view allows IT to conceptualize the impact of a problem or SLA failure, and thus better align itself with the business. The wide array of hosts, services and vendors supported by the product grants a big boon — having one tool to rule them all (LotR jokes are prohibited, thank you). It’s a tool that a seasoned sysadmin and an entrenched CIO can both love, and better yet, both use.

So … on my trademarked poker scale: EG gets a solid nine pokers. It’s hot, like a fireplace poker, and if you get jabbed by it, you will certainly know it!

ThinLaunch not all that impressive

At the New Innovators both at VMworld 2008 was an interesting small booth from ThinLaunch, which was manned by three of the four people in the company. I had a short pow-wow with two of the folks there and came away with mixed feelings. The product, for which the company is named, appears to fulfill a couple of interesting needs, the first being IT shops that want to pilot virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) but don’t want to invest beyond the server room, and the second being smaller businesses that have server virtualization capacity to devote to hosting clients but have been loathe to rip and replace their thick clients with new thin hardware. I’m not too wowed by the product but I can see where it may be useful. That said, I was royally unimpressed with the technology.

ThinLaunch can be cobbled together with a few Group Policy object edits in Active Directory without buying the product. Simply replace the shell with whatever VDI launcher (or other application) you want. Microsoft tells you how to do it here. True, ThinLaunch then monitors this process if it crashes and can automatically restart it, but this is also something that can be managed with an application or by copying the code from this site.

ThinLaunch is available as an MSI package, meaning it’s very easy to deploy via Group Policy. Then again, Group Policies are even easier to deploy via group policy. Duh. ThinLaunch requires .NET 2.0. and GPOs don’t. ThinLaunch supports Windows 2000 through Vista and 2K8. GPOs do too.

I can see the need for this package and I can even see some large enterprise customers who’d want a packaged application to handle the conversion of legacy desktops. I can even see using the product in small businesses with virtualization already in place but a lot of legacy desktops and a lack of cash. What I can’t see is how it’s innovative in its approach.

Sorry, ThinLaunch, but you get three out of ten pokers — there’s just nothing hot there.

EsXpress: A good idea come ’round again

I had the opportunity to spend a little time at the esXPress booth at VMworld 2008 this year, and I could kick myself. Hard.

To go to the start of why … a long time ago, back when my office primarily used VMware GSX3 for virtulization at the server level, I had a real need to do backups of the virtual machine disk files (VMDK). My GSX hosts were Linux servers and I used a simple cron job to launch scripts on a schedule, which triggered a suspension, tarring of the VMs and scp-ing of the tarballs to a network-attached storage (NAS) box before re-starting the guests. It let me avoid buying backup licenses for my guests (which were mostly pre-production units, image builds, etc.) and gave me a complete point-in-time recovery solution better than anything I could buy off the shelf (at the time). It ws so efficient that when my company joined the Core Customer Program, I was asked to give a webinar on the topic. Sadly, that webinar is now so out-of-date that it’s been pulled from VMware’s site and I can’t find it on archive.org.

Now why would I kick myself? Because that simple idea is at the root of esXpress. It does it a lot better than I did and focuses on ESX rather than GSX/Server, but at the core it’s very similar. It gets around the need for downtime and uses gzip under the hood rather than tar, but it has a Linux OS guest that essentially copies, compresses and offloads other guests. I was pretty impressed by how simply and efficiently the product works, though I must admit to being bit jealous — if only I had realized there was a <i>product</i> there in that idea.

So kudos to esXpress for taking a good idea and making a good product out of it!

Server virtualization in the age of mergers and acquisitions

Last week at VMworld ’08, while living in the glitz of Vegas for a week of product news, press releases, interviews and judging the Best of VMworld entires with my TechTarget colleagues, my constantly buzzing BlackBerry delivered the latest financial news — the collapse of Lehman, the fall of Morgan, the implosion of AIG — all saying the doom of the market is upon thee.

As an investor, this wasn’t my happiest week (I always felt it was odd to invest money in people who invest money), but for a lot of others, last week must have been miserable indeed. Among those who are feeling miserable right now are IT staffers at Bank of America, who must now acquire a global IT infrastructure as their company acquires Morgan Stanley. And of course, federal IT staff are now worrying about how to oversee the essentially nationalized AIG. That’s not to mention the IT teams at numerous other companies engaged in mergers and acquisitions.

This is the time for server virtualization to shine. Bank of America should lead the charge in making efficient use of virtualization in their acquisition of Morgan Stanley. BofA is going to inherit an immense quantity of hardware, not to mention enormous heating/cooling/electric bills, colossal real estate costs and a titanic regulatory compliance project as it tries to integrate its own IT infrastructure with Morgan’s. If BofA (or any acquiring company for that matter) is smart, it will use virtualization to physical-to-virtual (P2V) every possible asset, transport to its own data center and import those virtual systems.

Bank of America shouldn’t just P2V low-hanging fruit, either — it should reach for the stars. Then it should shut down that physical hardware, wipe it and sell it to help offset the project costs. There are obviously a lot of nuanced steps involved in making this happen, but all the major pain points to which virtualization presents solutions are all the major pain points in integrating a new IT infrastructure:

1) Server move/change/add/remove
2) Power costs
3) Real estate costs
4) Heating and cooling
5) Configuration management
6) Asset management

The difference between the slow-rolling projects in most companies and the aggressive plan I recommend is night and day. The ROI in a progressive rollout can be achieved over time, integrated into the budget and then applied over that time. The costs of an acquisition and the integration of that acquisition’s IT assets are immediate and immense.

Virtualization can provide those long-term benefits in the short term — the elimination of real estate, cooling and power costs alone will offset the cost of licensing and storage. The enhanced backup and retention possible with virtualized systems will go a long way towards easing regulatory concerns of data retention.

QLogic and Microsoft taken to task for “benchmarketing” by Chris Wolf

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.

Microsoft to ship Hyper-V … finally

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 Value of the VCP (VMware Certified Professional)

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.

Scaling Up or Scaling Out, Revisited

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 x8)
• 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.

Hiring Questions in the Virtualization Age

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!