VMware Communities

Monitoring vSphere adoption: A forum moderator’s perspective

As an active moderator and VMware Communities Guru, I’m in a unique position to see the level of vSphere adoption from an interesting vantage point — topic activity in the forums.

Take one morning’s statistics from this past week:

• 3 pages of new VMware vSphere Forum Posts vs 1.5 pages of VMware ESX 3.5 Forum Posts.
• VMware ESX 3.5 Forum posts used to be around 3 pages
• The majority of VMware vSphere Forum Posts that dealt with ESX 4 vs ESXi 4 was in favor of ESXi 4 by a wide margin (I did not actually count posts but noticed there were more ESXi posts than ESX posts in those 3 pages)

So using this as a rough measurement and in a completely unscientific way, we do see that VMware vSphere is being investigated for use at least by those activie within the VMware community forums. The same thing happened when ESX v3.5 was released, and over time ESX 3.0 community posts dropped to less than a dozen per day. (I say per day because I review the vSphere, ESX 3.5, and ESX 3.0 communities once about every 24 hours give or take an hour or so.)

Given the types of questions, it looks like two things are happening:

• VMware vSphere is being investigated
• VMware ESXi 4 is the packaging of choice

The second item could be because many people believe that when the next version of ESX comes out, it won’t have a service console, and these users want to get a head start on the adjustment.

What we do not know from this type of adoption measurement is whether these are adoptions for use within production, enthusiasts, or testing within lab environments.

What we do know is that the increase in volume and the drop in ESX v3.5 forum posts is that vSphere is definitely gaining traction. This is not surprising, but what is to me is that ESXi 4 has a constant flow of posts while ESX 4 does not. This will shift the security model people employ to protect virtualization hosts as well.

Useful VMware virtualization roundtable podcasts

The VMware Communities roundtable podcast drew in a large crowd on Wednesday the 7th. In general, the show draws hundreds of listeners that download the recorded sessions available via Talkshoe and iTunes. The host of the podcast is VMware’s John Troyer and the show provides an ongoing forum to discuss current VMware technical issues. The show also provides in-depth information on both older and newer VMware products. I am a panelist in the forum, as are several other SearchVMware bloggers. Join us every Wednesday at 3:00 PM EST.

Unfortunately, as it’s a general virtualization roundtable this particular podcast forum cannot get into the intracacies of any one area such as security. While security is brought up from time to time within the roundtable, it is a detailed enough subject to warrant its own round table.

To that end, I would like to announce the first Virtualization security round table podcast to be held on Thursday Jan. 15 at 2:30 PM EST. This will be the first of a series of podcasts that will run every other week.

Roundtable podcasts, Twitter, blogs, and the VMware Communities Forum are some of the best ways to get information and help about virtualization products and resources.