Today, Virtualization Field Day 5 kicked off in Boston. I have a few thoughts on each of the presenters today that I would like to share. All of the delegates and presenters were awesome. Great lineup from a delegates perspective, by the way! Stephen really out-did himself this time!
The Green Circle folks were back for the third VFD in a row. Eric Wright kicked off the presentation with an overview on the product and why it’s needed, followed by Charles Crouchman (CTO) on some more details, and finally Endre Sara with some great demo material and deep discussion on the inner workings of the tool.
I’ve seen VMTurbo present at all three of their VFD appearances, and for some reason I didn’t grasp the true power of the tool until this time. I think part of that had to do with a skewed first impression. I was first introduced to VMTurbo as a monitoring tool of sorts. If you look at VMTurbo through the lens of a monitoring tool, and only a monitoring tool, you’re going to get the wrong idea. Like not even close. The power of VMTurbo comes from it’s ability to take action based on calculated metrics where many parts of the infrastructure/application stack are considered. “Automation” is much more descriptive of VMTurbo’s product than “Monitoring.”
I still find the market economy analogy really intriguing. It makes a lot of sense to me, but I’ve wondered – as have others (like Justin Warren, if I’m not mistaken) – whether the analogy actually maps properly to infrastructure components. It’s not that I think the mechanics and algorithms aren’t doing helpful things. It’s that I wonder if market terms that would mean one thing in world of finance mislead me about what the technology is actually doing or calculating in the world of IT infrastructure. I’m a believer in what the product can do, I just wonder if I – the administrator – am confused about the technology because of the complex analogy. Either way, I love that EVERYTHING they do can be viewed with this paradigm, it would seem. The continuity is impressive.
I’m really looking forward to hitting up Eric for the NFR he promised me 😉 and spending some time with the tool in the lab. I’ll definitely put some thoughts up once I’ve had more experience with it.
