Who's Your Data?

My official answer was “it is a very nice product, with very good capabilities depending on your needs”. I hated that answer and so did the customer. My real answer is…actually I will tell you later. The customer’s query prompted me to search on the AGWWW for news about VMWare. Egad. You would have thought that mankind had entered a whole new plane of metaphysical existence.

My unscientific survey suggests that VMWare is currently tied for the most hyped technology on the planet with…I don’t know, but the answer is in some ridiculously expensive report entitled Gartner Identifies Most Hyped Technologies. Anyway, it’s hyped.

VMWare is a sort of virtual machine. It emulates an Intel-based PC in much the same way there are emulators for other machines. It passes instructions straight to the CPU for execution with no intervening translation, so it is a little bit faster. We use it in our lab at DLT. We use it for training and simulating complex network environments.

So, what’s my real answer…what is the real skinny on VMWare? Are you sitting down? Here it goes. Do you like snapshots?

VMWare has a pretty cool snapshot feature. You can setup your virtual machine the way you want to and take a snapshot of the setup. That’s great except us data management types have been doing that for years with Symantec, Network Appliance and others. I like the emulation features, but I am not ready to crown VMWare as product of the year just yet. It is a very nice product, with very good capabilities depending on your needs. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Say no more, say no more.