Opinions, questions and thoughts on server virtualization - from Tony Asaro, Chief Strategy Officer at Virtual Iron.
Tony Asaro
Virtualization Training and Education

Virtual Iron has focused on ease of use - however - by its very nature virtual infrastructure is complex because it integrates with a sophisticated ecosystem that includes physical servers, LANs, storage networks and backup solutions.

It is important for product vendors to extend their knowledge and experience and share it with the outside world. This provides value that complements their products with practical and immediate impact to the customers.

Virtual Iron has a suite of online training vignettes and courses that addresses the core considerations implementing our solution from pre-installation planning, integrating with storage networks, VLAN configurations, high availability, etc. Additionally, the bulk of the training is free.

The results have been significant - Virtual Iron customers are avoiding issues and accelerating implementation. And we get far fewer support calls. Again, we have an easy to use product - however - since it touches so many other things in the data center having the insight and knowledge at your fingertips is invaluable to the entire process.

Allow us to pound our chest a little bit on this - we have great training - and it has proven to be extremely valuable. Yes - the product is important - but we have enhanced the Virtual Iron "experience" by complementing our solution with accessible and useful online training.

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Posted by Tony A. on September 11, 2008 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Comments (2)

Anthony Hardy:

Honestly, when we installed VI (just recently), I'd never used a SAN or virtualization (ok . .vmware, back in 2000, but that hardly counts). The training vignettes were dynamite! I was able to setup everything in VI in 4-5 hours and migrate my first windows box the same day I turned on the servers. I couldn't be happier.

AND . thank god I did. My primary PDC (a samba box) had the RAID array corrupted (read where EVERYONE's roaming profile and logins scripts were stored) the DAY AFTER I migrated that first windows box. I was able to restore from that night's backup (thank goodness the array corrupted right AFTER the backup and before anyone came in for the day) and be back up and running on virtual hardware by the end of the day (boy . . tape backup can be a pain when it's terabytes of data).

The training from their basic vignettes made it all possible and I referenced them regularly. I wish more providers would do this.

Tony Asaro:

Anthony,

Much appreciated on the feedback and validating with a real world experience. Your peers need to hear this stuff from people who actually have been through it.

Tony

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