This year’s VMworld marks a serious transition in my eyes.
The best part: it’s not about the cloud debate. While that’s not settled, the
next topic is upon us. Convergence and software-defined infrastructure services
will clearly be a focus going forward.

Since I started virtualizing production data center
workloads with ESX in 2007 and GSX before that, I effectively self-taught
myself. I’m sure many of you can relate. I found that ESX, ESXi, vCenter, etc.,
were very comfortable for me as a “server admin” at the time. Sure, I learned a
lot about storage along the way. I learned even more about storage bottlenecks.
But that’s beyond the point.

Today, virtualization isn’t like it used to be. In the
context of VMworld; we’ll be immersed next week with the workings and benefits
of the VMware Software Defined Datacenter. This is effectively a tighter
connection of the pieces that are parts of the modern data center.

There are many reasons why this is important. It can
fundamentally shift everything from staff training requirements to the purchase
patterns for networking and storage. There are a lot of technologies in play,
but I’m not sure what the future will hold. As progressive as I may seem to be at time, I’m a little bit conservative in my IT practice. Take cloud discussions of
recent years — my approach is that the cloud still has infrastructure and it still needs management and
protection (credit