I used to find it irritating, back in the day, to watch a genuinely amusing TV comedy and become distracted from the jokes by the unnecessary laugh track.

One session I attended at last week’s VMworld evoked that same sort of irritation. I appreciated the basic overview provided during

Getting the Green Light for Your Virtual Infrastructure

, but the relentless cheerleading and gratuitous slams on other vendors, plus their myopia concerning other virtualization solutions was a little off-putting.

Let’s see what I can re-create from my notes, as slides of the presentations have not yet been provided to analysts:
“The Four Main Solution Areas”:
Cost Effective Business Continuity check
Automation of Development, Testing, and App Management check
Virtual Desktop capability check
Consolidation/ Containment/ Automation/ Standardization (specifically noted: reduced footprint, expense, and power usage) check, check, check, and check.

OK so far. But to summarize this set of slides, our speakers concluded that virtualization is about making life better, and not NOT about server consolidation. Did I miss something? What about reducing footprint, expense, and power usage? That sort of seems like a fairly solid value proposition. Hmm.

On to the “Financial Rationale.” Reasonable information on how to build a cost model (using VMware TCO Calculator, of course). But wait! No, hurry! Waiting to virtualize will cost you money! Perhaps this is so in the long run, but for a more measured view of the rate at which virtualization should take place, see our Wicked-Great Seminar post.

“Commercial Aspects” recommendations seem reasonable use chargeback models to show savings, ensure purchasing and business units are aware of the benefits, uh huh, uh huh zzzload up on features! There we go. Shoot for high targets! Of course.

Any “Objection Handling” techniques to employ back at the office? Why, yes! Here’s a whole list of things you can tell the boss.
All other VM vendors are still in testing, not part of the Linux kernel, or otherwise suck! (OK, they didn’t say “suck”, but by this point I could be pretty sure they were thinking it.)
No other VM vendor can allow an average of 2:1 memory overcommit! Yay!
Our price per VM is less than that of so-called “free” hypervisors! Yay! (Take that, XenSource.)
We’re better than XenSource or Microsoft! (They really did say that.) Yay!
We’re flexible with applications and operating systems from any vendor or other virtual hardware platform! Yay!
Don’t wait another day to install VMware! Gooooo team!

Much of this may very well be true, but such vigorous pom-pom waving, combined with a dismissive attitude towards anything that isn’t VMware blessed, makes us reluctant to accept anything at face value. And I still want those slides.