In my more productive and lucrative past life, I worked with VMware, both the product and the company. VMware brought virtual servers into the corporate mainstream, where they became an essential tool for enterprise computing.
When I retired, VMware was mostly owned by storage system technology vendor EMC. At the time, Dell was in the process of acquiring EMC, and we were under non-disclosure regarding Michael Dell seeking financial backing from China to close the deal. I assume the loan was settled long ago. VMware is now owned by Broadcom, which is making some painful changes at its new acquisition.
For a time VMware, Cisco Systems, and EMC were in a partnership called VCE, offering pre-configured server/storage/networking packages.
These product offerings made sense at the time, given the complexity of the configurations. A typical IT department, deploying desktop PC’s, making employee badges and replacing laser printer toner cartridges, didn’t have the resources to install and configure VMware with an EMC Storage Area Network. One area I specialized in was Storage Area Networking, a technology that hyper-converged networking has effectively made obsolete. Hyper-converged networking, first used at Amazon, is the foundation of cloud computing, which runs on commodity server hardware. The worst of the complexity is remote to customers, leaving IT departments free to deploy desktop PC’s, make employee badges and replace laser printer toner cartridges.
VCE’s long-term viability quickly faded with the rise of cloud computing, and the partnership was dissolved. On-premises systems continue to be essential for many applications, and yet I have to wonder how much more relevance VMware and EMC have in the corporate IT market.
My job was often fun, and it was certainly always interesting, but I’m glad to be out of it. Life put too many personal challenges in my way to manage both it and what I used to do for work.
