Since June of 2006, I’ve worked for HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative), which by the way is the national’s largest telephone cooperative. Its offered me some great experiences and training opportunities. One of those is exposure to virtualization technologies. And this one comes with a story.
When I started at HTC, my wife was pregnant and due in November. In September, we were scheduling a VMware class for the new version of VMware that was being released. VMware was already in our datacenter and operational, but the new version offered a huge leap forward – something we wanted to take advantage of. So the class was scheduled starting on November 1 and moving forward – no big deal – until the doctor’s said we’d have our baby on October 30 (much longer story there). So I began VMware classes two days after my daughter was born, but I haven’t regretted it. Even as distracted as I was during class, I met a really amazing product suite.
A couple months later, new hardware began arriving for the deployment of our VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 environement. My supervisor designated me as the lead for the project and so we began to roll forward with the project. Our group breaks up into primarys and backup personnel on each major product that we have implemented. I’ve become the primary VMware person.
A year after the project, we’ve completed 95% of our physical to virtual conversion and have an extremely agile and well-working VMware environment that we maintain. We’ve consolidated and eliminated some 30 physical servers in our datacenter.
In addition to my VMware experience, I’ve also become a Parallels desktop user. When we purchased our Intel based iMac, Parallels had just released their Mac virtualization product. I quickly moved to it and transitioned my Virtual PC virtual HD over to Parallels. I was blown away by how streamlined and fast Windows XP ran under Parallels desktop. It was the same reaction that I had to booting Windows 2003 within ESX for the first time.
Since implementing VMware, I’ve been following developments with Xen, Virtual Iron and Hyper-V.  Parallels (formerly SWsoft) is also pushing into the arena with some compelling products. I’m following all of the offerings and developments closely and I’ll be blogging about those.
Required Disclosure:
The opinions expressed here are strictly personal opinions authored by Philip Sellers, an employee of HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) and/or its subsidiaries. Any reference to, discussion of, or content regarding HTC and/or its subsidiaries has not been reviewed, approved, or authorized by HTC and/or its subsidiaries before such content is posted and does not represent HTC and/or its subsidiaries or its views and opinions in any way.
