vTeardown

vTeardown won’t be just another virtualization blog.  We’ll be writing about hypervisors and virtualization management tools, but the important difference we’ll be bringing to our readers is a focus on the technology’s ability to meet customer demands based on actual hands-on usage and not vendor datasheets and press releases.

All of us on the vTeardown team are part of VMware’s Server Business Unit where part of our job is keeping tabs on the VMware alternatives that our customers might also be evaluating.  To do that, we don’t rely on just the vendor documentation.  Instead, we install those products on servers, networks and storage hardware like those found in production datacenters, and then we put them through every test we can think of – we “tear them down” – to see if they can hold up to the needs of real users.  We’ve already uncovered lots of issues you’ll want to know about and you can look forward to learning about them in this blog.

We’re proud of VMware’s virtualization products and their production-proven reliability and performance.  However, we’re not the only provider of x86 virtualization platforms any longer and we need to keep making our products better than the alternatives if we want to maintain the hard-earned loyalty of our customers.  The vTeardown lab is where we compare our products to those alternatives to ensure we keep providing a better platform.  Our findings help our customers know when our competition is making claims in their datasheets that their products can’t deliver.

You might already know one member of our team from his very popular VCritical blog.  Eric Gray is one of our virtualization management experts and he’s been opening lots of eyes to the real world limitations of Microsoft’s offerings in that space.  At vTeardown, we aim to do the same for hypervisors and other management tools.  So look forward as our team – Michael Hong, Kayvan Montakhab and I – sheds some light on the real capabilities of the products out there in the virtualization market.