Category Archives: VMware

bored people quit, engaged people stay

I’m only 8 months into my time at VMware, so there’s no way that I could be bored yet.  But I still read bored people quit from Rands in Repose and found something that applies to me.  He’s talking about how geek managers can avoid boredom in their people, and mentions this:

In terms of a low-cost means of keeping your team content, the simple act of saying, “I know where you want to be and I’m thinking about how to get you there” is a way to demonstrate you care about the growth of your team.

Now that I’m reasonably comfortable with my role and my team, I’ve started to think about what my next career move should be.  I want to grow in my career.  I’ve already told my manager that I want to get to the Staff level here, but there’s also an attendant question of whether I want to continue up the technical track or move into the managerial track1.

In my weekly meeting with my manager this week, we talked about the status of my current research projects.  I’ve also got a couple of pet projects that are more internally-facing to help my user experience team rock, and I now have the green light to put some more energy into those.  In that meeting, my manager explicitly talked about my desire to move up and some short-term things that I should do to move that along.  I went back to my office thinking, “this is SO the right place for me”, banged out a bunch of emails and invitations to get some things moving, and went home with a glow.  As I talked to my husband over dinner that night, I realized that what really got me excited about this was that my manager had heard what I had said, put some thought into it, and came back with specific and direct feedback about how I’m doing so far and the next steps to take.

I’ve got to say: this engineer ain’t bored. 😀

  1. VMware allows its employees to move back and forth between the two tracks, which I think is a good deal for everyone.

launch day! vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, Cloud Infrastructure Suite

Today’s a big day on the VMware campus in Palo Alto.  Our early-morning1 live webcast just ended, wherein we launched vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite.  Full details are available at the post VMware unveils vSphere 5 and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite at the VMware Console blog, which is the blog of our executive team2.

Aside from the sheer awesomeness that is contained in these announcements, I learnt a few things this morning about this release that make me totally proud to be at this company.  This is the largest coordinated launch of software that VMware has ever done, with more than 1 million engineering hours and 2 million QA hours going into this release alone.

There’s been a lot of effort put into getting workflows right.  It’s not about automating steps, it’s about eliminating steps whenever possible.  For example, in the new vCloud Director 1.5, using linked clones means that you can provision VMs in about 5 seconds.

I’m sure that there’s going to be a lot of articles about these new announcements today.  @vmware is probably the best aggregator of them, although I’ll also point to Duncan’s 5 is the magic number post that lists five of his favorite topics around our announcements.  And, of course, it wouldn’t be a VMware announcement if there weren’t an accompanying video. This one is a five-minute overview of what we announced today, all filmed on our campus:

 

  1. 9am PT is early for geeks!
  2. I have to admit that my little geek heart goes pitter-patter that our execs have such a well-named blog

sign up to participate in VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation betas!

One of the top questions I get asked by my Mac geek friends is how to beta-test Fusion.  If you’re interested in participating in betas for either VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation1, fill out the form here.  When we’ve got room in our beta program, we’ll send out invitations to those who have expressed interest.

I’m totally a fiend for dogfooding, and I’ve got to say that the next version of Fusion has some awesome stuff coming.  More details to come later … !

  1. That’s an OR, not an XOR.

vCloud Director admins needed for research

My team is conducting research on vCloud Director.  I’m interested in talking to org admins who have deployed vCloud Director to their end-users.  I’m especially interested in deployments of vCloud Director to end-users who aren’t necessarily very tech-savvy.

In short, my team would like to conduct on-site research with 3-4 people for a given vCloud Director deployment.  We’d like to visit you in person, talk with the org admin to learn about the environment and how things are working, and then we’d like to interview some of the vCloud Director end-users at their desks (or whatever else their working environment might be).  Each interview would be 60-90 minutes.

If you might be interested in participating and helping to shape the future of vCloud Director, email me for more details.