Category Archives: VMware

on our new CEO …

Silicon Angle writes this about incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger:

Believe me; Maritz wasn’t pushed out the door and Pat Gelsinger he was not passed over for CEO job at EMC.  So to say that Gelsinger is marrying the ugly step sister because he wasn’t wanted by Cinderella is complete nonsense.  I’d say that he actually has the best job at EMC.  VMware is 60%+ of EMCs market cap, its where all the change and innovation will take place at the company.  EMC is the infrastructure play and VMware is the application play.  VMware an application focused company is where Pat Gelsinger will shine.  New apps, new platforms, new management paradigms, new partnerships & alliances this is the dream job for any serious IT executive and Pat Gelsinger will be in product heaven over there.

Read the rest: Industry Analysts Got It Wrong on VMware CEO Transition From Paul Maritz to Pat Gelsinger.

pay attention to your users

One of my colleagues, Ben Goodman, wrote a great post on the VMware end-user computing blog that essentially says “pay attention to your users”.  Okay, he titled it “what rogue users and cloud services can tell IT”, but my little researcher heart went pitter-pat when I read the post and saw that it was all about listening to your users.

Consider this paragraph:

Each time employees make a decision to choose a cloud service outside of the IT department, it’s an opportunity for IT to learn where those users are being underserved and to develop solutions that do fit the enterprise security, governance, and compliance requirements. So, in that sense, rogue services are a great opportunity for IT and they need to see it that way. Instead of looking at these service, tools and devices as unwanted invaders, IT needs to see them as what they are, leading indicators of their real customers’ needs.

And he’s totally right.  Pay attention to what your users are actually using, and you’ll learn a lot about what they need, what they want, and what hoops they’re willing to jump through to get what they want.  This will help you provide better IT services, better software, and a better user experience.

security policy-management user study

It’s research time!  In addition to the troubleshooting study that my team is conducting (and please, check out my blog post for more information, we’re still looking for participants for that), we’re also conducting research about security policies.

My team is conducting a study next week on security policy management in a virtual infrastructure. We would like to talk to people who manage and/or implement security policies in their virtual environment to learn about their work and get some feedback on our current initiatives.  If you are interested in participating, fill out this very short survey to answer a few questions and give us your contact information.

VMware acquires DynamicOps

Last year, my co-workers and I were joking that we seemed to be acquiring half the Valley.  And then it felt like acquisitions slowed down, but now we’ve got a new one: VMware has signed an agreement to acquire DynamicOps, a company that has some awesome applications that help get you to the cloud faster.  More information about it is available from a blog post from DynamicOps, a blog post from VMware, and a press release too.

Welcome, DynamicOps!  (And if you work in UX at DynamicOps, ping me.  I’d love to get together with you and introduce you to UX at VMware!)

research participants needed

Edited on Friday 7/13 at 11am: Thanks for your interest!  We now have all of the participants that we need.  But we’re still looking for people who would like to participate in research about security policies … 

My team is conducting some research about troubleshooting in virtual environments.  If you’re a virtual infrastructure architect or senior admin who does a lot of troubleshooting, we’d love to hear from you.

For this study, we are looking for people who perform troubleshooting tasks in their VMware environment and are willing to share their experiences with us.  For those of you who are local to the Bay Area, we can either come to you and chat with you in your environment, or we can do a conference call.  For those of you outside of the Bay Area, we’ll do a conference call.

Our research will be conducted beginning on July 9.  If you’d like to participate, please email me with the following information:

  1. Your name, email address, and telephone number.
  2. How big is your virtual environment?  (number of hosts, number of VMs, etc)
  3. What kind of issues do you troubleshoot?
  4. What tools do you use for troubleshooting?
  5. Does your organization use vCenter Operations? (We’re looking for a mix of people who do and don’t use it.)
  6. Would you be willing to show our researcher the tools you use for troubleshooting your environment via during an online screen-sharing session (such as WebEx)?

Feel free to share this blog post with anyone you know who might be interested in chatting more with VMware about troubleshooting.

using VMware Workstation to thwart a fake antivirus scammer

I’ve gotten a bunch of fake antivirus/malware scammers calling my home lately.  Like others, sometimes I take delight in stringing them along, playing dumb while they try to get access to my machine.  Sometimes, I’ll ask them, “What’s Windows?”, waiting for them to figure out that I’m not actually a Windows users at all.  Or sometimes, when they tell me that they’re from Microsoft, I’ll use my old Microsoft credentials and say, “wow, I wasn’t aware that we were being more proactive about this, I’m so glad that our company has decided to do more to eradicate malware”.  Once they realize that they have someone technically adept on the call, they hang up instantly.

But I’ve never strung them along like this.  A couple of weeks ago, one of these scammers cold-called a security researcher from Sourcefire.  The security researcher immediately knew that it was a scam, but he decided to take it a step further: he quickly set up a virtual machine for them in VMware Workstation, and let the scammer go to town: “I realized I could give them an environment to bang around in”.    So the scammer installed LogMeIn, and then he watched (and, yes, captured video) while the scammer disabled Windows Services and VMware services (but not actually realizing that this means that he’s in a VM!), all the while insisting that he’s removing malware. Then they force a reboot under Safe Mode, which (given that they’ve disabled everything) won’t work properly.  This is how they try to get the victim of their scam to freak out and give them their credit card details, and likely will leave the victim with a computer that won’t work at all unless they can find someone else who can figure out that it’s simply that Windows Services have been disabled.

Dark Reading has a good breakdown of the security researcher’s call, and a shortened version of the call is available on YouTube.

VMware made the 2012 Top Workplaces list

On Sunday, my husband and I were sharing breakfast and the newspaper, when I discovered that the San José Mercury News has released its annual Top Workplaces list.  Who made the list for large (<500) employees, do you ask?  Why, VMware did.  We’re also the largest company on that list of large employers, with 3300 employees in the Bay Area.  Some of the reasons cited include supportive management, our green initiatives across campus, and our community commitment via the VMware Foundation (amongst others).