The Virtual Vidalia: EMC recruits top 25 bloggers; VMware fanboy upset Hyper-V doesn't suck

EMC makes blanket job offer to all top VMware/Virtualization bloggers

      Despite owning 89% percent of VMware already, Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC has extended job offers to all 25 Top VMware/virtualization bloggers, as announced on Eric Siebert's vSphere-Land.com last month.
     By putting successful VMware bloggers on EMC payroll, the company hopes to surpass its storage rival NetApp in the lucrative virtualization market beyond what it has been able to achieve by simply owning the company, sitting on the board, appointing its chief executives, and investing millions in technical sales and research and development.
     "While EMC already cuts checks to 6,700 VMware employees, we felt we needed to expand the number of employees focused 100% on VMware to 6,725," said an EMC spokesperson.      The job offer letters came as a surprise to Top Bloggers Chad Sakac and Scott Lowe, whose Virtual Geek and Scott Lowe blogs came in at #2 and

VMware fanboy disappointed Hyper-V doesn't suck more
      VMware early adopter Rich Livermore admitted to co-workers last week that he's disappointed by the fact that Microsoft Hyper-V R2 is as good as it is.
     "It was fun to dump on Hyper-V 1.0, but everyone knew it was just a place-holder until Microsoft could come out with R2," Livermore told co-workers.
     But much to Livermore's dismay, Hyper-V R2 has been surprisingly stable for a Microsoft product, with good performance and no spectacular data loss fiascos, he complained. And while Hyper-V's live migration and clustered file system aren't as enterprise-class as VMware's versions, both appear to work pretty well.
     "I dunno, I was just hoping Hyper-V would be a humungous flop, kind of like the Zune."
     Looking out, Livermore expressed optimism that Hyper-V would soon suffer from a serious security violation, and that Microsoft engineers would fail to deliver memory overcommit by the next major release.

Virtualization architect's family still has no idea what he does for a living
      Rob McHugh, a senior virtualization architect at a midwestern financial services firm, told colleagues last week that try as he might to explain virtualization, his family still has no idea what he does for a living.
     "They all think I walk around the office with a pair of those loony googles on my head," he lamented.
     The VCP4/VCDX said he had tried numerous analogies to explain virtualization – eggs cartons, apartment buildings, the Holy Trinity -- but that his attempts at elucidation have fallen short. "By the look on their faces, you'd think I was trying to explain time travel or irrational numbers."

From the twittersphere: What does a guy have to do to get followed by @jtroyer?
      OK, so what I want to know is what does a red-blooded VMware zealot have to do to get followed by @jtroyer, VMware's social media guru? I know, I'm relatively new to virtualization -- I got my feet wet on VMware with ESX 3.0.2 -- but what I lack in experience, God knows I make up for in enthusiasm. I run VMware in my production data center, and I have ESX virtualized under VMware Workstation on my home computer. I write PowerShell scripts. I have a blog, and I participate in the VMware forums. I listed myself under #vmware and #virtualization on the http://wefollow.com twitter directory. I even added an 'I heart VMware' "twibbon" to my profile picture, for chrissakes!
     I mean, seriously, what do the 1,487 people @jtroyer followers have that I don't? Eeesh. Reminds me of high school.

CBS announces Survivor Island: The Virtualization Administrator
      CBS is contemplating a new season of Survivor Island: The Virtualization Administrator. The idea is to bring several Virtualization Administrators together on a remote tropical island with only a few backup UPS power generators. They must use their life skills and technical smarts to find a way to keep three full blade servers going, which will run 8-10 virtual servers a piece, some of which are mission critical and will be active CBS servers. One will run VMware ESXi, one will run Microsoft Hyper-V, the other will run Citrix XenServer.
     The winning survivor will know how to administer COS-less ESXi, Hyper-V and XenServer, figure out how to generate green energy from the resources on the island to keep the servers powered, and invent a way to protect the servers from the tropical temperatures.
     Casting is slated to begin 2Q of 2010.