Off to work we go...

Q: "So what is VMware and what do they do?"

The VM in VMware is for Virtual Machine. The idea is that a single computer can act like several computers at the same time. There are several reasons why someone would actually want to do that. A company typically has many servers that are dedicated to receiving email, serving web pages and files, doing backups and various other duties. The thing about servers is most of them, most of the time, are actually doing very little work. It was said about being a pilot, "Hours and hours of boredom punctuated with a couple seconds of sheer terror during takeoff and landing." It's the same for computers, you might have ten servers with only one under any kind of significant load, and even then it rarely is utilizing 40-50% of it's capacity. So if we think of each server as an airline, instead of having a separate airport for each airline, the Virtual Server software acts as an air traffic controller to allow all the airlines to use the same airport.

There are other reasons that you would want to use the technology. It will not come as a shock to you that Microsoft Windows software has some limitations. One of the more frustrating ones, particularly to manufacturers of high end hardware, is that the windows kernel can not efficiently deal with more than 2 Gigabytes of memory. If you are making a machine with 16 processors and 224 Gigabytes of memory and it doesn't perform any better than a Dual CPU box with 2 Gigabytes, you have a problem. The solution is to run many virtual servers on the machine, you can suddenly take advantage of all that hardware capacity that was inaccessible to a single instance of Windows. Microsoft also tightly integrates Internet Explorer with the operating system in such a way that it impossible to run multiple versions on the same machine. If you are doing web development you need to test your website against several different versions of IE and having to dedicate a single machine to each version can be tedious to say the least. Being able to keep every version of Windows and IE on a single machine can be a troubleshooting life saver.

The other interesting side effect of server virtualization is that each server instance can be treated like a single file. You can copy that file and duplicate the entire server. It gets even better though, you can actually move a virtual server from one real machine to another, while it is running, with no interruption! This is really a handy thing for a large company that needs to keep services available at all times.

Q: "So what does your fancy shmancy title mean?"

Fancy Shmancy? [Seriously, shmancy isn't even a word. -- ed.] I will be making custom tools to simplify and automate testing and bug tracking for our products. These are web based systems usually using open source software. It's going to be a lot of fun, and far less system administration than I have had to do recently, which will be a bit of a relief. I get to use Perl, my favorite programming language.

I will start on May 2nd. and I will report on anything cool that I get to do within the limits of my NDA.