VMware ramps crusade to make sysadmins redundant Having already made major revisions to its ESXi hypervisor, vSphere add-ons, and vCloud extensions in the 5.0 releases that came out over the summer, VMware isn't making any blockbuster announcements at VMworld Europe in Copenhagen this week – unless you count some management tools for infrastructure and platform clouds that …
I hear if you write your software in COBOL, you can get your business guys to do all the useful 'business logic' bits without needing any code monkeys. Its all about the interface after all... none of these problems are intrinsically difficult, they're just poorly presented... probably by people trying to protect their own jobs. Time to cut away some deadwood, I say.
I missed the part in the article where it was explained how VMware have made hardware and software that always work the way VMware says they will and never breaks. Also, the part where the hardware walks itself into the datacenter, cables itself up, and plays nice with everything else without oversight by someone who actually is familiar with the environment.
"the OpEx nirvana of having one system administrator be able to manage 1,000 virtual nodes in a cluster all by his or her lonesome"
If I were proposing a real business case for Virtual Machines in the Cloud then I would describe the current infrastructure for a medium size business eg. switches, routers, servers and client desktops. On top of that runs your business processes. Moving to a VM would involve moving the former to the cloud. As such you are out sourcing your underlying network infrastructure. And when you say 'manage 1,000 virtual nodes`, who are you going to get to analyse your data, engage with customers and colleagues and maintain your business processes or write your own in-house applications.
@Anonymous Coward: "I missed the part in the article where it was explained .. the part where the hardware walks itself into the datacenter"
Haaa, nice one ...
The Sysadmin is a person who builds the foundation for a platform.
A builder will never be redundant no matter what platform you are building.
On another matter - when the world ACKs The VMWare Day, then we'll think about redundancies. For now there's The Sysadmin's Day.
Quality software always shakes up crappy IT resources. If they remove the GUI the jobcentres will be overwhelmed with sysadmins (with lower case 's') lol
a half-caste breed of system administrators whose only point of analysis is to read the vendor documentation and take it as gospel, rather than undersanding the concepts. (I showed our Wintel VMWare Admins the command line for VMWare and how I could quiesce whole Servers for backups using a pre-script, and they were amazed. And it took me 3 hours to explain how the virtual networking actually worked - no, each packet does not go out to the switch)
Meanwhile the real sysadmins will continue to look for the challenging work environments, *nix, possibly networks or systems programming. (Dennis Ritchie, you are the real messiah)
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