At this years Catalyst conference in San Diego a heavyweight championship match was laid on with Scott Drummonds of VMware in the red corner and Simon Crosby of Citrix in the blue one.
This was an epic battle all about the relative performance of different hypervisors. you can see the video of the session here. So who won, well there was no clear winner both side gave a good performances, but I wanted to pick up on what I considered the most interesting comment by Simon Crosby, Performance is not just about how many IOPs and number of VM’s per host, but about “End user Perception”. In this I can not agree more. It is no use buying a Rolls Royce, when you need a Sharrabang. Yes; the Rolls looks nice, Yes; you are very comfortable – however you cannot take the office to the works outing in a Rolls Royce. What I am trying to say here is that if your users are not happy with their performance, it does not matter what hypervisor you used, what switching technology, which hardware vendor. If Mavis, the CEO’s PA can not do her emails and word processing, or adequately browse the web, the project will have failed in its fundamental purpose. “DELIVERING A USABLE SOLUTION”. That is something that we often loose site of as IT professionals when we are sitting smugly in our Glass OPs cage, and all the Metering software says Green.