Then I suggest you never fly in a modern commercial airliner. From an uncle's stories flying many an Airbus for United, you have 0 ability to perform an evasive maneuver in one that is outside the bounds of 'comfort for the passengers.' Want to throw it into a dive or a hard corner? Nope, that must be an incorrect command from the yoke, we'll just go ahead and give you the predetermined limit for that action instead. Here you go, a nice steady decline, that's what you really meant.

Your garden variety Cessna isn't in that category, but those big ones you've actually been in are worse than a car for absolute control.

Once again, on paper. I suggest you go out to the formations where they *do* fracking and take a drive around. You'll find more than a few locations where good chunks of land has been completely sterilized by the truck-driver that got tired of waiting in line at the disposal station and dumped in the ditch. Either that or his company told him to drive 'over that hill there' and dump it out so they could get back to drilling.

I don't know what the hell they put into or take out of the wells, but the effects are pretty indisputable when they're staring you in the face. Maybe your additives are ok, but some others apparently aren't, or create bad things when they are mixed.

The rapid expansion of drilling up here in the 2nd largest production state in the union has meant that the enforcement agencies are ill equipped to handle the volume of complaints. They act on as many as they can to show that enforcement does happen but most just get filed away. End result: you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it.

You should really come look at what 'current' VMware software looks like and the directions they're going. Things may be further along in 5.1 but my info is good as of the latest patch to 5.0.

vCenter is offered as an appliance VM (vCSA) that is good for many small-medium shops, limited by the database connectivity and integration with other non-essential VMware tools and partner software. While it doesn't yet have the integration with all the addons, they're coming supposedly. It also brings along a web interface good for 90% of your day-to-day, which while built on (what I think is) a crappy framework, it does work. I'd venture a guess that SRM is almost ready for the vCSA environment as it's basically written in Perl. I think EMC has their integration bits working in the web client, and NetApp said they were close.

They don't exactly roll their own web service either, it's tomcat everywhere you look for the web services, all but the esxi hosts require AD integration for authentication and vC uses an ADAM database for linking servers together. I have heard a couple of grumbles about people not liking the windows servers for their VC a year ago, but honestly who has a totally non-windows environment these days?

I'd love to see the whole stack as a group of drop-in appliance VMs, but then again, this is job security right :-P Seriously though, they need a lot of work around the edges for that to happen. It's a major chore if you want to tweak stuff up like change all the certs to trusted certs with your internal enterprise CA or purchased PKI. It'd be cooler if it was easier, but it's not there yet.

This is exactly what has been going on in the enterprise storage space for a while. I only know much about two vendors, but they both have a solution like this. High end IBM storage has EasyTier, which while originally for the mix of FCAL/SAS to SATA, it works with SSD too, and in the latest revs all 3 tiers at the same time. NetApp used to have a PAM card which is now called... FlashCache? FlexCache? F-Something-Cache anyway, which is essentially an SSD drive on a PCI card.

Good to see the high end tech being applied to consumer level workloads.

I hope so, or at least that there would be a level of license to use a semi-autonomous car, there are people that this would help if so. For example, my wife cannot legally drive a car today because of a seizure disorder*. If there was a license that required a lower standard but could only be used in an auto-car, I would buy one, cost be damned.

In my town public transport is a joke, and doesn't even come within a mile of my house or her job, and that's at a school. Other days she could have to work at a sporting venue across town, or work later than a bus travels. The only reliable way to get to and from your job for her occupation is to drive yourself. Some days of the year it is too cold to bike, and honestly in her condition, there are times that biking across an intersection could be deadly... hell a fully functional person could be in trouble crossing the intersection of two "4 lane + turning lanes" roads.

I wait for this day in great anticipation. If it's only 5 years away, I will rejoice.

*This is commonly called epilepsy, but this is not shake on the floor epilepsy, just a short term (15 second) period of time where she isn't under complete control, once every couple of weeks. Unfortunately, it happened once at the wrong time before her license was revoked, and she almost died, thank the engineers at Nissan that she didn't. Thank her partial control for not ending someone else.

Speaking from VMWare land here, YMMV if you're Hyper-V (more on that later)

What we do is a soft lock on our first AD server, SQL box behind VirtualCenter* and vCenter* server so that they are always on host #1. If there's some maintenance going on, we have to disable that rule just to take down host #1. It will move if that box fails, but not before. In the case of a dark datacenter we know to turn that box on, connect to it directly and fire those three boxes up in order. Beyond that it's back to business as usual.

There's a doc from VMWare about why to keep one physical AD server, but I can't remember why.

Now if you're on Hyper-V you get to deal with one of the stupidest architectures, in my opinion. If you're using the clustered filesystem, you need AD to mount it. If your AD server is on the clustered filesystem, you can't mount the shared FS. I guess you *really* need a physical AD server in that case. Why exactly do you need something so high level as AD to get to something as low-level as a filesystem that's behind something as low-level as the hypervisor is beyond me. I could see for high level, tightly integrated services, but at this level it's just bad design. /rant

* we don't do that any more because we've had a run on bad HBAs that cause SAN issues, and there are problems managing your hosts on the san when your san is having problems. They're still virtual, just not on the cluster, on a standalone box on the side built for 'special' cases.

iSeries is already "kindof" virtual, especially if you're using VIOS.

I was at a conference in Vegas last August for a certain industry leading virtualization vendor. While in one of the keynotes, I was happily using my corporate IM and citrix on my tablet. As soon as they got to the 'future products' section of the CEO's presentation, I lost wi-fi on the tablet. As it had been flaky all day, I tried to tether to my phone. I tethered to it just fine, but then found I had no cell signal. As soon as that section of the talk was over my cell and wi-fi signal magically came back to full signal.

Seemed rather coincidental, and also rather irresponsible. Large room with several thousand people in it... and depending on how large and/or directional this 'outage' was, could have been hitting a good chunk of the highway out back of the hotel too.

Maybe by a rope and your backwoods service jockey.

Winch it onto a flatbed, even locked wheels skid. Can't get to an end of it because it's parallel parked? There are these funny little things that scoop each wheel and then you basically push it sideways to wherever you CAN lift it. If you are towing something with AWD without a flatbed handy? Lift one end like anything else and use the wheel-scoop style things to jack the other end off the ground and tow it on them.

There are ways, and a good tow service knows them.

I have to agree there. Almost every point he made made me say "but my Xoom does exactly that." Granted there are like a total of 3 ICS devices in the wild right now, and the number of old devices that will get it is a mystery, you CAN have those features he desires. It's almost as if he didn't realize that there was another option to iOS, webOS and... Windows Phone 7(and the future 8)? Seriously, how did Windows even make the list??

I thought maybe it was alphabetical

Good luck with those web forums when your millions-of-dollars-an-hour-in-lost-revenue business is down beyond it's maintenance window while you wait for those web forum responses for your obscure edge case you ran into during $someMaintenanceTask. Even better luck with that once the response comes back 'RTFM noob!'.

Real IT checks their pride at the door and pays the man for proper mission critical support when you're dealing with enterprise infrastructure.

So 38% of virtualization customers are planning on switching, but 2/3 of all virtualization customers are VMWare with the other 1/3 being somebody else. There's a lot of floating data points here.

We can come up with lots of fun theories...
Maybe VMWare numbers will drop to 30% of the market and those will all get sucked up by Hyper-V.
Maybe everyone using Hyper-V thinks it blows and are going to Xen, leaving 22% of the original survey to allocate to leaving either VMWare and Xen for one of the two they're not using.

Connect the dots any way you want, but without knowing which camps the answers come from, this is a non-story. You probably see a lot of churn in the minds of decision makers, but nothing gets done anyway once they get to planning strategies, or crunching the numbers, as another commenter here said.

Your first point is slowly becoming less of an issue. With vSphere 5 you can now run a Linux appliance for Virtual Center which will do for starters, and it doesn't even require (or support) an external database. Hopefully this will expand to be the only way to get VC, but they'll expand it to use a DB when you get big enough, and make plugins work with it. There's also supposed to be a '75%' web client, e.g. good enough for 75% of tasks and a full web client in the next major update, (5.5?) That's how VMView has been for at least the last major release too, the previous might have been web too, I can't remember.

They have a lot of products because they do a lot of things... regular old server virtualization, enterprise grade server virtualization with HA, desktop (I want a test box), desktop (VDI), disaster recovery (with a replicating san), disaster recovery (without a replicating SAN)... If you don't know what you want to do, looking at their product sheet won't help you any.

I'll give you that vRAM is evil and sales people are douches, but isn't that one a given?

You must not be reading the marketshare numbers. They are still selling quite well, by themselves... but not compared to anything. There are still tons of iPhones selling but if you add up the numbers of all manufacturers of Android phones you see they aren't in the lead any more.