Alan’s is one of my personal favorites because of the way he stated it originally on Twitter.

What I find interesting about this product is the wide range of need for this product.  There are some people who are fairly advanced in their environments and have a pretty good handle on things.  They are finding things they were not aware of before.

Then there are people who have possibly never gotten VMotion to work.  You may be reading this thinking– that can’t be right – but we have talked to people that virtualization is part of their job and they have had issues for the past year getting VMotion to work.  OpsCheck can help these people quickly identify what issues that are preventing VMotion and giving them the troubleshooting guidance to correct those things.  One of the main technologies that sets VMWare apart from the rest currently is VMotiion.  OpsCheck is a tool that should be in every VI Professionals toolbox because you should not be spending time in training or dollars on consulting for what should be a foundational piece of your VMWare deployment.  Use those dollars wisely on things that should be being built upon this foundation.

Our goal at Tripwire in these free tools is to provide value where it matters.  ConfigCheck and OpsCheck are the first two tools we have released because we have heard a need for these things and we have the skills to produce them quickly.

For some time now here at Tripwire there has been a team working on what has been known internally as Project Spitfire.  You have seen part of this team here at the Virtual Black Hole but today is a significant coming out party for the entire team.  What we announced today is the first phase of a new initiative here at Tripwire focused on virtualization management known as vWire. This is a separate line of business from Tripwire Enterprise and is entirely focused on solutions to make the VI professional’s life easier.

As part of this, today we announced that OpsCheck is now available at www.vWire.com.  OpsCheck is a free tool that helps you ensure your VMotion is operational.  We also today announced a new community for VI professionals.  There are already lots of great discussions about OpsCheck and virtual infrastructure management within the vWire community.

Last June we released ConfigCheck to allow you to test your VI configurations agains the VMWare hardening guidelines.  This great free tool is also available at vwire.com.  ConfigCheck was recently rated one of the top 10 free VMWare tools over on VM/ETC.

There is lots more to come but this is a big day for us.  We hope you enjoy the free tools, website and community as they have been designed in an effort to help with problems that we have been hearing from VI Professionals.

We have talked to lots of different VI professionals over the past year. One thing is clear - most of the people you hear writing in blogs and on stage at VMWorld are those people that are fairly mature in their virtualization knowledge and their environments reflect that. But it seems like the masses are the people that have some virtualization but are not running a majority in production because they have their hands full with what they have. This survey seems to reflect the true masses.  So where are you in your environment and what do you need? Do you agree with the survey?

I spent last week in San Antonio, Texas at the Tripwire World Wide Sales Kick Off meeting. With the meeting being in San Antonio you know that the theme had to be the Alamo and even though we were staying a block away from it I never got out to see it. It was a great week to interact with our sales force from around the world. Our fearless leader Bob Dunne - SVP of WW Sales always puts on a great show for the troops and this year was no exception. I’m not sure how he accomplished this but he rode into the hotel’s conference room on Oreo - the largest long horned steer I have ever seen. It was an interesting site.

The great thing about the week is that everyone is excited about 2009. Tripwire had a great year in 2008 and ended Q4 with our best quarter ever. There is a sense of a reality check going into 2009 but the team has great faith in what we are bring to market. I had the chance to present to them on Thursday morning and I have never had such great feedback. They are really excited about the things to come from us in Virtualization as well as our Security and Compliance business in 2009. Looking into the eye of a recession can be a little daunting but if people think they have seen great things from Tripwire in the past - you haven’t seen anything yet.  2009 is going to be a great year.

Karen is running our marketing so her passion is about how we engage the customer.  Ted is our product manager so he wants to talk about how to develop the products users want.  Steve just loves virtualization and helping people.  As many of your know this is Steve’s passion and he is good at it.  It was very exciting to bring him on board and many of your are enjoying what he has to say.  My passion is the business - how we can engage the users and create amazing products.  Myself - I love the business of bringing all of this to you and I love the social media tools we are using.  I look at the industry as a whole and look at what is happening in this quickly evolving landscape.

We all wanted to write a blog because we believe in having a conversation with people - not just blasting out a message.  That is why we started this blog.  This is why we are all on Twitter.  (@mkh001, @sbeaver, @VirtualKaren, @TedGary.  This is why there is much more to come from us.  We want to talk.  We want to find out what people want to talk about and how we can work with them.

In May of last year we produced a great tool - ConfigCheck.  We produced this in conjunction with VMware to address issues that they saw in the market.  The most amazing thing was that people loved it because it added true value for a basic function.  We want to do more of that.  We are working to understand the issues of Virtualization Professionals so that we can add value.  So find us and let us know

Today is Christmas, which means more than likely you have the day off with the rest of your family.  Put down the computer and go hang out with them.  We will be here with great stuff again tomorrow!  Happy Holidays from all of us at The Virtual Black Hole.

Many of you reading this are probably virtualization professionals and probably have some idea of what your budget looks like for 2009 at this point.  So the question I have is what does 2009 look like for you?  Are you planning on spending the same, more or less than 2008?  The other question is for that budget what are your priorities?  Do you have the infrastructure purchased and now you need management?  Are you worried about security and compliance if more of it is going into production?  Or are you looking to things like storage?
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Last week was the Gartner put on the 27th annual Gartner Data Center Conference.  Thomas Bittman had lots of interesting projections in his keynote - see the article in CIO.  One of more basic but interesting ones to me was the growth of the server virtualization market at an annual compounded growth rate of 30% per year from 1.8 billion in 2008 to 6.8 billion in 2013. 

Today there is lots of talk about virtualization management and how the tools are lacking.  This is at 1.8 billion.  Obviously more and more tools will come to market but in order for this level of growth to come to realization there is going to need to be more than the ability to create VM’s - managing them becomes all the more critical.