It’s budget season where I work. We operate on a chargeback model, so this means that I get to guesstimate what I’m going to need to spend next year, look into my crystal ball to see what I’m going to bring in, and then figure out if I can keep my chargeback rates the same or not. Infrastructure folks like me are at the bottom of the budgetary food chain, so changes to my rates have serious implications for people higher up. It’s been pretty nice to be able to drop the chargeback rates of virtual machines year after year, as hardware gets faster but the workloads remain fairly constant. Dropping your prices is definitely easier than raising them.
Something new in my budget this year is explicit funding for several people to go to VMworld. Over the last few years I’ve been able to attend as part of my organization’s training budget. With budgets shrinking I want to ensure that some folks get to go in 2009, so I’m building it into my service fees.
If you aren’t in charge of your budget you should find the person who is and lobby them now to put funding in for VMworld 2009. There are lots of good reasons they should send you.
- It’s a training opportunity, with hands-on labs where you get to use the software, learning best practices and good ways of solving problems.
- It’s an opportunity to talk to other people having the same problems and challenges as you, finding out what works and what doesn’t work before you spend a lot of time on it.
- It’s an opportunity to talk to VMware staff who can answer your questions directly, like by asking questions in sessions.
- It’s a way to see new technology, so you can be ahead of upgrade curves and be able to decide whether a particular technology, like SRM or VDI, is useful to you without starting a big in-house evaluation.
- VMworld is a great place to see all the other hardware and software vendors and the new technologies they are rolling out.
- It’s a way to get access to all the VMworld content, so you can look it up when you get home and implement all the good ideas that are presented in the various sessions, including the ones you missed because there were too many good sessions scheduled at the same time. 🙂
So get going! I don’t want to hear next fall that you can’t attend. If you want to go plant the seed now in your management’s heads.
I’d love to go but we are so far from Europe. We have just on ESX server foundation edition. But next year we are planning to buy 2 new servers and virtualize the maximum we can.
Yes but you are right that it is a great opportunity to meet the VMware team.
Cheers
Vladan