Here is a video interview with Mike where I asked about their strategy.

Some more details from the events today regarding HP and VMware.

Today HP detailed the release of the vCenter Plugin for MSA, P4000, EVA and XP arrays, which enables you to see the underling storage configuration and attributes from within vCenter. We noticed in the later demo this is a read only view you, it is not possible to make any changes from within the plugin. This is a free tool. It may also be used with HP Insight Control Integration for servers so you can see from with vCenter both server and storage details from a single pane. Insight Control is a licensed element though. There is no documentation up yet and we are waiting for the slide deck so we will need to wait a little bit to dig into the details of the features. But this is good news for HP customers, who I think have been waiting a while for this level of integration.

During the talk there was numerous references to the reference architectures which HP have in relation to building out the stack, "solution blocks". However we don't hear a lot from HP about these, certainly not like the hype around the vBlock Reference Architectures or the Netapp Secure Multi-Tennant Reference Architecture.

Its interesting to remember that HP's relationship goes all the way to the OEM level which gives them a different relationship, which was quoted as "access and opportunities for collaboration and co-development". In was stated that HP is VMwares largest OEM partner.

Lastly an interesting statistic, for customers who are going to make server purchases over the next 12 months, 57% of those x86 servers will have virtualisation on them.

So here is my take. I think HP have a lot more to say or engage with about virtualisation and VMware in particular, the thing is they are just so quiet about it no one really knows. The other vendors do a great job about making sure the community of partners and end-users know all about their integration and features, so thats what people talk about. HP, if you do have lots of great information, functionality and support then do yourself and your customers a big favour and get out there and start engaging with the community where they are at.

Rodos