Virtualization and SMB's

Just a quick note... Last night while I was relaxing on the couch half-paying attention to one of my wife's favourite shows, I thought about a few SMB's I had visited in the last few weeks on projects not directly related to VMware. I saw 3 or 4 customers who I thought would benefit from implementing virtualization. I talked to them about VMware and in many cases they were a little oblivious to the value it would offer them. I think more education needs to take place in the SMB market space to increase the SMB's awareness of virtualization. 

There is definitely a big untapped potential there... Case in point: three of the four customers implemented 32-bit Windows systems on server hardware with 8 GB RAM and8 CPU cores. These servers will be hugely underutilized and could potentially support upwards of 10 production loads (instead of just one :-(...). I shared my observation with them and was greeted by surprise and disbelief.

In two cases I connected remotely to my ESX lab and demoed deployment of two W2K3 servers using simple (yet mostly uknown...) time-saving techniques such as ISO images, Linux NAS file libraries, etc - to show how much easier life is with virtualization. 

In two cases customers requested a follow up visit to present on the benefits of VMware :-) ...