I’ve seen your name quite a bit over the years and am familiar with your book “VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide”; it was great to meet you at the recent New England VMUG. Tell us about Vmguru.com and how did this get started?

VMGuru.com is a personal blog that I started several years ago when I was starting to push the envelope on what VMware said I was allowed to do with their software while consulting. I had done some creative things around using VMware ESX 1.5 which, at the time, were quite cutting edge. I was looking for an outlet to share my information and settled upon the name VMGuru, as the “Guru” moniker is something that had actually carried over from a previous life while in corporate IT. Sadly, I do not have near as much time as I’d like to continue to share some of the cool things I do through my personal blog.

Your current position as Lead Architect – Virtualization Business at Quest Software, sounds like the dream job – “Generate new product ideas and enhancements into growing line of virtualization products “? Can you tell us a little more about what you do, and what the drawbacks are?

My daily responsibilities are quite fluid depending on where we are in a release cycle around a new idea or set of features. I normally find myself rotating around 3 distinct tasks. One of the biggest challenges I come across is when I have 3 concurrent projects, each of which are in a different phase. This tends to keep me quite busy, to say the least.

1. First, often at the beginning of the year, I find myself traveling around and getting in front of as many customers as I possibly can simply to talk shop. I still maintain a sizable test lab so can keep very up-to-date on the latest technologies. This enables me to work closely with current and potential customers on identifying key challenges they are experiencing as their datacenters shift towards a more virtual existence.
2. Secondly, I take the various discussions that I, and the product management teams collect from customers and identify any specific trends or common themes, and also investigate upcoming market trends that relate to the identified challenges. We then make decisions around strategies to fulfill those challenges and determine the business value of filling the gaps. Fortunately, with the financial support of Quest Software, we have several options open to us, whether we decide to build the new technology or we investigate an acquisition strategy to lower our time to market.
3. Finally, once the solution is spec’d out and submitted to R&D, I help determine the best way to market the new features or products as solutions that can be offered to our customers. This often involves enabling our sales teams as well as our partner channel with proper training and sales tools. Fortunately, the unique perspective acquired when doing initial customer interviews helps us focus on the key pain points and challenges, which really help us make sure we are doing the right things for our customers.

I can’t say there are significant drawbacks to what I do outside of the fact that my family life takes a hit every once in a while. Quest is actually an awesome company when it comes to understanding a mix of personal and professional life, or at least I don’t give them the choice. The overall attitude is “If our employees extend work hours while they are at home, they should also be able to enjoy a bit of personal life while at work”. This has enabled me to bring my wife with me on my travels on multiple occasions, which helps make up for the time I spend away.

What about your earlier experiences at Invirtus & Vizioncore?

My earlier experiences at Vizioncore and Invirtus (Both Quest subsidiary companies through acquisition) gave me a taste of what it was like in a startup company. Overall, roles within the organizations at the time I was there were quite loosely defined and I found myself doing complete 180’s as a direct reaction to a new feature request or customer comment. I can honestly say it was a great experience to go through the start-up thing not once, but twice, but having a definitive role and an opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business for a while will make me a much better individual.

What market segments are you targeting ?

The segments that we target actually vary by product or solution. This is all a part of properly analyzing the market and how our solutions best fit. There are several areas in which vendor solutions are actually good enough out of the box in the SMB segments, so instead of fighting an often difficult battle, we focus our development and sales efforts on mid-market and enterprise. There are also some areas in which competing at the enterprise level is difficult due to legacy software or technology methods, and the best opportunity is where vendor tools lack in the SMB and Mid-Market space. Our ability to accurately assess the market and attack the key segmentation instead of trying to sell everything to everyone is what actually helps drive our success within Quest.

What is the EcoShell Inititaive?

When I was “growing up” in Corporate IT and continued driving virtualization as a consultant, I found that I was simply amazed when I couldn’t do things that, to me, were extremely simple with the tools that were available. To my astonishment, 6 years later, many of these annoyances still existed, and were still causing all kinds of headaches for my customers. By utilizing some internal Quest Intellectual Property with our PowerGUI product, I was able to create a virtualization-specific version of the software that I branded as Virtualization EcoShell and distributed as free software to our virtualization customers.

Alongside the freeware product, I also launched a website called the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) for short, which helps people get the most out of the software as well as share PowerShell scripting tips and tricks around virtual environments. In 11 months of existence, we’ve had over 25,000 downloads of Virtualization EcoShell and a steady increase in traffic to our community site, which to me shows the strength of our understanding of the needs of virtualization users, and our ability to provide them with powerful tooling.

Is there a person or company in the virtualization space that you admire or are keeping an eye on?

I’ll always have nothing but the utmost respect for one of my key mentors while in consulting with Ron Oglesby. He’s surprisingly patient (Even if you reboot his production servers mid-day) and was never afraid to share any knowledge. He really set me up for success. I also have tons of respect for the many virtualization authors out there. I know first-hand what it is like to take the time out of our already busy schedules, often on the personal side, to share the knowledge we’ve collected over many years to help people avoid making the same mistakes we have. There are simply too many to name.

Probably the question that you are asked the most – Quest and the Cloud; what can you tell us? When is the right time to move to the cloud?

From Quest’s standpoint, we are constantly looking at ways to better service our customers and simplify the use of our products through the adoption of the latest technologies. This can be seen by our recent announcement of our Quest OnDemand SaaS Services which are currently in Beta.

Personally, not being one that succumbs to the marketing of “The Cloud”, I’m of the opinion that organizations and consumers are, and have been there for some time. To me, “Cloud” is an overly generalized term to describe one, or a combination of, several key technologies. People who build virtual environments to provide capacity-on-demand are utilizing “Private Clouds” for infrastructure. I did this for the first time about 6 years ago I believe. Even going back prior to that, some would argue that using a service such as Akamai to increase bandwidth and availability of static web content is considered a cloud service by today’s standards. The key shift here is the introduction of off-premise clouds, and even hybrid clouds which enable workloads to seamlessly transition between the private and public clouds

New technologies such as Microsoft Azure, and even slightly older technologies like Google APIs provide a platform to quickly publish new applications using a defined development framework. We also see companies who were traditionally considered “Software as a Service” or SaaS vendors (also considered cloud technologies BTW) enabling platforms for writing applications, such as Facebook for social applications or Salesforce for business and CRM applications.

When it comes to adoption of these technologies it comes down to the simple question of “Is there an application or service being provided that can benefit my business without violating the IT Governance policies in place that must be adhered to at a price point that makes sense?” We have seen the SMB and Mid-Market segments adopting these technologies steadily now. As trust grows and security and compliance concerns are accommodated, we will see enterprise interest in these newer technologies increase.

What things are holding desktop virtualization back from wider adoption? What issue is top-most in your mind and why?

There are several inhibitors standing in the way of what I’d consider “Wide-scale” adoption of VDI. First is simply concern over end user experience. The target recipients of VDI instances are more often than not non-technical users who are prone to get frustrated with technology. Every time there is a change to the way in which they need to access their applications, or they perceive the “Network to be slow”, they get vocal…VERY vocal. If running a fat client application within a remote desktop instance appears to be slower or less responsive to the end user, it is difficult to have success in VDI implementation. That is why there is such a large investment from VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix to tackle this very issue. As more applications move towards using web 2.0 technologies and become online applications, the question of “Why use VDI at all” can also arise, as data is not persistent on the client and all processing is performed on the back-end servers.

In addition, many organizations expect to see cost-savings out of the box as the primary benefit of VDI. In 2009, where IT Spending was limited, this meant that projects that didn’t have quick ROI or were costly to get off the ground simply didn’t happen. When looking at JUST virtual desktops, the ROI doesn’t quite add up, mostly due to software licensing costs and increased storage demand. Organizations need to really stop and understand the processes around how VDI can change user management as well as the provisioning of operating environments and application workloads to see how desktop virtualization as a whole solution fundamentally changes how their users can work, and the cost savings associated with the larger picture.

How would you compare your firm with BMC, or CA?

When you historically look at any of the “Big 4” management companies (BMC, CA, HP, IBM) you get offered solutions that go as wide as anything you can conceive of sticking in your datacenter. What is traditionally lacking is adequate depth into many of the key technology areas. Where Quest traditionally excels is in identifying the top technologies seen in the infrastructure in the Application, Database, Windows and Virtualization management spaces and instead of going 7 miles wide and 2 inches deep, we focus on the depth of giving the internal subject matter experts the level of detail they truly need to most effectively manage their infrastructure. We aren’t focusing on owning all management within the datacenter, which I think is actually one of our strongest traits.

For the technologist reading this or the “virtualization champion” who appreciates “the deep dive”, can you tell this person something that he would really appreciate about a current product that you are involved with?

I’d actually recommend aspects of two different products. For those that are concerned with more than just pulling out VMware metrics and displaying them in a different format, which too many products do today, definitely take a look at the depth of what vFoglight can do. The ability to customize any dashboard, script business rules based on trends, and even chain portions of physical and virtual applications together to report on key SLAs make vFoglight a truly amazing and capable application.

For the guys responsible for administering a rapidly expanding virtual environment, definitely spend the time to check out what Virtualization EcoShell can do. While we provide 250 or so scripts out of the box, we actually mask the fact that PowerShell is really on the back-end of the application. For those wanting to learn this whole “PowerShell Thing”, we don’t hide anything about this application. All of our scripts can be viewed or modified, and the entire UI and set of actions is fully customizable using PowerShell. I have already seen some users and community members do some AMAZING stuff with EcoShell. The best part is that it is free of charge, so there is minimal risk in getting started, and it provides immediate benefit “out of the box”.

Where does Scott Herold go from here?

Right now I wouldn’t trade my job for anything (well, except the chance to retire early to a Tuscan Villa). I have the ability to create and generate new product ideas and continue to blaze new trails not just in virtualization, but as a technologist, and I have the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the software business. I’m learning everything I can as fast as I can, and we’ll see where that takes me when the next big thing comes around.

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Scott M. Herold, Lead Architect – Virtualization Business, Quest Software

Scott Herold leads product design and architecture for Quest Software. With more than a decade of industry experience in operating system, network, security and storage design, Scott has been a pioneer in architecting advanced virtualization solutions. Scott is also the co-author of two best-selling books, VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide. Focused on helping organizations achieve the benefits of virtualization while minimizing the challenges, Scott is a frequent presenter at industry events and contributes to whitepapers and articles focused on virtualization best practices.

Check out Scott’s blog VMGuru.com