The VMguy

So the first day of keynotes at Partner Exchange is finishing up now.  Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer at VMware, Tod Nielson Chief Operating Officer at VMware and Boyd Davis, General Manager Server Platforms Group Marketing at Intel all spoke.  Some very good information to kick off the event.  Rick really got everything going, Tod delivered the vSphere story and the overall direction of VMware and Boyd really talked details on the new Xeon 5500′s and all of the virtualization advantages in them.  Here’s a quick pic of Tod (on left) and Boyd on stage(sorry, I’ll try to sit closer tomorrow):

For my customers that read my blog, please consider this article optional. For my Partners that read it, listen up.  I just completed the VTSP Certification. The VTSP is VMware Technical Sales Professional .  It’s a certification for VMware Partner SE’s to confirm that they understand the technical aspects of VMware software and how it applies to customer needs.  There are a set of Core exams on Virtual Infrastructure and then you can choose electives in one of 3 catagories (Advanced Virtual Infrastructure, Enterprise Desktops, or Management and Automation).  For VMware SE’s we have to take all of them.  It’s a total of 16 possible exams ranging from 15-30 questions each.

For those Partner SE’s selling VMware it gives you some very good sessions on setting up and installing each product, who the intended user is of each product and their use cases, as well as administration on each product.  I highly recommend this training for our Partners.  Just don”t do like I did and take all 16 tests in a 36 hour period.  I now need a stiff drink and some aspirin.