It’s been a little over a week since OOW, and finally getting back into the swing of things. I should say up front that while I spoke at Oracle Open World, this was not a general session like VMworld, but instead I spoke from the VMware booth at Oracle Open World. Not only was it great hanging out with some really cool folks from the marketing teams from VMware (which I never get to do) I also had the chance to speak directly with Oracle and VMware partners and customers about the cool things that me and my team at VMware have been working on over the past 18 months. It was a throwback to my consulting days at Oracle, which were great, but with the liberty to share more about doing things with VMware than the ordinary Oracle Consultant does.
My short presentation was focused on helping Oracle IdM customers get a handle on the top pain points that a company might encounter from an operations perspective, and I offered some insights on the challenges one will face and a VMware specific solution to the problem. In essence, if you can build your Oracle IdM foundation on VMware vSphere starting Day 1, it will lend itself to dramatic time/cost savings and speed with regards to building out new environments and horizontally scaling those environments as your business and IT infrastructure evolves.
Also, as an EMC company, VMware employees enjoy a great partnership and access to world-class tools and support for managing the Oracle database, which is the very foundation for Oracle IdM. As such, another of the practices we use at VMware, which I also discussed in the talk at OOW, is not as much VMware focused as it is on the EMC technology, but it has to be included to paint a complete picture for improving efficiency of your operations environment. Of course, some of you were quick to point out that EMC’s SRDF isn’t the only company to provide block level copy of Oracle data, we happen to think it’s a really good one worty of your consideration. For more about this process, you can view my VMworld presentation on managing Oracle data with SRDF, or you can get more from your local DBA or straight from EMC, such as EMC’s own Oracle Storage Guy.
For those of you who didn’t attend either talk or catch the link on my Twitter post, here is my OOW presentation. Being only given 30 minutes I could not go into too much technical detail here, so please forgive me. You can, however, talk with your in-house IdM Architect/Admin or IdM consultant about how you can build your Oracle IdM environment similar to the way I talk about in my presentation.
In addition to presenting at the VMworld booth I also got a chance to talk to a director at Oracle about collaborating on some white papers for publication on OTN on best practices and configuration specs for building and running Oracle IdM on VMware vSphere. There is nothing like this that I am aware of, and if there is (please share your stories with me) then this will just make it an official collaboration between VMware and Oracle. We are just getting started, and I would expect this to be available to the public sometime in Q1 of 2011. You can follow my blog’s RSS feed or my Twitter as that is where I will make the announcement when these papers are available. Another way is to check www.vmware.com/oracle for the latest updates on this collaboration.
On a final note, I received some some sad news last week on the heels of Oracle Open World that Oracle will be losing Rohit Gupta to run another company in the Bay Area. Rohit has been around the Oracle IdM space as long I can remember Oracle being in this business (circa 2005) in field enablement and product management. I got a chance to hear Rohit speak in person at Burton Catalyst this year, as the last speaker to an audience of very thirsty IT guys and a bunch of long winded corporate sponsors, he hit the grand slam with a speed 2 minutes under his allotted time with grace, humor and a technical acumen that’s refreshing coming from a VP. Rohit, you will be missed by many and I’m confident you will succeed famously at BMC as you did at Oracle. And if not, I’m sure there could be an open door for you at VMware. 
Have a great week, everybody and feel free to comment here on my blog and get some conversations going about how you’ve put any of these ideas to use in your environment.
