I’m a big believer in “practice what you preach” and I try to do my best to live by this motto.  Now, let me be the first to say that I also believe that by being human, almost by definition, makes me a hypocrite and I am certainly not saying that I’ve never failed at this.  All I’m saying is that I try my best.

All day long, as a VMware Systems Engineer, I spend my time evangelizing the wonderful things that virtualization and VMware software can do for companies.  I can do this because I’ve been working with VMware software almost since VMware began.  And I’ve helped implement virtual infrastructures for many different clients, long before actually being employed at VMware.  I even helped build VDI’s (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures) before VMware had a VDI product offering.

VDI is really starting to take off this year and most of my conversations these days are about giving corporate users a virtual desktop.  And while I’ve helped build VDI solutions before, am I actually using a virtual desktop myself?  No!  Well technically I do, given that I run my corporate destkop in VMware Workstation on top of Ubuntu Linux.  But this is not the same solution I’m preaching to my customers.  A virtual desktop running locally is a very different beast than running a virtual desktop remotely on VI3 via a desktop broker.  Normally, I would be able to rationalize this and say “I’m not a corporation that has the virtual infrastructure to run a virtual destktop.”  But this is no longer true.  I have a dedicated Internet connection and at least three good servers always running in my lab.

So, I’m about to start practicing what I preach and “eating my own dog food.”  I’m going to begin a series of blog posts that document my conversion to a dedicated virtual desktop.  I hope that this can also serve as inspiration, and possibly even a guide to a proof of concept, for those who are interested in virtual desktops.  I’m sure this blog series evolve as I progress, but I envision the upcoming posts will look something like this …

1. Planning the environment
2. Setting up the network and dedicated remote access
3. Getting the virtual infrastructure set up correctly
4. Setting up VMware View (the broker)
5. Preparing the desktops
6. ThinApp’ing my applications
7. Troubleshooting, tweaking and optimizing

Again, as I progress, this could all change.  But for now, this is the blog series I’ll begin in the next day or two and hope to complete over the next few weeks.  I hope you join me.  If you plan to follow along and, better yet, get involved, please sign up for a Disqus account.  It’s the system I use for commenting and discussions.

By the way, do you know who originally coined the term “eating our own dog food?”  VMware’s CEO, Paul Maritz.  But he didn’t coin the term while on duty at VMware.  From Wikipedia …

In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood” challenging him to increase internal usage of the product; from there, the usage of the term spread through Microsoft, as chronicled in the book Inside Out: Microsoft—In Our Own Words (ISBN 0446527394)

The irony is so thick, you can cut it with a knife!!