Harry Potter in the VMware era

Earlier this week the following message popped up in my twitter: ‘@Microsoft: Amazon says Windows 7 is the biggest pre-order product of all times, even over Harry Potter in the UK’.

Comparing Harry Potter to Microsoft? Hmm, this got us thinking, what if we compare Harry Potter to VMware, what if Harry Potter lived in the VMware era.

It’s 1995, Paul Maritz (Harry Potter) lives with Microsoft (his aunt and uncle) in a small village. Paul (Harry) spends most of his time locked up in a closet under the stairs. One day Paul (Harry) starts receiving daily messages from the APIs (owls) asking him to come to Palo Alto (Hogwarts) because Mendel Rosenblum (Dumbledore) and Diane Green (McGonagall) have left.

Paul accepts the invitation and travels to Palo Alto (Hogwarts). When he arrives he is taken to the  Appliance store (magic store) where he receives his VIclient (magic wand) with which he can control all the VMware hypervisors (magic). During the first evening diner Paul Maritz (Harry) is placed at VMware (the house of Gryffindor) which battles with Oracle (the house of Slytherin),  and Citrix (the house of Hufflepuf) for domination.

Here Paul (Harry) also meets his friends, Maurizio Carli (Ron Weasly) and Stephen Herrod (Hermine Grainger).

Paul (Harry) starts finding his way around Palo Alto (Hogwarts) and gets familiar with VMotion (the Nimbus broom), Long distance VMotion (the Nimbus 2000), Distributed Resource Scheduling (the moving staircases) and High Availability (Phoenix). He quickly finds out that all is controlled by vCenter Server (Ministry of Magic) and that VMware Server and Workstation (muggles) are not accepted as Enterprise hypervisors. Soon he is experienced enough to receive his VMware whitepapers (spell- and potion books).

After that Paul (Harry) becomes member of the VMware (Gryffindor) management (quidditch) team where they battle for a large market share (golden snitch).

In 2007 the battle intensifies and Paul has to defend himself from FUD of competitors (Dementors) and attacks from Steve Balmer (Voldemort). Paul (Harry) can dodge most outside attacks by using vShield zones and VMSafe (Cloak of invisibility)

After winning the first battle with Steve Balmer (Voldemort) on the server hypervisor, Steve (Voldemort) returns with release 2 of Hyper-V (black magic) and Paul (Harry) also wins this battle. But Steve Balmer (Voldemort) is a persistent *peeeep* and tries a different approach. The battle shifts to VDI (goblet of fire) where Steve Balmer (Voldemort) releases MED-V but Paul (Harry) is not impressed.

We will just have to wait and see how the story develops.