It is announcement day here at HP [http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/091104xa.html], so there are a large number of new and updated products, services, and visions to take a look at. Many people in the Business Critical Systems group, and actually across Enterprise Servers and Networking, have been working on the new Converged Infrastructure Architecture [http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/us/en/consolidated/converged-infrastructure-overview.html].

Converged Infrastructure, in a nut shell, is about switching the IT budget from mostly maintenance and operations to mostly innovation and upgrades. Normally, this means moving to a shared service model, and naturally, with the announcement, there are products and services to help you get there. BCS, and all the OSes that we support, are part of the Converged Infrastructure strategy.

However, there was one little tidbit that I knew was coming that particularly hit home. Many years ago, on a Friday afternoon, I was speaking with my manager about her idea of bundling a bunch of our server virtualization products together, at least from a naming perspective. From that and a few other discussions, the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) was born. Virtualization became popular in the industry shortly thereafter, and I was busy for many years speaking with the sales force and many customers around the world about the VSE.

The idea around the VSE became popular enough, and the products effective enough, that we ported some of the management products to the x86 side, where they were named Insight Dynamics - VSE. While the product suites were somewhat different (ex. utilized VMware and MS Hyper-V on HP ProLiant servers and the HP Partitioning Continuum on HP Integrity servers), the reality is that we had two similar names for two similar suites of products on two separate product lines, and I can tell many firsthand stories about how much confusion it caused! I would be asked to do an ID-VSE presentation, and when I was prepared to speak about managing VMware, someone would mention that they only HP-UX servers, and vice versa.

So, with today's announcement, the HP Virtual Server Environment on HP Integrity servers is going away, and being replaced with HP Insight Dynamics - VSE for Integrity servers [http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/solutions/insightdynamics/vse-overview.html]. While it is with a feeling on melancholy that I say goodbye to that Friday afternoon idea that grew bigger than any of us imagined, it is with great relief that I welcome the simplicity of one name - Insight Dynamics - VSE - onto the HP Integrity server family. The fact that ID-VSE has grown beyond what the VSE started as, is more capable, and is a key part of HP's Converged Infrastructure, makes this an exciting day for the many people who have worked on and often still are working on server virtualization and management technologies.

Jacob