I’ve spent the last couple of weeks travelling through Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina) and the one commonality between my experiences in each of these three countries is that I don’t speak the local language in any of them. In high school, I studied French, not Spanish, and Portuguese wasn’t even taught. So, at restaurants I can never read the menu and I usually attempt, in very broken Spanish, to ask the waiter for a recommendation (“Que es bueno?”). Then he says something and I nod enthusiastically and smile.
The process reminds me a bit of what backup administrators face when they are trying to figure out how to back up their VMware environments. There are many ways to do it and often they don't know which is best. The easy and obvious way is to run a backup client from inside each virtual machine. In some cases that works fine, but in other cases, all the backups running simultaneously overloads the physical server (the challenges of sharing I/O and...