The meeting  with Groupe Agrica was another highlight of the day . This Cisco VMware EMC French customer is an insurance conglomerate, which  manages retirement, injury, health care and saving plans for employees in the agricultural sector.  Groupe Agrica is also well known, as it was one of the fist company to roll out a VDI project with VMware View. Today, Groupe Agrica manage 200 Virtual Servers running on 20 ESX hosts, and 550 Virtual Desktops running on 8 ESX hosts. Almost 99% of servers are virtualized yet. Groupe Agrica is also one of the first user of Nexus 1000V, as well as an early adopter of unified fabric and  FCoE on Nexus 5000.
The presentation of Julien Mousqueton , Groupe Agrica’s Data Center Architect, generated a ton of interest and a lot of questions from an audience eager to collect  customer details on the challenges , best practices and benefits of these migrations.The deployment of a suite of Cisco Nexus virtual switches, combined with VMware vSphere management tools, facilitated cooperation between server and networking teams and resolved challenges arising from this infrastructure consolidation project . According to Julien, “The combination of these solutions allows our IT teams to discover new benefits to virtualized infrastructure because we can now administer a network in avirtual environment the same way as we have done in the physical world, and it is simplified and intuitive.”
I will come back very soon with video interviews of Julien Mousqueton. Stay tuned.