VMware is famous, at least amongst its employees and visitors to our main campus, for its turtle pond.  What I didn’t know is that we currently have nine turtles in our little pond.  None of the turtles were (ahem) developed here at VMware.  They’re all acquisitions, starting in 2007 with Rosie.  Rosie was an unofficial addition to the pond, but VMware adopted her wholeheartedly.  She soon had more turtles join her.  We’ve even updated the pond to be more turtle-friendly, adding more rocks for them for sunbathing purposes, and more plants for swimming around and hiding in.

We have, of course, named all of our turtles.  Rosie got her name from the restaurant from where we acquired her.  Other turtles have been named for their attributes, such as Houdini (who is a master of hiding himself away) and McQueen (who often escapes by scaling a wall).  Another turtle is Zilla, named after the Bugzilla that our development teams use to track bugs, issues, and feature requests for our products.

Our newest addition to the turtle family was given to us by one of our customers.  His name is from his home city of Portland.  I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll need to add another pond if we find ourselves with too many turtles.