I am finally back home from VMworld Europe in Cannes, France.  This trip was an amazing adventure for me and I will always treasure the memories of spending time with my fellow virtualization fanatics.  Before VMworld began, Citrix had made their big announcement about teaming up with Microsoft to start giving the hypervisor away free with the ability to run an unlimited amount of virtual machines.  There was a lot of talk about this at the show and the general consensus from the people that I talked to was that it may be free but the support would not be.  Companies do not make any money and stay in business if all they have is free products and Citrix is no different.  They want people to buy the paid product once they kick the tires on Zen server.  I do not really see the big deal about this since both Microsoft and VMware are giving the hypervisor away for free already.  The bigger deal was that the Citrix and Microsoft virtual machines and management software will play nice with each other.  That will be something to watch in the future, I just do not think it matters currently especially with what VMware has coming down the pipe.  I think VMware will set the bar even higher and I guess we will see how long it takes the other venders to catch up. 

One of coolest demos that I saw was for the Mobile Virtualization Platform or MVP.  I had mentioned in another post that I carry two cell phones so I can keep my personal life separate from my professional world. Being able to run two phones on one device…Priceless!!!   I keep thinking about some of the possibilities with this.  Companies can build custom virtual machines for the employees to use that will give great control of the devices to the administrators.  What if you added the capabilities of VMware Ace where you could have a mobile device expire in a certain amount of days?   This really opens unlimited possibilities but, alas, I digress.

vSphere was the buzz word for the event but a lot of us had heard this all before and I was  just glad VMware has decided on a new name for the virtual infrastructure but I am still an old school boy who would just like to call it ESX4.  It is kind of a cool name and we here at Tripwire have started to follow suit with our vWire Community that we just launched.

The Cloud is still a very hot topic but in my opinion still very early in the development but VMware is still very committed to this area. I think in the next few years we will start to see some really cool things appear.  Time will tell.

From a personal level I cannot think of a better time to be involved in the virtualization technology space and continue to be very excited about the future direction that things are going and the new technologies that have yet to be developed.  Virtualization is not a project but yet a journey, and what a journey it is.

Citrix, microsoft, virtualization, vmware, VMworld

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