by
Rene Vester
Looking back over the VMworld 2007 (which was also my first VMworld), I have to say I found this to be a great event. I've had to reevaluate my perception and adjust my expectations--but in no way for the worse. This being my first time at VMworld Ii have to admit that what I expected going in was deep technical sessions, sharp sales oriented sessions and a circus of sales people in a large hall. :-)
I was happy to be proven wrong already the first day. Meeting peers, experts, SE's, and sales professionals from the industry quickly led me to notice there was actually a lot to be gained and given at this conference. I had a bit of bad luck on my session planning I think, and next year I'm registered for the interesting SuperSessions in good time. Besides that, I found the intermediate sessions were perhaps more intermediate to the people who are new to the business than people who are new to the new products. But we all live and learn, and next time my time will be better used.
The SolutionExchange area was where I came to spend a lot of time, not only for the great gadgets. It was a great experience. The people there were open, technically well founded, and there were way fewer circus-sales-people than I had feared.
The focus of the event (I think to no surprise) was heavily influenced by the Green-Wave. Almost everything strategic was shaped from the fact that we all work to help reduce servers, reduce power consumption and thereby help the environment. And how lucky are we? Being able to do the job we love and help save the environment at the same time.. :-)
I think it was great to see VMware already showing that they are not going to let Microsoft, Citrix XenSource, or any of the other virtualization vendors just run in on them, keeping VMware ahead by keeping the distance to their competitors. First off by things like ESX 3I (brilliant idea), and also by incorporating more and more of the tools we all need to use into the main product. I am all for 3rd party add-on products, but when it comes to solutions that everyone needs, I think it is good to see VMware or any other vendor taking these things into their own product and supplying them to their customers "free of charge".
VDI (for me) seems to be where the battle is going to be the next year. There seems to be alot of VDI brokers available, most of them with different attention. Which way it's going to go is sure to be an exciting battle. I think it is going to be hard to have this many brokers being mainstream, so for the benefit of bringing VDI to the customers I hope a few good brokers will get ahead and make a product that covers the needs to the most customers.
Coming from the business I come from, I could not help myself visiting the Citrix booth and of course our new family member XenSource. I am very excited and I am going to be following the development in this area closely. I will be the first to admit that Citrix Desktop Server 1.0 is not a threat to the established brokers like Provision Networks and others. However to me it seems that Citrix actually have done something very right with their purchases of Ardence and XenSource. (I'm not sure I totally understand the XenSource purchase still, but we will see.) The dynamics that will be available in the future editions of Desktop Server make a lot of sense to me. To quickly outline my major expectations:
- Dynamic provisioning of desktops using Ardence to stream OSes.
- Less storage requirement for virtual desktops as Ardence can be used with a gold image for the OS and delta-changes for the different machines.
- ICA directly to the virtual- or blade-desktop. Giving the benefit of all the development that already go into Presentation Server.
- An already established remote access infrastructure. Seeing that Citrix already has a large footprint in the market, the customers are going to be able to utilize the same infrastructure they already have and simply bring in a new published resource with less education and change for the users.
- Staying hypervisor neutral. I guess (for now anyway) Citrix promises that it will not matter if you have chosen Microsoft, Xen, or VMware for hypervisor.
In some ways I almost hope that it is just a rumor with the Europe-based VMworld next year, as I have to admit that the best thing about this VMworld for me has been the social networking, meeting people from all over the globe, customers, integrators, analysts, vendors and resellers. I can't help but fear a bit that having the event split in two will limit the exchange of knowledge and experiences. But we will have to wait and see I guess :-)
/LamerSmurf
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