Bienvenue VMworld Europe 2008

I’m in Cannes, France all this week attending VMworld Europe 2008. This is VMware’s premier event in Europe and although the number of attendees is less than it is in the US, the show is buzzing with virtualization speak from the 4500 attendees and nearly 100 exhibitors.

Diane Green just finished her keynote that included a general overview of server virtualization and how it has grown from consolidating physical server resources to a data center that is fully automated with virtualization being the key infrastructure enabler.

IBM, HP and Dell all took their turns up on the big stage explaining to the audience why their solutions are better than the others. IBM demonstrated the capability of running 16,000 Microsoft Exchange users on a single physical server using VMware. HP demoed how VMware Virtual Center and HP Insight Manager will work together to provide insight into hardware failure and communicate to Virtual Center to start moving virtual machines around until the hardware failure has been remedied. Dell announced that all of its VMware compatible servers will ship with VMware software. Each of them showboated about its long term relationship with VMware, and Dell claimed to sell more licensed copies of VMware than the others.

If you are wondering which steps VMware is going to take next it is clearly around data center automation, which is interesting considering Novell’s announcement to acquire PlateSpin. VMware is also clearly focused on the desktop. Diane ran a few desktop demos that showed the versatility of desktop virtualization by efficiently applying a single patch to multiple virtual desktop images, showing the audience how technology is coming to check out a virtual desktop image and take it on the road with you and finally she demoed the quick application access and installation leveraging technology from its recent Thinstall acquisition. All of which is a great set up for my break out session on Thursday, Desktop Virtualization: The Next Big Thing?.....Thank you Diane!