Wrapping VMworld, Day 1
Day 1 of VMworld is a wrap. Here are some of the highlights, at least for me.
- Paul Maritz' keynote, which I wasn't enthused about, still was an important event because it was his first public appearance as the new VMware leader. What I did like were the two question and answer sessions he had -- one with attendees, and one for the press. At those, he answered questions forthrightly. When he didn't know the answer to a question, he didn't try to tap dance around it; he said he didn't know. It's OK to not know things.
- The Venetian Hotel, where the conference is being held, is big. Really, really big. I must've walked five miles today. And the general session room, where the keynotes are held, is cavernous. It looks like you could put more than 10,000 people in there, easy.
A few things I learned, that I didn't know before today:
- VMware, at least for now, won't help you with Hyper-V. "At this point in time, we don't support hypervisors other than our own. We're not religious about that," Maritz said, adding that VMware would consider it if there was enough customer demand.
- Microsoft sees App-V, its application virtualization product, to be more of an opportunity in the market than virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
- VirtualCenter (soon to be vCenter) may one day be available on Linux. "VirtualCenter needs to be platform agnostic," Maritz said during one Q & A session. He wisely gave no timeline.
- VMware is considering making ESX open source. Maritz said "discussions have been held" about the topic.
- VMware's first VMworld, four years ago, had about 1,500 attendees, according to a P.R. rep. This year it has about 15,000. You don't need to be a math genius (which I ain't) to figure out that attendance has increased ten-fold in four years. I think that's a staggering figure, and says volumes about how virtualization has captured the IT public's imagination.
More coming today.
Posted by Keith Ward on 09/17/2008 at 12:48 PM