VMworld Preview, Plus "Bye, Bye, Bye" To vRam Entitlements

If you are not yet in the VMworld 2012 spirit, boy do I have news for you to help get you warmed up. Do you hate vRam? Well, if you do, you'll be happy to hear that VMware is rumored to be killing that program. That announcement is supposed to happen at VMworld, but CRN's Kevin McLaughlin is playing spoiler and broke it as a news piece a few days ago. I can't personally confirm or deny that what Kevin wrote is true, but I do know that if VMware makes such an announcement, it will still be greeted with cheering. I fully expect tears of joy and applause to follow, with an emotional moment similar to what follows when a tyrant falls.

All joking aside, VMware is probably the only company I know that has the guts to change its licensing program inside of a one-year cycle without worrying about the competitive backlash that such a move could generate. Again, and again, bravo, VMware, for being the customer's champion and I wish all other companies with challenging licensing programs would follow suit, especially my orange-drinking friends down in Ft. Lauderdale.

Let's take a look at what else will be hot at VMworld this year. I am sure everyone will be looking forward to vSphere.next and I can tell you this: It is pretty sweet. Nuff said.

From an end-user computing perspective, I am sure the highlight will be around Mirage, better known as Wanova, which is the acquisition that VMware made not to too long ago. Speaking of acquisitions, if you have been following the news you will notice that VMware has been on an insane shopping spree for the last few months:

Nicira -- I'm looking forward to see what a $1.25-billion-dollar Nicira acquisition does to reshape VMware's vision and strategy for the cloud, and am looking forward to some kind of reaction from Cisco on this (please, something other than "we are buddies and everything is okay...")

VMware vCloud Director and DynamicOps -- the latter being also a recent acquisition, how will it be positioned, how it will converge (or not) with vCloud Director and the Auto-Deploy feature of vSphere 5, etc.

VMware's Log Insight acquisition -- How about more information, please!

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I expect the show to be packed with information and some killer labs, and me and my colleagues in attendance will follow up with some awesome reporting and blogging, so make sure you are following us here and on Twitter.

Finally, for those of you who cannot make the show, you can watch the keynotes live online by registering here.

As always, if you have any suggestions on what you would like to see covered, drop me a note in the comments section.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/22/2012 at 12:49 PM