Partner Day at VMworld 2006
Published on 7 Nov 2006 · Filed in Liveblog · 546 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)Karthik Rau (the Vice President of Product Management) focused on the technology factors that combined to drive virtualization to today’s levels. These were factors such as the increasing adoption of x86-based servers, the continuing progression of Moore’s Law, and the emergence of Linux as a viable alternative to Windows. He also discussed emerging trends that will continue to drive the adoption of virtualization, such as multi-core processors. It’s quite true that as the hardware scales up to quad-core and 8-core CPUs, no single workload (or application) will generally be able to take full advantage of all that computing power. That’s a natural fit for virtualization.
The breakout sessions were also pretty good; I attended a session on the new VMware Lab Manager, formerly Akimbi Slingshot. That’s a pretty handy application, especially in its target market of developers who need groups of systems for testing and validation. It seems like VMware Lab Manager is also going to need a lot of storage, which is a good thing for storage vendors and resellers with storage expertise.
The VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) session was fairly good, too, but VDI still has quite a few hurdles to overcome before it will see broad adoption (in my opinion). Things like client-attached printers and local peripherals are two key factors, and a few other attendees that I spoke with shared the same opinion. That’s not to say that VDI is not a great idea; it is a great idea. It’s just not suited for all companies in all situations.
I wrapped the day up with a BC/DR (business continuity/disaster recovery) breakout session which, unfortunately, was more sales-focused than technology-focused. (That was true to a certain extent for all the sessions.) Nevertheless, some good information was shared.
The day wasn’t all good, though—the VMworld wireless network at the convention center here in LA was down all day long, and it was impossible to find an Internet connection anywhere. To make matters worse, the wireless Internet connection that was supposedly being provided by my hotel turned out to be nonexistent, and we were informed we’d have to pay a fee for a wired connection instead.
Things ended well, though, as I joined a group of fellow bloggers and community forum participants at Cicada, a downtown restaurant just right around the corner from my hotel. To be honest, I was honored to be invited and be in the midst of such names as Mike Laverick (of RTFM Education), Alessandro Perilli (of virtualization.info), Scott Herold (of vmguru.com and now with Vizioncore), and Richard Garsthagen (of run-virtual.com). In my eyes, these are some big names in the VMware/virtualization “blogosphere” (I don’t really like that word), and my little blog doesn’t really compare. Still, it was great to be there. There were a number of other people there as well that I hadn’t heard of before. I also had the opportunity to meet Jim Jones (from vmwarez.com) and his wife; they are some great people. All in all, it was a great get-together and I really appreciate having the opportunity to be there.
I’m really looking forward to the remainder of the conference, where the sessions are going to be more technically-minded and I’ll get the opportunity to really delve into the products. Stay tuned for more details.