VMworld 2010 – Let the fun and games commence
I currently find myself sitting rather bored on the flight across to San Francisco for VMworld. Just to clarify, it’s certainly not the thought of VMworld that’s boring me, far from it in fact!Instead it’s the rather poor choice of in flight movies that’s got me thinking about what this VMworld is going to bring us and what am I going to take away from it at the end of the week.
It’s now been 3 years since my last VMworld visit and in that time things have moved on significantly in the industry. Back in 2007 VMware really had no competitors, Hyper-V hadn’t even been released yet. The phrase Cloud computing wasn’t being mentioned at every opportunity and the likes of VMware Fault Tolerance and Storage vMotion were still confined to the stage as keynote demo technologies. It’s mind boggling to think how much has changed in those 3 short years, what a very different landscape it now is!
So I’m wondering what can we expect from VMworld 2010? Well there has been plenty of speculation that VMware will announce View 4.5, I’m now taking that one as a given as it has been so widely commented on already. I’m also expecting lots on private and public cloud infrastructures and the transformation steps required to take it from concept to the real deal. All the big IT companies in the world are working towards this model, the concept is out there and now very much on the loose. I’m hearing more chatter about it from people who don’t even work in IT! On the Cloud front I am expecting to hear lots about how to overcome the fears, the risks involved, the security concerns and all those other things that have the sceptics worried and concerned. Oh and you just know that VMware will have a few little extra special announcements hidden up their sleeve, it wouldn’t be a VMworld without them.
From my own perspective I have a few angles to cover this year. My employer is the one funding my attendance and therefore I have a number of specific topics I need to cover off as part of my day job. Deploying Exchange 2010 in a vSphere environment for instance is one key area and another is looking at the transition from ESX to ESXi in advance of the service console retirement. On top of this I will be looking at the longer term strategic view, where is the industry going and are we pulling in the same direction or do we need to change tact?
As an aside, I have also been asked to present to the Scotland VMware User Group upon my return to the UK. The theme for the VMUG being “VMworld looking back, looking forward” which is meant to cover VMworld US and my experience of it, while also encouraging people to attend the VMworld Europe event in Copenhagen. Hopefully there will be plenty of good content for me to report back on but enough announcements held over to make VMworld Europe in Copenhagen appealing.
It’s shaping up to be a great week, I’m looking forward to getting stuck in tomorrow first thing. I Just hope the jet lag doesn’t hit me to hard as I have a feeling the various vendor parties and ad-hoc beers just might!
