I attended VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas believing that the event would be scaled back compared to the 2007 effort in San Francisco. With VMWare’s stock price down, the general economy suffering and new competitive threats on the horizon there is no way they could make this event bigger and better. I was wrong.

The Venetian in Vegas was a perfect place to hold this year’s VMWorld conference. I thought the conference digs were an upgrade over San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The flow of people between conference sessions and the overall layout of the conference seemed more orderly to me. You just can’t beat the strip for dining and entertainment options. The conference is moving back to San Francisco next year.

I focused more on educational sessions than the vendor expo this time around. Frankly I didn’t see anything new in the vendor area. I was much more interested in learning about VMWare’s future product strategy and the future of virtualization technologies in general.

The keynotes this year were given by new VMWare CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Stephen Herrod. I thought that Herrod’s keynote presentation on the second day was a little sharper. His presentation contained more details about future product strategy and his presentation style was a bit more polished. The problem was that both presentations were a little cloudy regarding the details. Yes they both talked about building cloud computing architectures using their virtualization technology, but they attached no timeframes to their future initiatives. Herrod gave a demo of a technology they are now calling VMWare Fault Tolerance which allows a shadow copy of a virtual machine to run on a second server. The thing is we saw this technology demoed at VMWorld 2007. So where is it? When are we going to see these new technologies baked into released products? Nobody seems to know.

The takeaway from VMWorld is that VMWare has a number of technology initiatives they are pursuing — vNetwork, vCompute, vStorage, vCenter, and vCloud. Their strategy seems smart given the fact that virtualization is now a commodity technology. They are focusing on the layers of the solution stack that are traditionally hard to manage and scale. VMWare wants to become the data center operating system. And I think they are moving closer to this reality every year.

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