VMware: Virtually There

Happy 2007 to everyone! Sorry it’s been a while since the last entry… we’ve been quite busy here in VMware Research & Development. On this topic, I thought you’d enjoy a few updates on what we’ve been up to and some things to look forward to in 2007.

VMworld

In November we held our 3^rd VMworld event in Los Angeles. The attendance exceeded our most optimistic expectations again with more than 7,000 people. if you were unable to make it, you can go to http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vmworld/ to see a video of the general session and to get access to recordings and presentation materials from the breakout sessions. It’s hard to believe, but planning for VMworld 2007 is already well underway. It’ll be from September 11-13 in San Francisco, and I hope to see you there!

Products

On the product front, these last few months have been among the busiest in company history. In just the last 3 months of 2006, we released:

• VMware Lab Manager 2.4: This is the first product coming out of VMware’s acquisition of Akimbi, and early signs are that it will be a big hit with software developers and testers. Check out the details here.
• VMware Capacity Planner 2.2: This is a tool used by professional services teams to assess the utilization of a company’s servers. It’s often used in offerings such as our own "Virtualization Assessment" offering

We also went pretty wild with betas. You can check out http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/beta/ to see all of our latest downloadable beta offerings.

• Earlier in the quarter, we put out a beta of VMware Converter 3.0 and phased delivery of the general availability (GA) version is underway. This tool combines and replaces our older VMware P2V Assistant and VMware Importer tools. It is used to transform physical machines into virtual machines as well as to transform a variety of third party disk images into virtual machine images. The hot cloning feature is particularly nice, so check it out.
• And then to close out 2006 with a bang, we released several betas on December 21^st. These products share a lot of source code, but it’s still a huge challenge to get these all out at once. Making the biggest splash was VMware’s desktop product for Mac, codenamed Fusion. This is our first entry into the x86-based Mac market and the response is overwhelming. We also released a beta of the new VMware Workstation 6.0 product. This team is great at bringing new software developer- and test-focused features to market and I’m particularly excited about the integration with debuggers, multi-monitor support, and automation APIs. The beta of VMware Player 2.0 comes along with VMware Workstation and we hope you enjoy its increased focus on supporting the growing Virtual Appliance Marketplace.

2007 is going to be even busier! In addition to bringing all of these betas to GA status, we have several new releases on the way. You can look forward to a 2.0 version of the free VMware Server product, a new major release of VMware ACE, and several additions to VMware Infrastructure 3. I can’t share many more details just yet, but stay tuned!

People

Last, but certainly not least, we’ve been incredibly busy on the people front and working to grow our outstanding R&D group across the globe.

In the US, we’re continuing rapid grow in our Palo Alto, California headquarters. This year will be particularly exciting as we shortly move into our shiny new campus.

We recently opened a San Francisco office and are filling it up rapidly! We now have enough people going back and forth to support the VMware Palo-Alto-to-San-Francisco shuttle bus. One of our engineers there has a nice picture of the location if you’re interested.

Additionally, we are continuing our rapid growth in Cambridge, Massachusetts and are enjoying being in the middle of so many great academic institutions. In February we move into our new Kendall Square offices with a beautiful view of the Charles. Stay tuned for an announcement about our open house there in March.

Finally, we’re starting to ramp an R&D office near Boulder, Colorado and have our first people in Austin, Texas.

Internationally, we continue to grow rapidly in Bangalore, India. I’m also very excited to announce the opening of our first European R&D office in Aarhus, Denmark. We’re moving into the space as we speak, so I’ll have better pictures than the below shortly.

And if it’s not obvious from the above, we’re hiring.

Hope this has been interesting. One of my new year’s resolutions is to improve my blogging frequency, so drop me a line if there are some topics you’d like to hear about.