Bob Roudebush of Double-Take posted his somewhat contrarian take on the Partner Day keynote. I think what Bob is not taking into account is that VMware’s customers are the ones bringing us the new use cases. VDI started that way over the last year or two, and now the interest is everywhere — people are implementing virtual desktops today. It’s not really a new concept really, just a better technology platform for when the power of a full desktop, stored centrally, is needed.
Virtualization is going to grow even more in the future as
it is at some point going to be the only reasonable way to take
advantage of the performance advancements in hardware. No single
workload will be able to take advantage of the multi-core units we will
see in the next 5 years.Karthik made the case that certain
services like availability, resource mangaement, data protection,
security, etc. can run in an OS-netural way was a VM or as part of the
hypervisor. And, in some cases, I agree this is probably an appropriate
approach. The examples he gave for these types of solutions all were
VMware-centric things like VMware HA and Consolidated Backup. This
tells me that there is some room for a partner to come in and start
delivering solutions like this to round out the story for VMware.Lastly,
a large amount of time was devoted to new use cases. Maybe I’m a
skeptic but my opinion is that the existing use cases of consolidaiton,
dev/test and disaster recovery haven’t been exploited to their full
potential yet. And new use cases such as Remote Management Services and
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure are a bit of a stretch right now.
