Alessandro Perilli of firtualization.info was at VMworld 2006 and gives his wrap-up.
It’s a long and thoughtful post, so read the whole thing, as they say. His takeaways were:
- The explicit message of this year has been: software as a service (SaaS).
- The implicit message has been: focus on Enterprises.
- The overall theme has been competition.
- Among several notable sessions it’s worth to mention:
- General sessions
- VMmark
- Lab Manager 2.4
- Next generation ESX Server Storage architecture
- Workstation 6.0
- ACE 2.0
- Workstation for Mac OS (codename Fusion)
- What has been announced during the conference timeframe:
- A final word on the event itself
He’s very correct that the focus was on Virtual Appliances and the Changing Role of the OS, on the future of virtualization in the Enterprise, and in trying to foster growth and communication in the whole industry, including VMware’ s competitors. The most interesting to me were Alessandro’s thoughts on (1) the absence of VMware Server and
small-medium business content at VMworld — as Raghu Raghuram is quoted, we want
to work better with small business in 2007 and (2) some very practical
comments about the virtualization benchmarking work (VMmark), which
although it mirrors real-world scenarios (a mix of OSes and workloads),
doesn’t allow comparing with single-OS partitioning solutions. In the hands of an organization like SPEC, I’m sure the correct goals and outcomes can be aligned for a virtualization benchmark.
