Live from the bloggers' room at VMworld Europe 2009

Seeming as how virtualization is a technology that is still expanding exponentially, and our research is not of the kind that drops a subject once the novelty has worn off, the Belgian IT department of Anandtech is once again attending VMworld Europe, with high hopes of greatly improving our knowledge on the vast amounts of fields virtualization has seeped into.

 

So here we are, once more in lovely Cannes, joining 4700 other attendees (up 200 from last year) at undoubtedly one of the best conference locations in Europe. And rather than trying to pour all the information into a big mega-article, we have decided to try some daily blogging as a way of channeling the content of the sessions to our readers.

 

 

 

As it is, the first breakout sessions started a mere 20 minutes ago, and we are excited to see what the day has to offer. As explained by VMware's CEO Paul Maritz in the keynote that kicked off the conference 2 hours ago, VMware's focus is shifting to completely changing the way data centers are structured. Of course, this is a process that was kicked off years ago with the release of server hypervisors in 2000, however, now that the technology has matured sufficiently to allow for amazing breakthroughs like VMotion and Dynamic Resource Scheduling, VMware feels it's time to take data centers to the next level: Cloud Computing. "Providing IT as a Service" or building a "software mainframe" are two of the very nice publication-ready terms he used to describe the idea, and they actually capture the technology quite well.

 

Their strategy to achieve a Cloud Computing environment in any serverroom rests on 3 basic principles:

Each keyword representing one of the big fields VMware chooses to focus future developments on. The VDC-OS stands for their current Virtual Infrastructure technology, allowing global management of the ESX machines in a network. With vCloud, they intend to extend the management of data centers beyond that of the internal architecture, allowing workloads to be distributed to either the internal or an external cloud (offered by ISP's, for example). vClient adds desktop virtualization to the mix, allowing regular users a spot in this newly virtualized landscape, by further improving their VDI technology.

Tomorrow's keynote is promised to discuss these new technologies a bit more in-depth, so be sure to check back if you are just as curious about VMware's new advances as we are.

Now it's off the follow some breakout sessions we go, see you at the next blog!