This week I have started a new position with Canonical and am at VMWorld 2008 being held at the Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas. I am surprised to see that there are over 14,000 attendees to this conference this year and all of the known and unknown names in virtualization are here.
VMWare does appear to put on a good show although when I arrived in Las Vegas and went to registration Monday the lines were quite long and organization appeared to be lax at best. After a few hours the lines died down and all was good, but they did not handle the resource usage well for a virtualization company.
I have found a number of very interesting vendors here this week. The most interesting one is BlueBear. In addition to their slick titles like “Benevolent Director” and “404 User Not Found”, they have a very slick product code-named “Kodiak” that is not only a pleasant interface, but a usable pleasant interface. Built on Adobe Air, Kodiak represents your virtual network in a very usable map that allows the user to see the near real-time status of their virtual environment. The coolest part, it is going to be using a open source license. Others like Elastra are interesting in their model even if they have a bit of trouble in explaining exactly what they have to offer. I had done a bit of research on Trigence and was pleased with what I saw. They seem to be similar to Virtuozzo where they use containment virtualization to abstract the application from the OS.
Overall, VMWorld 2008 appears to be a great success for VMWare and the vendors attending. The attendees are smart, interested in what is being offered and forthcoming with information. In the coming weeks, I will try to highlight more about my trip.
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