VMworld keynote thoughts

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I have just finished watching the VMworld keynote online.  Here are some of my rough thoughts:

  • There was a moment when Paul was talking about VMware “providing a set of management products targeted to specific scenarios”.  When he said this the display on the screen went from a picture of two boxes, to a picture of close to a dozen boxes.  I have heard complaints about the fact the VMware have too many different products here – but the visual on the screen really highlighted this.

  • There was a fair discussion around power efficiency and cost.  There was a really nice demo where they showed power monitoring that reflected power usage per virtual machine.  I would like to see us do this in the future.

    That said – with Hyper-V R2 we have spent a lot of time working on making Hyper-V a power efficient virtualization platform (I will be speaking about this at length at Tech-Ed Australia and Tech-Ed New Zealand).  The result is that Hyper-V R2 virtual machines now use significantly less power.  I will try to get a blog post written about this after I get back from my tradeshow run.

  • There was a discussion of addressing small / medium business customers.  VMware is offering vSphere Essentials “starting at $166 per processor”.  Now, for this space we are offering SCVMM 2008 workgroup edition for $505 that allows you to manage up to 5 computers (no limits on number of processors).  At first glance – you might think (like I did) - “Well, if I have more than four processors, SCVMM workgroup edition is the better deal”.  But digging deeper, I think SCVMM 2008 workgroup edition is the better deal, period.  Why do I think this?  vSphere Essentials does not provide support for high availability or live migration, both of which are supported out of the box with the R2 releases of Hyper-V and SCVMM.

  • VMware Go has been announced.  This is all about providing a better experience for small environments when deploying ESXi.  I will be following this with great interest.  I believe that Microsoft, VMware and Citrix / Xen all have a lot of work to do around the user experience of our “free” offerings.  With all of these companies it seems like you need to pay for usability – and I hope this trend gets turned around in the future.

There was a fair amount of discussion around cloud and VDI.  But I need more time to formulate my posts on those topics – so stay tuned over the next couple of days to hear about that

There was also a discussion about the SpringSource, but to be honest – I am a core virtualization guy, not a management guy.  So I largely tuned out for this part.

My final thought at the moment: No love for VMware Workstation?

Cheers,
Ben