Being a late arrival, the day 2 keynote was my first impressions of the conference as a whole. And all I can say is - this thing is huge. At 14,000 plus attendees VMWorld 2008 is way bigger than this year's TechEd, even bigger than the old TechEds of the past. That familiar sea of moving bodies missing from the past TechEds is all right here.
The conference also exudes an air of newness, excitement, and immediacy. While the keynotes have focused on VMware's future vision, the majority of sessions have been focused on learning about VMware's current technology. The practical focus of the sessions makes them a great learning tool. Here the attendee take away is clearly linked with VMware’s current technology.
Today's keynote by Steve Herrod focused on several of VMware's new technologies. Steve gave an overview of the concept behind VMware's new Virtual Data Center OS and then turned to cover some of VMware latest VMware technologies consisting of:
vCompute
vStorage
vNetworking
vClient
A couple of the key take aways for me included the announcement that VMware will be delivering a Linux version of the Virtual Infrastructure Client (which was greeting by a round of spontaneous applause). There was also a demonstration of VMware's new Fault Tolerance technology. VMware Fault Tolerance takes up where the VMware HA product leaves off. VMware's Fault Tolerant makes a shadow copy of a VM and keeps it in sync with the original VM using a technology called vLockStep. If the primary VM fails the shadow VM can assume its functions with the same instruction boundary that the original VM was executing. There was also a very cool demo of no touch vApp application deployment on the new vClient platform. vClient makes VDI possible by pushing VMs to a client hypervisor. The client hypervisor is like ESX server for your desktop or laptop system. If an application change is made to the linked clone master the client hypervisor prompts the user to shutdown while the delta change is streamed to the client. In the demo Google's Chrome was added to 25 desktops and a managed laptop in just a few seconds.
From an attendee standpoint I can't remember seeing more iPhones at any one place… There's definitely some kind of link going on here