VMworld 2010 - August 30 - Sept 2nd

Another VMworld is around the corner, just a week away now - it is again in San Francisco at Moscone Center and should be an interesting event as always. Cisco, EMC and NetApp will all have big presence at the show for sure and it is nice to see what they have in terms of product lines and what they are doing in the virtualization space. What makes me want to attend the expo every year though is the small niche companies that have interesting products or way of solving problems that the big boys haven't figured out or haven't thought about.

Often it is the case that these folks get purchased and integrated into one of the bigger players so part of the fun is getting to see them while they are still small, still agile and still interesting plus getting their swag while they still have their own logos and tag lines and such.

I expect to see some announcements associated with the show regarding partnerships, new product launches and perhaps some heated debate too. It looks like Microsoft will once again be relegated to a regular small booth which is a shame considering the majority of deployments of VMware's products are to support Microsoft platforms. I think VMware is making a mistake not allowing Microsoft to have a bigger presence at the event and simply asking them to live within some guidelines regardings Hyper-V.
- Ed