I managed to attend Partner Day for VMware's annual conference VMworld and the announcement of ESX Server 3i is just huge. The fact they they have gotten a full hardware integrated hypervisor built out on standard Intel platforms will be a massive blow to other players out there. I think what is more remarkable is the fact that it is only 32MB in size and they have Dell, HP, IBM.
To top it all out they released Site Recovery Manager and a new release of management for VDI and a new version of ACE. While Xen is still moving forward on product and I am sure will have some interesting things to show off once the integration is done with the Citrix folks they are still behind what VMware is doing. Microsoft isn't even on the roadmap, which I think is a real shame since they have such a strong Server OS product line. It might be time for Microsoft to just buy Citrix and get it over with.
- Ed