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

PacITPros BranchCache presentation posted

The presentation I gave on BranchCache has been posted up on the PacITPros website here and the MS slide deck content is here. There were some questions about Active Directory requirements and I will post some clarifications requirements on that shortly. VMworld is still going on and there are a lot of options happening in the Cloud area that IT Pros should be keeping an eye on as they start to virtualize their environments and are looking for DR/BC options.
- Ed

Microsoft released Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 in time for VMworld

Seems Microsoft wants to leverage some buzz at VMworld and released Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 which is supporting a bunch of new features. You can check out their blog to see more info, the highlights are:
Up to 8 processors per physical server
Up to 64 logical processors
Up to 1 TB of physical memory
Live migration
High availability

It is good that VMware has some competition to push it to continue to innovate and drive new and exciting things to market. Plus never, ever count Microsoft out, they still get a whole additional version number before folks consider their product "ready" to use, which means they will get lots of attention pretty soon.
- Ed

VMworld 2009 - San Francisco next week

VMware's VMworld 2009 is next week in downtown San Francisco and I picked up an Expo pass (Solutions Exchange) to be able to drop in for a day to see all the exciting stuff happening in the virtualization world.
It looks like Cisco is going to have a huge showing at the event this year. There is a lot of buzz around UCS, Nexus 7000, 5000, 2000 and 1000v and the new Data Center 3.0 architecture. If you want to get your toes wet on some of the happenings with Cisco's involvement you should check out Colin McNamara's blog, he has been doing some great posts about all the happenings with UCS. Colin is also on twitter.
- Ed