We have a strong virtualization practice at my organization, so VMWorld is generally an important event to ensure our team stays abreast of recent technologies. With that in mind, Scott W. will be our "man on the ground" in Las Vegas this week, sharing thoughts each day on significant announcements and finds on the expo floor. We’ll also have some Operations Manager update from VMWorld as Scott talks to partners like Veaam, who recently purchased nWorks, which offers a great ESX monitoring extension for OpsMgr and Essentials 2007.

What you’ll learn this week is that diversity is going to be a key theme in the enterprise space, as the partner community works to support not only VMware, but Hyper-V and Citrix Xensource as well. As Microsoft has stepped squarely into the world of enterprise-level server and application virtualization, this conference takes on a new importance as we try to identify how the two platforms, and their respective partner communities, compare in terms of functionality. There are already many partners supporting both technologies (as Scott will point out) and will no doubt only increase over time. We will see the two technologies coexist within a single enterprise, I like to call this "Heterogeneous Virtualization".

Scott’s Day 1 Highligts:

Two areas that come to mind as areas seeing key advances are capacity planning and security. And while VMware is showcased at this event, you’ll find a big chunk of the VMware partner community has thrown their hat into ring" where Hyper-V is concerned. Here are three solutions from the partner community I was very impressed with, all of which come from companies offering Hyper-V support in some form.

• Cirba – (www.cirba.com) has the premier analysis and capacity planning tool out there, and are a leading provider of Placement Intelligence software.  In talking with them, they are expecting to have storage analysis/planning integrated into the product by the end of the year. Cirba has already announced an offering for Hyper-V in conjunction with the Microsoft  Virtualization launch event.
• vKernel – (www.vkernel.com) Capacity Analysis and Modeler appliances – "awesome tools from what I can see". vKernal has also already stepped up to the plate with support for Hyper-V
• Reflex Security – (www.reflexsecurity.com) I was intrigued by these guys – their ReflexVMC product was very robust.  It looks to be very powerful configuration management and security product.  Check it out if you have some time. Reflex has already announced Hyper-V support in the their Reflex VSA (Virtual Security Appliance).

That’s a wrap for day 1. I’ll be back with more on tonight with some day 2 highlights.

-Scott

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under News, VMware, Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.