With 7,000 attendees at the L.A. Convention Center, the third VMworld was a great success.  As a comparison, Citrix – now one of the world’s largest software companies, only had around half as many attendees at 2006 iForum in Orlando a week earlier.

The energy and excitement surrounding VMworld was also huge.  From AccessFlow’s perspective, we were thrilled that VirtualMan received so much attention.  An animated VirtualMan made two appearances during the general session.  In one of them, he calculated that there are only 18,324 possible VMware products because that's the total number of combinations of three letter or four letter acronyms starting with the letter V: VMTN, VMDK, VDI, VMI, etc.  There was also a photo booth which generally had a line of attendees waiting to get their picture taken as VirtualMan.  The real VirtualMan, i.e. Gary Lamb, spoke on a panel session on assessments which appeared to go over very well.

While VMworld had an abundance of great information, there was some particularly exciting news around the introduction of VMware Lab Manager, advances in VDI and a certification program for virtual appliances.

VMware Lab Manager  “enables enterprise software development organizations to more efficiently utilize software development and test lab assets, accelerate software development cycles and increase the quality of delivered software products.” http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/labmanager.html
 Lab Manager is the made-over Slingshot product produced by Akimbi (acquired by VMware several months ago).  AccessFlow was one of the original 14 Akimbi partners prior to the acquisition by VMware, and we are even more impressed with Lab Manager which has integrated the product into VMware.

VMware’s Virtual Desktop Initiative (VDI) enables organizations to host individual desktops inside of virtual machines running on their data center ESX servers.  Users can access these desktops remotely from a PC or Windows Terminal using a remote display protocol such as RD or Citrix ICA.  There are a lot more options now for organizations looking to virtualize their clients, particularly when including application virtualization strategies such as Microsoft SoftGrid and Citrix Tarpon among others.  AccessFlow’s Bryan Dickson and Steve Kaplan are currently writing an article to help organizations evaluate the various alternatives and to make a decision about the optimal product or products for their environments. 

“A Virtual Appliance is a pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software application packaged with the operating system inside a virtual machine.” http://www.vmware.com/appliances/.  Virtual appliances are rapidly being adopted by software manufacturers as well as hardware appliance manufacturers.  Software manufacturers gain the advantage of ensuring that their applications are already configured with best practices, and that they will run on any VMware supported hardware platform.  Hardware appliance manufacturers gain the advantage of being able to distribute their intended functionality (i.e. VPN, load-balancing, network intrusion prevention, etc.) without having to distribute expensive hardware devices that consume lots of power to operate.  AccessFlow will soon be submitting a patent for a replication appliance that will reduce the cost of replicating virtual machines for DR purposes.