I've been here at VMworld and I just walked every booth on the floor. A few notes: Half of the exhibitors are all about the monitoring and management of VM images. Lots of desktop virtualization companies offering a way to look inside the performance or operation of the VM "boxes" running in your environment. It is literally like everyone realized that a management/metrics dashboard for VMs was missing at the same time.
Several companies offering I/O virtualization -- which is a way to provide one big pipe and manage the provisioning of the users of that pipe. So for instance, we have a 100-meg connection to the Internet, and some team wants to consume some of that, so we need to provide a "virtual T-1" on top of the real 100MB ethernet... saving the dedicated capacity of that bandwidth "box."
Application virtualization (aka "Endpoint Virtualization" by some) is nice in that you aren't just getting a whole box, instead you get a set of apps that are provisioned just for you. So I log in and get a programmer's IDE but our sales guy logs in and doesn't -- in fact he's not allowed near it ;) Cool way to provision team members with their individualized boxes.
Virtual Test Lab vendors were there too like VMlogix and Surgient. I don't know how many of these attendees are concerned with virtualization in development lifecylces but this is clearly an important space for virtualization in the larger context.
What's new? Skytap and other Cloud platforms were there, mostly grouped in the back by the fire escape in case there was a virtual battery fire. What is interesting is that VMWare has competing product with just about every software vendor in the building, save cloud provisioning, and I'm sure that's coming out soon enough.
I turned every corner looking for the banner that said "What about all those systems you can't image in a VM instance?" Of course that's our offering with LISA Virtualize. So my reaction is that the market is still digesting the fundementals of virtualization. It's a very operations focused show. That's not "wrong" -- it's just leaving a lot of what virtualization can do on the table. I'm looking forward to virtualization concepts pervading the whole enterprise.
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