Back In Town From VMworld Europe

Ah, we’re back. Late last night we landed on Amsterdam Schiphol airport, and I got back home at around 02:30 AM. We had a good 5 full days in mostly sunny Cannes. VMworld Europe itself was a great event. I met a lot of people and saw a lot of good and not-for-us solutions for the problems that we have to face in the not so distant virtual future. I’m mainly talking about life cycle management and overall environment management. We all agreed however that the announcements of VMware were all pretty substantial

Let me share some of the things I encountered and my thoughts on them. I will write more about other aspects of the virtualization game and VMworld in later posts, I know this is not complete or orderly. It’s just that my head is still so full of everything and I want to get it out!

VMsafe

VMware has been working together with McAfee developing a new security API which will be released very soon. The idea is that instead of having a virus or mal-ware scanning tool in the guest OS you are going to see this happen underneath the hardware, in the hypervisor. There are some big advantages to this:

• No more scanners in the OS poking their way into all kinds of user, kernel, and IO calls causing overhead and potential issues.
• Being underneath the hardware will make it possible to scan everything. From the full memory map of the guest machine to stopping malicious processes before they are started on the CPU. Yes. This works and had been demonstrated.

The good thing is is that the API will be open for everyone.

VDI

Virtual Desktops are the future. There is no doubt about it. Get into the game. There was a whole host of connection broker solutions being offered on the stand area and it’s hard to get a clear view of the offerings there. Some work to be done there for us I guess to choose a partner in that.

I need to write more about this area. I think I will.

Microsoft

Microsoft was also there at the VMware event. Pretty bold move from them but I also understand that they HAD to be there. They had a tough sell and I am afraid they made a mess of it. While the product manager of HyperV was running circles around every question asked to him, not denying or confirming one single feature, the other workers on the same stand promised everything: better performance than physical machines, flawless virtual machine migration over boxes and so on and so on. Sorry folks, but you have bought a whole different hypervisor than VMware’s, and you can not develop the same features as VMware is offering on a totally different architecture.

I’m sorry to be so negative about Microsoft as I love a lot of their products, but I’ve been doing this job for a few years now and I think I know what I am talking about. And I know when I am being simply lied to…

More to follow soon!