Off to VMworld 2007

I’m off to San Francisco today to be part of the MS contingent attending VMworld 2007. It’ll be interesting to see how this post-IPO VMworld conference stacks up to last year’s show. One thing I know for certain, the keynotes should be better as the heads of AMD, Intel and Cisco speaking. I’ll be counting to see how many times AMD’s Ruiz and Intel’s Gelsinger say “quad-core” during their talks – the over/under should be set at 20.

I’d also expect to hear some news from VMware of how they might start spending their new found money. And I’m looking forward to hearing more about virtualization security. Along these lines, I know that Virtual Server 2005 was recently certified for an important security requirement for the US government (e.g., NSA, CIA, FBI, others). And VMware has been doing their own work with the feds. And if you’re interested to learn about the security measures being built into Windows Server virtualization (aka, Viridian), check out Brandon Baker’s presentation from this year’s Black Hat security conference, titled, “Kick Ass Hypervisoring: Windows Server Virtualization.”  Speaking of Viridian, let’s hope we get a CTP of Viridian this month.

Another difference at this year’s conference – at least from my perspective – is that three Microsoft employees are actually presenting sessions during the conference. Last year we got shut out, but what a difference a year makes.

Mike Neil, who has blogged here before, is speaking on a panel titled “Best Practices for the Data Center of the Future (Panel)” on Wednesday.

Eric Jewett, who I actually share an office with, will present a session titled, “How to License Microsoft’s Products for Your Virtualized Environment (Microsoft)” on Thursday. Good luck with that one, Eric 😉

Chad Jones gets the happy hour slot [5pm-6pm] on Thursday, presenting a session titled, “Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization and Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop – Creating the Desktop Computing Utility Today (Microsoft)“.

Myself and others will be posting from the show here and the Windows Virtualization team blog. See you in SF.

Patrick