There's no recession at San Francisco's Moscone Center. With a reputed 13,000+ attendees, the exhibit hall was packed and the sessions sold out. The energy is almost palpable and a nice break from the past year of continual gloomy economic news. Citrix added to the fun by postering virtualization advertisements on taxis and benches around the Moscone Center.
Living in the east bay, I only decided to stay in San Francisco for VMworld around a month ago. I ended up at the Union Square Hotel. It's nice enough, but I'm on floor 2 ½. Really. I feel like I'm in "Being John Malkovich". The work-out facilities turned out to be at a sister hotel a few blocks away, so I figured I might as well just get up early for Bikram yoga, and was at class at 6:00 a.m. so that I could still catch early morning meetings.
My favorite part of the Partner Day general session was VMware's new messaging around VDI: User-centric. As a Citrix channel partner for many years, we had to regularly adopt new messaging: thin-client, SBC, access infrastructure, on-demand computing, application delivery. I think that "user-centric" computing is a great summation of what VDI needs to accomplish in order to become the new desktop standard.
On the part of INX, our team did an amazing job at bringing our Extend2Cloud™ demo together for VMworld. Extend2Cloud™ utilizes VMware vSphere, Cisco Nexus 1000V, Cisco UCS, AFORE and our own virtual appliance to extend fibre channel through the WAN and present storage in geographically disparate data centers as if it were one logical data center irrespective of distance. Tonight we demonstrated vMotion between two data centers 60 km apart. Tomorrow we will hopefully be able to demonstrate vMotioning to Europe.
I met with the CEO and team from Hyper9 this morning and was impressed with the product's management capabilities. I'm eager for our engineering team to check it out. I also finally met Tyler Rohrer "t-rex' of Liquidware Labs in person. Our representative at the VMware Partner Technical Advisory Board said that the product was highly touted at the PTAB meeting today. Liquidware was also clever enough to purchase the vdi.com domain and launch a well-done VDI-focused social Web site.
Among the highlights for tomorrow - lunch with Doug Brown of DABCC. I always enjoy the opportunity to chat with Doug. He may espouse an "average Iowa boy" persona, but as his hordes of readers know, Doug is an exceptionally astute observer of our industry.
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