VMworld 2009 First Day keynote notes

Notes and things of interest from first day keynote:

• 12,448 attendees at this year’s VMworld – down from last year in Las Vegas
• Tod Nielson, VMware COO, challenged partners last year to try and recruit any of the 40 Fortune 1000 companies not using VMware to purchase VMware – 10 companies were recurited and those partners were rewarded with free passes to this year’s VMworld – not a bad challenge.  The same offer is extended to partners who can recruit any of the remaining 30 Fortune 1000 companies not using VMware.
• Paul Maritz, President and CEO, takes the stage – talking about cloud initiatives
• Martiz talks about how VMware has been driving capital expenditure savings and now also operational expenditure savings.
• Talks about the growing family of vCenter products, including Chargeback, Capacity IQ, Orchestrator, SRM, ConfigControl, etc.
• Commitment to small business – showed off the IT in a Box solution targeted at small business.
• Also targeted it small to medium business – VMware Go announced – service offering for users of the free ESXi product to quickly configure and deploy ESXi for their uses – a way to engage the community which is tapping into free ESX offering.
• vCloud Express – a service offering from cloud providers (like Terramark, who demo’d) to quickly and easily provision VM’s in the cloud all based on VMware’s vSphere platform.  At rates starting at about 3 cents per hour – or about $40 per month, its a good cost judging from my web hosting days…  and its all protected like any other vSphere cluster.  I’d certainly pay those prices!  I have a friend who runs a hosting company in mind that I may mention this offering to…
• We also saw a demo of the PC over IP technology that has been developed.  TELUS demo’d and discussed their company all over a PCoIP connection – and it looked flawless.
• Last, but not least, Martiz addressed the recent acquisition of SpringSource.  As soon as the demo began for this and source code appeared on screen, the flood gates open and people began leaving in mass.
• SpringSource’s Rod Johnson took the stage for the demo and showed off SpringSource’s customized Eclipse framework which now offers a Deploy to internal cloud, Deploy to external cloud or Deploy to the local – aka the “very private cloud”.
• The integration to deploy to cloud looked, to me, like Macromedia’s half-baked solutions for deploying code in Dreamweaver – it never really does the best job you could on your own – and probably not what a developer really wants – but good for a novice without a sys admin.
• Glossed over was SpringSource’s Hyperic offering, though Martiz did remark that he thought this is what monitoring will look like in the future – and I agree.  If only they could do it agentless – somehow leveraging ESX instead of agents – fingers crossed.