Archive for February, 2008
KEYNOTE
At Tuesday the general event of VMworld Europe 2008 started with the keynote by Diane Greene.
After welcoming the audience, showing some figures about growth and mentioning VMware was awarded the most reliable product by Redmond magazine with IBM mainframe as second runner up, Diane handed over to Stefan Van Overveldt from BT (British Telecom). At BT they have placed VMware software in the heart of their strategy, in terms of maturity regarding virtualization they are on the right track to enter the stage of cloud computing. Besides BT a couple of major hardware vendors IBM, HP and DELL presented at the keynote all announcing their support and readiness to ship ESX Server 3i. Not on stage but also co-annoucing was Fujitsu Siemens.
Diane Greene ended by demoing Virtual Desktop solutions (Virtual desktop portability with VDI and the newly acquired VMware Thinstall product).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWZfAVCjjOQ&hl=en]
Diane Greene Intro Keynote
At monday the partner day kicked off the VMworld Europe 2008 event. With a keynote by Diane Greene and some other speakers and quite a lot (1200+) attendees. This was the first ever Partner day in Europe and I think it was a success!. Due to NDA-regulations I can’t elaborate too much, so I will keep it general and just give you a impression how the partner day took pace by showing you some pictures.
Have fun
The pictures can be found at: My VMworld Europe 2008 Photo’s on Flickr (please be patient while more photo’s are being added).
Today (monday 25 feb 2008) Novell announced the acquisition of Platespin ltd.. Novell inc. will acquire PlateSpin for $205 million using current cash. The press-release can be found here.
So after Vizioncore being bought by Quest, now it’s the turn for Platespin to being swallowed by a big player in the tools-section of the virtualization market. Being a relative new company (compared to the bigger ones like microosft and vmware) Platespin was founded in 2003, it was just a matter of time to see a take over being settled.
Platespin always had a very great interest in VMware products, I’m curious to see how this develops now Novell, the king of "Open" platforms took over the company. Will it move their attention to open source variants like XEN opensource or even XENServer from Citrix. Time will tell how fate develops 
More info can be found at http://www.platespin.com/novell
Today or better tonight we (my collegue Piet Kiekebos and I) arrived in Cannes, after our plane touched the ground in Nice we catched the last shuttle bus to Cannes (around 23:30). The bus took us to the "Palais de Festivals" in Cannes. From here other shuttle buses took over the hotel visits. Unfortunately the bus to our hotel was retired because of the late hour, so we had to catch a taxi to the hotel. Finally we arrived at our hotel near Cannes after midnight.
At the check-in desk the guy told us that there was no WiFi on the floor we are staying, but we could use a cable connection to a socket on the phone. Somewhat dissapointed we left to our room and of course checked the connection he told us about, just what I was thinking: RJ11 (phone connection). Bummer, so no internet in our room, at least that was what I thought then.
Just neclecting everything the guy at the reception told us I flipped the lid of my laptop and just tried to see if I could connect to the WiFi hotspot. And guess what? I got a signal, not very strong but enough to post.
Here is a first impression: an empty entrance of Palais de Festivals at Sunday evening.
Patrick O’Rourke from the Windows Virtualization Team Blog noticed that The Yankee Group published a new report detailing about the pricing benifits customers will experience with the increasing competition in the virtualization business. Great timing by The Yankee Group publishing the report on the evening before VMworld Europe in Cannes.
In short the report shows the differences in costs between the different vendors of virtualization software and more important the consequences these differences in costs have on the decision makers when it comes to choose the one or the other. The report tells the story of some customers who choose in favour of VMware’s competitors based on the cost aspect. VMware still is the market leader with the greatest penetration in the market, but will it be able to keep this position?
read more at The Windows Virtualization Team Blog
Check for more Blogging from Cannes!
Just a couple of days before VMworld Europe starts in Cannes, France. I just did a last check to see if everything is arranged as expected: hotel, flight and event confirmation.
For me the adventure starts next Sunday evening when I have to travel to Schiphol (Amsterdam) to catch the plane towards Nice (Cote D’azur, France). Then on monday the European version of VMworld starts with the partner day in Cannes. Location of the event is Palais de Festivals, the same location as where the famous Filmfestival takes place.
Next from Tuesday through Thursday the main event takes place.
I noticed that there are quite a few collegues attending this event.
I will be blogging as much as possible at VMworld Europe, so if you’re attending too and you spot some guy typing a lot on his DELL laptop, chances are that it’s me writing a blog entry.
links:
vmworld website: www.vmworld.com/europe
session-overview: http://www28.cplan.com/cc190/sessions_catalog.jsp
partner day agenda: http://www.vmware.com/vmworldeurope2008/agenda/partner-day.html
alternative timetable 1: http://verbeiren.blogspot.com/2008/02/vmworld-europe-2008-timetable.html
alternative timetable 2: http://www.renevdlinden.nl/wordpress/2008/02/19/vmware-vmworld-europe-2008-timetable/
session abstracts: http://toni.verbeiren.googlepages.com/session_abstracts.html
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