Live Blogging VMworld Europe 2009 keynote

Today we have the opening keynote of the public part of VMworld 2009.

After an introduction by Maurizio Carli, the new EMEA General Manager, we have now arrived at the keynote of Paul Maritz. His introduction was mostly the same as yesterday with emphasis on the expertise that VMware has built up over the years.

The focus for the future is on the vCloud. Cloud computing is the current direction that the IT business is going to finally enable the IT As A Service and Mr. Maritz his presentation focuses on VMware as an enabler of the cloud where one key point is that companies are always starting with a legacy set of application where encapsulation is necessary to bring these applications into the cloud.

And after this elaborate explanation of the cloud architecture and VMware’s role in the cloud system the formal announcement is made that the set of programs and tools is called VMware vSphere. vSpere is not the narrow definition of ESX4 or even the next version to VI3 but it is meant as the name of the framework that consists of compute, storage and network services on the technical side and availability, security and scalability on the application/services/management layer.

The next announcement is the introduction of vCenter Suite. Like vSphere this is not just the successor to vCenter Server but also a framework to enable additional management and for instance also chargeback options.

After a segment on cloud computing that was similar to the segment that I wrote about yesterday we are now looking at an Enterprise Cloud demo from Terremark. For those familiar witVI3.5 functionality this is known territory but the application in a cloud form is new as well as the opportunity to buy just what you need and not get cut off when you “overuse”. You just pay extra for the time that you use the extra resources and have the opportunity to scale out (if it is a permanent rise in capacity use) or just leave it (when you have a temporary usage peak).

The Terremark demo was followed by an Engineyard demo about provisioning a Ruby on Rails application in the cloud and a demo of IT Structures about providing proof of concept environments in the cloud that can be seamlessly integrated into your internal cloud infrastructure when you conclude the PoC and want to start using the particular environment.

Client Side Virtualization

Our trip into the cloud is now over and we are looking at the desktop virtualization side of things. This was an subject where an announcement was hinted on yesterday.

The concept is that the desktop can be portable to everything. The biggest challenge with this is the mobile endpoint and the fact that they have tendency to get offline.

The details have been communicated yesterday on parner day. With the highlights of the roadmap coming from December of last year with View3 and more onthe protocol side.

The announcement that was hinted on yesterday is a new partnership between VMware and Intel on a client side hypervisor. It seems to be a partial comeback of the Intel vPro initiative (which frankly I have never heard of a company using it).

Key points of the new solution will be the fact that the vPro layer is there in the hardware to enable image verification/security, remote access and management.