Maritzio Carli,  GM for EMEA, opened the keynote today. He gave a lot of figures to reflect the grow in virtualization despite the hard economic times. These figures show that virtualization, and VMware in specific, is here to stay and invests heavily in people and resources.

  • Last year there were 4500 attendees at VMworld Europe, this year 4700.
  • There are more than 100 sponsors.
  • VMware has got more than 6300 people working in different departments all around the world.
  • More than 1300 of those work in or for the EMEA region.
  • 42% of the businesses that were interviewed said that VMware is their ‘default build’ for their datacenters. In 2007 this was only 25%.

Paul Maritz, president and CEO for VMware explained the road ahead for VMware. The rumors about the new name for the Virtual Infrastructure suite were already going, but Paul finally confirmed the new name for the VI suite, namely vSphere.

In Paul’s view there are two ways to get out of the current mess we have in datacenters: revolutionary or evolutionary. Evolutionary is always better, the organization and IT grows, evolves instead of taking drastic measures.

In this line also lies the whole cloud architecture that the internet is buzzing about. VMware’s view on this point is that the cloud is the architecture, no matter if it is an internal cloud or an external one.

One of Paul’s most important quotes for today is in my opinion:

With the new generation virtualization products there is no excuse to put all your workloads on virtualized hardware

Paul spent a lot of time on the whole cloud idea. The cloud gives you the possibility to transport workloads to other clouds, for example a hosting partner where you could rent CPU cycles when you need them.

Paul also announced client side virtualization. This bare metal hypervisor is planned for this year. The client hypervisor makes it possible to create a safe and secure environment on your PC. As an administrator you no longer have to manage end user PC’s (if you like that is). You can go ahead and introduce the long wished for BYOPC, bring your own PC. End users can buy their PC’s at the local Aldi, Lidl, Walmarts etc and still get a enterprise environment at their side.

And VMware just announced a new partnership with Intel. With Intel’s  vPro at the client side combined with VMware’s 3D, Flash and HD video support. This truly is the FAT client and Citrix killer. I know that there are still colleagues who do not favor VMware VDI solutions because of poor graphic performance. Soon VMware View can provide the same functionality and much more. Great graphic performance, user familiar interfaces and offline use. Citrix eat you hart out :-).