VMworld 2006 – Partner Day
I’m in Los Angeles this week attending VMworld 2006. I’m presenting a couple of sessions for work, which is exciting in its own right. But most importantly, I’m looking forward to being able to immerse myself in the technology for a few days.
Today was/is the VMworld Partner Day. Each year, a day before the actual conference is devoted to VMware partners. There were several breakout sessions as well as some general session keynotes:
Diane Greene’s Keynote
Diane spent a brief amount of time bringing everyone up to speed on the growth of the company – from its meager beginnings to a new state-of-the-art 29-acre campus in Palo Alto which is going to be finished next year.
From a product perspectve, she highlighted VMware DRS, VMware HA, VMware Infrastracture 3 as well as some of the buzz from releases such as VMware Player and VMware Server. A lot of time was spent talking about VMware Virtual Appliances. The biggest issue with Virtual Appliances isn’t whether or not they’re useful – it’s whether software licensing (Windows, for example) and its complications will stagnate potential growth. As much as some would like to wish it away, Windows-based applications are still far more dominant (in terms of numbers) than those running on open source OSes like Linux.
Karthik Rau’s Keynote
Karthik is a very polished speaker. He did a great job outlining why virtualization still makes sense and providing some new use cases which could potentially propel future growth.
I few key points I took away from Karthik’s presentation:
Virtualization is going to grow even more in the future as it is at some point going to be the only reasonable way to take advantage of the performance advancements in hardware. No single workload will be able to take advantage of the multi-core units we will see in the next 5 years.
Karthik made the case that certain services like availability, resource mangaement, data protection, security, etc. can run in an OS-netural way was a VM or as part of the hypervisor. And, in some cases, I agree this is probably an appropriate approach. The examples he gave for these types of solutions all were VMware-centric things like VMware HA and Consolidated Backup. This tells me that there is some room for a partner to come in and start delivering solutions like this to round out the story for VMware.
Lastly, a large amount of time was devoted to new use cases. Maybe I’m a skeptic but my opinion is that the existing use cases of consolidaiton, dev/test and disaster recovery haven’t been exploited to their full potential yet. And new use cases such as Remote Management Services and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure are a bit of a stretch right now.
Carl Eschenbach’s Keynote
Carl is the channel and field sales “general” for VMware. He provided a pretty enthusiastic overview of why virtualization matters and why partners should go with VMware. Interestingly enough, he focused on the existing use cases like consolidation. Which tells me that the new use cases that Karthik talked about haven’t taken hold yet with sales. And until sales sees them gaining traction, we have plenty of time to contemplate their destiny.
Two keys from the presentation: there is plenty of growth opportunity for virtualization and VMware wants to continue to capitalize on this opportunity at Microsoft’s expense. It will do so by continuing to innovate from a product perspective and try to build a sales channel that is loyal and dedicated to its cause. I still argue (against heated arguments from colleagues) that Microsoft is going to have a hard time keeping up. Because of it’s size and dedication to the “Windows Platform” product ideaology, it just can’t get new features out the door fast enough. And the channel that VMware is building while Microsoft plays catch-up will be a significant challenge. Though, almost better than anyone, Microsoft understands how to leverage partners.
