VMworld Rocks

This was my fourth VMworld and the biggest and the best by a goodly margin. The attendee count was up to over 10,000 (the first was 1,400), the exhibition huge, and the buzz bigger than ever (nothing like a successful IPO and $30B market cap to create quite a party atmosphere).  The interesting news was the announcement of ESX-3i which is just the hypervisor.  It's been slimmed down and it's being bundled as integrated flash memory with a new generation of virtualization optimized servers (to steal Dell's term). These diskless machines just have to be racked and cabled and powered on, and the VMware management system automatically discovers them and adds them into the hardware mix (so simple that even a CEO can do it as Diane Green gamely demonstrated). Having the hypervisor a cleanly separated layer (previously it was shipped with an attached Linux based controller) makes it easier to visualize some of the ways in which it might be exploited. In Mendel Rosenblum's closing keynote they used hypervisor-to-hypervisor communications to implement an experimental high-availability system, and Mendel gamely demonstrated pulling power on the primary Exchange server and in fact the backup took over mid stride (showing I guess that even a CEO's husband could do it although he's also a Stanford CS Professor so the test might be rigged). Mendel suggested an interesting strategy of taking some more of the nastiest system problems (HA in this case) and looking to see whether the virtualization abstraction could be used to greatly simplify them as was the case in data center consolidation.  The future of virtualization is clearly in front of it. The only dark cloud is that it is also becoming quite clear that it is getting to be really complex stuff so the simplicity is somewhat skin deep. It's clearly going to be another exciting year for virtualization!