This is the week of VMworld, the leading virtualization event to be held at The Moscone Center, San Francisco from today to Sept. 3rd, 2009. This event, used as a platform to pimp the products of VMware, is building quite a bit of excitement among the pundit and others who are interested in virtualization and cloud computing.
Last week, Forbes ran an article about Citrix’s plan to gatecrash VMware party. It appears Xen.org is planning to announce an open source version of VMware’s vCloud today. I am not aware of the details of the announcement but it has the potential to turn the landscape upside down. While VMware’s hold on enterprises is strong, Xen is the darling of public cloud companies. One of the problems faced in the enterprise adoption of clouds is the difficulty to migrate VMs from the internal resources to the public clouds. This is the biggest differentiator for companies like Skytap (Teaser: Wait for a post later in the day about a Skytap announcement) who use VMware’s products in their cloud offerings.
Xen’s cloud will run virtual machines from any other vendor–including
VMware.
Well, the Forbes article also let out a news about an upcoming announcement by VMware during this VMworld conference. If vCloud Express news is not enough for you, today eWeek broke a news about the release of free VMware Go (link not live at the time of this writing) product, a free service designed to help SMB customers get started with virtualization. This service will help customers get started with the freely available VMware ESXi hypervisor product. VMware ESXi is a lightweight alternative to the expensive and complete VMware ESX hypervisor. VMware ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor that can install directly on top of the physical server and partition it into multiple virtual machines that can run simultaneously, sharing the physical resources of the underlying server. Even though VMware ESXi is available for no cost, it was too geeky for small and medium businesses to deploy without a trained IT admin. In spite of the large number of downloads after the announcement of VMware ESXi, the requirement for manpower proved to be a road block for many businesses. This is where VMware Go can step in. It is an easy to use web interface to deploy, configure and manage VMware ESXi with a few mouse clicks. The beta version will be available from today after the announcement in VMworld and the GA is expected to be in the Q4 of this year.
announce vCloud Express, an easy way to get up and running with vCloud
service.
The Moscone Center, blogosphere and twitterverse will be buzzing around with the news coming from VMworld and I will keep a tab on the news and add it here at Cloud Ave. If you are attending the event and interested in Live Blogging at Cloud Ave from there, please contact either me or Zoli for guest access.
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