At VMworld 2009 in San Francisco I visited the InstallFree booth. And while I was there, the guys from InstallFree showed me this concept of the universal client, where you package/virtualize your applications once and run those applications on XP, Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7. “Is this so special?” I thought to myself. Well, actually it is. Where some of the vendors will make it sound very easy to migrate to a new OS when using their application virtualization solution, in fact it isn’t. Sure, in some cases you don’t need to repackage your applications, but at least you have to certify if the package still works on the new OS.  Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think this book needs more attention, being sold out on the first day of VMworld, but I’ll do it anyway. Scott Lowe did a great job writing Mastering VMware vSphere 4. Especially if you’re new to VMware vSphere and you want step-by-step instructions on how to install and maintain your VMware vSphere internal cloud (virtual infrastructure). Read the rest of this entry »

Today VMworld 2009 finally gets started. I will attend 2 interesting hands-on labs and will blog-review them later today. What concerns me however is the number of people waiting in line for sessions already, and the Monday sessions are usually easy to get in to. I can’t remember seeing this kind of long queues in Las Vegas last year, while there were more people attending VMworld then. 

I will also release the updated Application virtualization comparison chart today. This time it includes a comparison of launch-time of 5 commonly used applications and the results are very interesting.

I guess it’s now official: VMworld Europe won’t be held next February but we’ll have to wait until October 2010! The reason to do this is “to ensure that we are able to roll out key initiatives to customers and partners more quickly and consistently worldwide“, according to VMware.

For me as a blogger it won’t be interesting to go to the VMworld Europe event anymore because this time it really is going to be a “record-and-replay” event, so nothing new is going to be announced or demonstrated at the Europe event. I wonder if there won’t be any EMEA-partner sessions during VMworld 2010 in San Fransisco, because VMworld Europe will be held a month later…

Do you remember the days when VMware P2V Assistant costs $20.000? And a couple of years ago, the product was suddenly available for free? And what about the introduction of the free ESXi? VMware’s hypervisor available for free all of a sudden? Well, this is exactly what I think will happen to vCenter Server. It’s just a matter of time, but VMworld 2009 is getting close, so why wait, VMware? Read the rest of this entry »