What was interesting at VMWorld 2011, how do I feel TrackITOnline will be effected by what I have seen?

Well, yes I know I am a bit late getting something down but I have had a packed timetable with the opportunity to meet many interesting people and even a few days off.

OK, what I noticed can be summed up in the following order - Storage, Cloud Management, VDI. - How can I squeeze more value out of my virtualisation platform.

Storage - there were an impressive list of storage vendors; of course you can see the usual high profile names such as Dell/EMC/NetApp/Hitachi but what was interesting were the number of smaller vendors; both US and Taiwan based.  Very low cost SAN's, smart all in one Servers & San's, high density low power servers & storage, ethernet and iSCSI based connectivity to get away from the more expensive Fibre Channel and of course SSD had a big presence.

Cloud Management - At least half a dozen companies emerging in the VM provisioning and lifecycle management space.  Typically positioning a much lower cost with a much lower install cost than the likes of vDirector.

VDI - It is interesting to see how many variations of desktop delivery is still there, just a few that are still there include Kaviza, vWorkspace, Moka5, Panalogic to name a few.

So what is my interpretation on all this?

Customers are looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their platform, much of which is moving to the data centre. Many are also searching for the best way to utilise VDI in an efficient manner.  All of this comes down to good management tools coupled with efficient hardware platforms.

What were the products that had me thinking "very cool"?  Fusion IO provide a hardware device claiming to reduce your server density by many fold and then there was the LG phone showing off it's virtual OS that allowed you to run multiple phone identities on the one phone.