VMworld 2010 started yesterday as us folks in the UK enjoyed bank holiday. There is a lot of speculation of what will be announced here, such as:
More focus on OpEx
Virtualisation is a cap ex boon and an op ex bust-as compute capacity is made available by the hypervisor, it’s quickly filled in with new machines. The result? An explosion in the number of machines that need to be managed-and an explosion in operating expense. The often-forgotten fact that cap ex represents less than 30% of overall IT spending. The larger share of cost savings-higher on the mind of the CIO-is operating expense. Consequently, op ex is emerging as the new cap ex and will get considerable attention this year.
Emphasis on Business Value
Expect the business value conversation to take center stage-hopefully with more intelligibility than the adults featured in Peanuts cartoons of yore.
Automation
Automation and IT management in general will be one of the most important themes this year.
Private and hybrid clouds
The rise of public cloud services like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace have demonstrated a new standard for cost-efficiency and responsiveness that have forced IT to rethink how they measure their own performance.
Official announcement on VMware View 4.5
What exactly the announcement about 4.5 will include is anyone’s guess.
More information on VMware “Origami“
Citrix will talk about XenDesktop Feature Pack 2 and XenVault