VMware CEO Paul Maritz outlined VMware's upcoming product roadmap and unveiled additional aspects of the company's cloud computing strategy during his VMworld keynote address this morning.
While none of the announcements made were particularly revolutionary, they did underscore VMware's efforts to keep several steps ahead of Microsoft and Citrix on the virtualization front. VMworld attendance has been robust, with VMware claiming that more than 12,000 attendees are attending this year's show.
We'll provide more information on some of these releases in the next day or so, but the bulk of the interest revolved around the following announcements:
VMware vCenter Product Family Updates: Two new products in the VMware vCenter product family were announced: VMware vCenter ConfigControl, and VMware vCenter CapacityIQ. The former helps maintain the compliance and configuration info of VMs, while the latter improves the ability to model and forecast capacity needs for virtual environments. These two new products join the rest of the VMware vCenter product family, which now includes:
- VMware vCenter AppSpeed
- VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
- VMware vCenter Chargeback
- VMware vCenter ConfigControl
- VMware vCenter Lab Manager
- VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
- VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
VMware Go Unveiled: While the expanding vCenter family is focused primarily mid-sized and large enterprises, VMware also announced VMware Go, a free new service that intends to help SMBs more easily test, deploy, and manage the free VMware ESXi hypervisor product. The free VMware Go service is now available in beta form and can be accessed here. VMware Go should be available by the end of 2009.
VMware Partner and Market News: VMware announced a number of new initiatives with partners, including a new program that will let Intel sell VMware vSphere 4 into its own reseller channel. HP and VMware jointly announced a new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution based on VMware View that costs less than $1,000 per user. And VMware also touted some early adoption stats for VMware vSphere 4, claiming that they've seen more than 350,000 downloads in the first 12 weeks after vSphere 4 became available.
We'll be posting more VMworld news throughout the week, so keep checking Windows IT Pro for updates from the show.
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