Ho-Hum for VMworld

It’s great to be in LA right now because it’s mid-80s and sunny here versus flooding rain back home in Redmond. But even the sunny skies of LA couldn’t liven up the audience sitting through the opening keynote this morning at VMworld.

The hall was packed with 7,000 people, the stage and screens were large and impressive. But Diane didn’t deliver any “ah-ha” thinking. The demo was intended to show live-motion video being moved from one virtual desktop to another without any video degredation. Unfortunately, the demo was a little flat desite using one of the better scenes from “Office Space.” The people on the appliances panel agreed with each other more than the Bush v Gore debates. They all agreed that appliances are a great way to eval software, and eventually deploy software.

I left early to see the exhibit floor. It’s  much bigger product demo area than last year in Vegas. The Microsoft booth includes SC Virtual Machine Manager, the new hypervisor running on a build of Longhorn, Virtual Server 2005 running SLES, Vista and other guest VMs, and also SoftGrid.

 More to report later today.

Patrick