VMworld 2007: MS booth noise

The show floor has been busy. Lots of people interested to kick the tires of Viridian and SCVMM. The funny thing is, after exhibiting at this show for 4 straight years, some people still say, “I’m surprised to see Microsoft here.” To which I always say, “what OS and apps are you running in ESX?” That when there’s the “ah-ha” moment.

Along these lines I had a good conversation with a gentleman from the civilian side of the U.S. government. After completing the above-mentioned dialogue, he said that he didn’t know too much about our new hypervisor but that he needed to because someone up the chain of command had IP and security concerns over ESX Server. He proceeded to tell me that all the new hardware they bought specifically to run ESX Server had one major problem – driver incompatibility. He was interested to hear about Viridian’s microkernelized architecture, where drivers run within guests, supports the existing windows server driver model, doesn’t include 3rd-party code and minimizes the trusted computing base. And thankfully I was able to tell him that he’d be able to download Windows Server 2008 RC0 soon in order to preview Viridian.

This conversation was common – lots of folks still getting up to speed on what Viridian (and our management tools, SoftGrid, etc) can offer. That’s one reason our booth traffic looked like this (photos from my T-Mobile Dash smartphone)

Jeff Woolsey demoing Viridian … that black screen might be server core in all its glory.

Like last year, the Microsoft shirt has been popular. I’ll post a photo of it in an upoming post.

Patrick