3 Days at VMworld

After 3 days at VMworld I have not yet had enough of virtualization, or as a friend of my spells it virtualisation. Taking my own advice I went to the important security sessions and went out on the show floor.

There was an impressive array of vendors with some of the smaller booths providing real innovation. My favorite picks are:

Security: Reflex Technologies, with Catbird being a very close second. Reflex has a pretty impressive toolsuite.

Management: Hyper9's product offering was really impressive for large installations. The drill down capability was outstanding.

Compliancy: vmSight is still one of the best.

Backup: Not a company but the big talk was on data deduplication, or saving storage space by combining like blocks on the device.

Hardware: I really liked Xiotech, an independent company stated they have amazing support. I have been told this by others as well. If you can afford it, it's well worth the look.

Announcements: Distributed Virtual Switch is by far the best thing announced followed by the Cisco Nexus 1000V which makes use of this for VMware's future product VDC-OS.

Overall: Putting faces to handles to names in the VMTN forum.

I will delve more into each of these over the next several weeks but there are the highlights.