Virtual Acquisitions Coincide With VMworld

More on VMworld

VMworld 2010 kicked off Sunday afternoon with a “fun run” along the San Francisco Bay, periodically endless lines for materials at the registration desk and a seemingly bottomless keg of free beer. With Tweet Ups, blogger lounges and a heavy emphasis on social networking, VMworld offers a wealth of info to those who couldn’t make it to San Francisco and seems intent on connecting the 15,000 attendees who are present.

As VMworld kicks off, it is clear that a consolidation of virtual players is
under way.

More importantly, as of Monday some very real acquisitions of virtual players
had been announced. The Dell-3Par-HP love triangle that began
last week, looks like it may be drawing to a close. Reuters is predicting
that the maker of virtualized, multi-tenant storage array vendor will be HP,
whose latest counter offer was $1.8 billion. Whether
Dell will counter remains to be seen.

Then, on Monday, Citrix announced its intent
to purchase VMLogix. The addition will be part of Citrix’s OpenCloud
infrastructure platform for cloud providers, and it is expected to close
in the third quarter of 2010.

The slogan for VMworld 2010 is “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds,” and indeed
cloud is huge. So too, it seems is desktop virtualization. A brief walk through
the Solutions Exchange revealed many desktop solutions.

On Tuesday, the show will kick into high gear with VMware CEO Paul Maritz’s keynote, in which he and Steve Herrod will present VMware’s latest vision: IT as a service and demonstrate new virtualization and cloud computing technologies.

Other thoughts on the show: I’m not a big tweeter. I’ve dipped my toe into
the Twitter waters, but haven’t been a power user — it just never grabbed
me the way FaceBook has. For VMworld, however, it appears to be the link to
what is going on, both officially and ad hoc. Look
for lots of frequent ServerWatch tweets this week. I even checked out my first
Tweet Up this evening.

Amy Newman is the senior managing editor of ServerWatch and Enterprise IT Planet. She has been covering virtualization since 2001, and is the coauthor of Practical Virtualization Solutions, published by Pearson in October 2009.

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