Hi everybody from Paris, France.
As you already noticed no virtualization news from virtualization.info since a couple of days: I’m attending the technical conference for VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and Partners called Technical Solutions Exchange (TSX) 2006 in EuroDisney.
TSX is pretty interesting to understand how the EMEA technical arm of VMware community is answering to new announcements and upcoming technologies.
It was a big surprise to see that, at the end of plenary session with Karthik Rau, Senior Director of Infrastructure Products & Alliances, nobody had anything to ask.
It was not a surprise instead to see, among others solution partners, 2 vendors collecting a majority of visits: PlateSpin and vizioncore.
Attendees provided clear feedbacks: half of them is looking for features not available (clustering as the most wanted ever) without any care on prices and the other half complaining about VMware too high prices for Virtual Infrastructure.
An interesting point it’s that while the whole conference is focused just on ESX Server the most discussed topic is VMware (GSX) Server.
Attendees opinions about sessions quality was mixed: some speakers (like Patrick Lin and Richard Garsthagen) were greatly appreciated, while others were considered excessively poor in technical details.
At the end of the event 3 big points were commonly shared:
- the whole market is really in an early stage, with so much vendors opportunities and so many new potential customers
- VMware is more and more focusing every day on very big enterprises, trying to satisfy highly complex requirements
- the Virtual Infrastructure (ESX Server + VirtualCenter) is becoming so complex that to become proficient on it you have to be a networking expert, a storage expert, a security expert and a system engineer expert at the same time
I personally enjoyed very much the event for the opportunity to meet many virtualization professionals, quite every vendor I blog about since 3 years, great VMware representatives and many readers of virtualization.info.
I would also say a special thank you to Richard Garsthagen for inviting me and publicly endorsing virtualization.info, and all of you who stopped by to keep in touch and exchange great insights about the market.