[Editor’s Note: several of our contributors and editors (including John Furrier, Nate D’amico and James Watters) will be in attendance of VMWorld09, and liveblogging it on our site. If you want to keep abreast of everything going on at VMWorld this year, make sure you keep a tab open on our liveblog. Alternatively, if you’d like to contribute to the liveblog, leave a note on this thread. –mrh]
Today kicks of VMWare’s annual VMWorld event at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Around 10,000 attendees are expected to attend the weeks events with today kicking off with partner and developer sessions where VMWare is hosting some labs and giving partners a preview of whats new rolling into the end of ’09.
News started popping up over the weekend that Citrix would be trying to steal some of VMWare’s thunder by announcing new cloud computing efforts around the Xen platform on day one. Today Citrix officially announced its new initiatives around cloud computing in the Xen Cloud Platform.
Over the years Citrix has been a bit of a thorn in VMWare’s side but VMWare has still managed to maintain its dominance in the enterprise virtualization space. With its commercial open source approach the Xen platform has continued to evolve and release some of its paid tools such as XenServer while achieving mass adoption in the hosting/data-center space for those wishing to build on-demand cloud computing services such as Amazon’s AWS offering.
The power of commercial open source allows Xen to be tweaked and twisted to no end with lots of integration points and ad-ons coming from community participation. Citrix plans on weaving all of these together to create a coherent virtualization platform that is not just tied to the Xen Hypervisor but also interact with Microsofts Hyper-V and VMWare’s own vSphere setup in greater detail.
The team here will have lots of reporting going on this week as we will be attending sessions and visiting vendors. You can follow real-time posts and conversation at our VMWorld microsite here while we aggregate stories together for full posts.
The race is on in the virtualization space, at risk, own the plumbing, or risk being a dumb pipe.
