At VMworld this week

VMworld brings me back to the Moscone this week. The VMware conference has drawn over 12,500 people and the exhibit hall was absolutely hopping yesterday. There is a lot of excitement about new technology and the vision of a dynamic IT service. Most of what I’ve seen so far is in CAPEX reduction such as layering shared OS images, application packs, and personification settings to reduce storage and administration costs. I like the prospects of VDI to change the security model, but it looks like VDI may stay poised waiting for a breakout for a bit longer.

Most of the security here is tied to multi-tenancy. For example, if an Exchange VM is launched on a new server to meet capacity demand, then make sure a DLP VM is also launched to meet compliance mandates. I can’t say I’ve seen much of innovative use of VMsafe even though big security vendors Check Point, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro are all here. Reflex Security may be interesting when I talk with them tomorrow.

It has come to my attention that www.ogrengroup.com returns a “not found” error message. My blog is hosted by Google so I’ll have to see what changed there. If you are reading this, then you know how to get to my blog directly. Bad timing with the conference going on - I’ll get this fixed as soon as I can!