For those interested the Session ID is WV27 and the title is "Virtual Appliances and the New Data Center - Changing the Rules"
The bad news is that there is going to be a partner on stage (IBM). The good news is that I won't be trying to sell you anything ... :-)
Joking aside, this year I thought it would have been interesting to touch on this new trend (and cool concept) that is ... Virtual Appliances. The content of this session has its root into an idea I had a few months ago to create a small / simple presentation regarding the concept of Virtual Appliances. As time went by I realized that many people knew what a Virtual Appliance was (and quite frankly it takes a couple of minutes to explain the concept in its essence) so the choice was to either dig into the technical details about how to build such a thing ... or expand on it differently. For a number of reasons I thought that getting into the details wasn't the right thing (for me) to do, so I started thinking more about "why building Virtual Appliances" rather than "how to build Virtual Appliances".
So if you are going to VMworld 2007 and you are planning to come to this session, be prepared: you won't find how-to info nor technical details! This session is just a very high-level overview of...
- what the x86 world was in the past,
- what it is now and
- what it might look in the future.
In fact it is not even accurate to say that this session is about "why Virtual Appliances" or "the good reasons behind deploying software as Virtual Appliances"... In the final analysis this presentation tries to summarize the (good) trends we have seen in terms of Virtual Infrastructure deployments and why these trends are very compatible and complementary with the appliances concept. In a sense Virtual Appliances is an ISV play (i.e. "instead of distributing software on a cd you can now integrate and distribute it under the shape of a file"); my speech instead has a more infrastructure focus and it is intended to be a 60 minutes overview for "infrastructure people" sharing the reasons why where we are going from a virtual infrastructure perspective is going to intercept very efficiently this ISV trend to distribute software "as a virtual disk".
If, after reading this post, you are still interested in this :-) ... then you might want to get some background with these articles:
http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2007/03/11/4.aspx
http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2007/03/27/5.aspx
http://it20.info/blogs/main/archive/2007/06/25/32.aspx
In terms of pre-reqs ... the discussion doesn't require you to be a hands-on expert on VMware and virtualization in general.
Whatever you are going to attend at VMworld ... I hope you will find the event useful for your own business and that you enjoy your time! See you in San Francisco !
Massimo.