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My earlier post focused on my general observations about VMworld and the hot topics in play. Needless to say from inside and around the Egenera booth, I was pretty overwhelmed by what a great reception our technology and our vision garnered.  Incidentally, this was our first year with a standalone booth at VMworld and it was great to meet the many data center managers who said “Wow, I’ve heard of you guys, and now I get to see your software and hardware in action." The more they saw how it worked, the more they liked it. I know I’m supposed to be modest but it’s hard when you’re coming off such positive feedback. I think people were pretty excited to check out our Capacity-on-Demand preview in action. Our SE team started with a demonstration of exactly how easy it is to create and deploy a server onto the hardware using the PAN Manager software.  When they saw the server booting up just after a few mouse click set-up, their attention became more intense.  PAN Manager software makes that possible - and the fact that we can guarantee seamless failover, plus deliver up to 70 percent reduction in capex and opex for the data center - well, suffice to say those are strong differentiators for Egenera and our customers. The pièce de résistance was the automatic failover.  The SE would walk them over from the PAN Manager software screen to the hardware, and then proceed to take out the blade from the chassis (we happened to be running PAN Manager on our own hardware for this demo).  A flashing blue light reappeared on another blade, and they walked back to the PAN Manager screen.  Voilà – the same server is automatically rebooting.  They were even more amazed, and it evoked further curiosity and questions – how did you do it, does it work with ESX, can you bring over the virtual machines, etc. Yes, you can do that with ESX, and PAN Manager software also runs on Dell and Fujitsu Siemens hardware so there's choice and flexibility along with performance! PAN Manager delivers today on the dynamic data center vision that most vendors are only talking about (anyone else noticed a lot of "journey" talk lately?), and has been for seven years in production. I'm glad to see the realization that this is possible NOW begin to catch on! Seeing is believing.  Never more so than with changing the paradigm towards the dynamic data center.  Many promise, few deliver.  Or they deliver something even more complex, which, let’s face it, doesn’t resolve anything.  It takes a demonstration first to show how it really works.  Then we get into meaningful discussions about the details – computing capacity, training, expandability and so on. PAN Manager software’s rapid ESX deployment and Capacity-On-Demand capabilities drew a lot of attention as users were looking for ways to accelerate their projects and optimize their hardware usage.  Users with (or planning) large environments see these as necessities not "nice to haves." On a final and lighter note, the attendees loved the orange Egenera bags.  It created a lot of buzz and everyone wanted one.  The whole show floor was glittering with orange. It happens to be my favorite color too ;)