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It almost felt like back to school for technology last week at VMworld – a lot of excitement and movement in the industry. Not to mention, more attendees, more vendors and more vision. I had a blast! Predictably, everyone I talked to has some deployment of virtualization in production.  Of course, they were familiar with virtual machines and their basic operations and value. So what was interesting was that many people were strolling around the show floor looking for solutions to help them better manage their “virtual environments.” Not just their VMs. That was the dominant theme this year. I was pleased to see users thinking more broadly. There were many case study sessions illustrating, “how I did it and what I had learned”.  Technical sessions and presentations focused on features and products that deal with increased efficiency such as thin provisioning and streaming of VMs from a single image, and single logical domain presentation of network channels to reduce set-ups. There were the dozens of pure-play vendors, large and small, targeting basic manageability – network discovery of VMs, groupings and policies, event correlation to find the root cause of performance problems, finding “abandoned VMs” that were created eons ago but haven’t seen the light of day since.  The predominant sales pitch? Control VM sprawl – “you can only manage it if you know you got it!”  This was best illustrated by the programs that used a Google-like search engine to discover what you really have. The strange thing is that almost all these management solutions just focus on the VM layer in isolation without considering the other servers still running physical that power them from the depths. Have we really become so solely-focused on one layer in the entire data center? The IT world has long implemented the multi-tier application paradigm with light and focused application front-ends and mid-layer components passing information to heavy duty databases and transaction back-ends.  The latter is still best run on physical – they don’t need any extra overhead, and they don’t suffer from the drastic underutilization problems that this round of VM server consolidation is targeting.  So in my view, the “VM-only” management solution users are still only getting half the picture and less than half of the value they likely need.  VMware’s b-Hive acquisition promises to address a part of this – the end-to-end traffic analysis capability is a good start for customers.  Integrated physical and virtual management would be even better. One application that still hasn’t crossed the chasm is DR.  There is a palpable hesitance when those two letters are uttered.  I don’t know whether it's because of inner guilt (as in “I know I should have a more solid DR plan and technique”) or conditioned fear (as in flashbacks to performing tape restore and crossing your fingers that it will somehow reboot, or justifying the expense of another layer of idle equipment and software to CFOs).  But it goes to show that for DR adoption to become mainstream, it has to come right out of the box, with no extra knitting and weaving set-up, and no idle equipment. Those were my first thoughts on what was hot at VMworld. I’d love to hear your own observations! In my next post, I’ll talk a little more specifically about Egenera’s presence at VMworld – what we showed, what we learned and how the folks we spoke with reacted. Stay tuned! And as always, we welcome your feedback.