Anyone attend VMware vForum 2009 in Sydney??

I’ve just come back from spending 2 days at the biggest virtualization forum in the ANZ region for 2009…the VMware vForum!

I must say that the event was huge with over 2500 attendees and over 60 technology vendors with their products, solutions and services on offer all circling around virtualization!

Cloud Computing being the new buzz was high point of discussion throughout the Forum. It is quite outstanding to see VMware as a market leader making leaps and bounds in this area and making it a reality. Here in ANZ we got to hear about how Telstra, Optus and MelbourneIT have already built or building their own public cloud offerings.

Now you might be thinking what exactly is cloud computing? Well the definition that seemed to come out of the forum is that:

Cloud Computing = IT as a Service (ITaaS)

in other words just like your telephone or electricity you only pay for what you use and IT resources should be the same.

So what else did we learn? Well got to learn a fair bit about VMware’s latest offerings vSphere 4 and all the new features and how you can leverage these in the organisation. Features such as automating much more of the remedial tasks of provisioning VM’sm, mananging them etc.

One cool feature is the Dynamic Resource Scheduler in conjuction with Dynamic Power Management that move workloads to other servers afterhours say and shutdown those servers completely saving power.

I’m definetly keen on trying out VMware’s offerings myself, for PicNet and our customers.