Quoting from ADTMag
The West Coast edition of the biannual LinuxWorld Conference and Expo has come and gone. Here are some observations of my week in San Francisco among the Penguinistas.
Buzzword of the Show: Virtualization.
It was deafening. XenSource gave a keynote. There were sessions on the subject. Just about all the big vendors were talking about their virtualization strategies. And the presentations at the VMware booth were standing room only.
It's not surprising to see virtualization making such a splash at a LinuxWorld show. It wasn't that long ago that VMware , the company that resurrected virtualization from the mainframe graveyard for the x86 platform, began marketing its first products as a means of running Linux on Windows machines.
''A lot of people thought that we were just a Linux tool,'' company co-founder Mendel Rosenblum told me in an earlier interview, ''but we had bigger plans than that.''
Rosenblum, who is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-founded VMware with his wife, Diane Green, Stanford grad students Edouard Gugnion and Scott Devine, and Berkeley engineer Edward Wang, back in 1998. VMware has a lot of competition these days, as this show demonstrates. But the company is staying ahead, said Jack Lo, VMware's senior director of R&D, with ever-evolving management services based on the increasingly sophisticated demands of its customers.
''Once people start using virtualization,'' Lo said, '' they realize that it's a very powerful technology. If you look at the progression of our products, server consolidation was Generation One. Then people started deploying virtualization onto a lot of different servers, so they needed some way of providing central management. Now our customers are beginning to see virtualization as a rich stack of services. With the third generation (VMware Infrastructure 3) we're saying that you're really looking at a distributed infrastructure based on virtualization, and here's how you can you provide a lot of services in this layer across all of the workloads that you are trying to run.''
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Read the rest of his roundup, here.