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People started to arrive at VMworld 2006 for registration yesterday afternoon/evening (except for VMware Partners who had sessions Monday, so they were already there).



The morning general session was good as usual. One of the most interesting things was VMware's emphasis on saving the world from global warming… I think it was said a little tongue-in-cheek, but I could be wrong, they are from California! Diane Greene introduced a guy from PG&E who announced their new rebate program that will pay companies for reducing their server count using virtualization. Besides the power savings realized by server consolidation, you can also get credit on your account per server eliminated. That’s pretty cool.

There was then a demo about Virtual Infrastructure. It was somewhat interesting but nothing new. Next came a panel about virtual appliances. Lots of good stuff there. Last year the buzz seemed to be about the hosted desktop, this year, it seems that the virtual appliance is getting a lot of attention.

The last bit of the general session was an industry perspective from a few big dogs… Marc Andreessen (wrote mosaic), Andy Bechtolsheim (a chief architect at Sun) and David Cheriton (a professor of computer science at Stanford). It was mediated by Lee Gomes of the WSJ. This may have been the most entertaining and insightful part of this session. Cheriton, from academia was ranting (and mostly rightfully so) about how little attention is paid to quality in today’s programming. Andreessen likened PERL to crack and Bechtolsheim impressed everyone with his ability to wear a suit and tie WITH berks – and get away with it! He was the only one of the panelists who did not want to say anything specific about the topics… seemed he was worried about being misquoted or something. Anyway, it was all good stuff.

Next stop, the solutions exchange.