So that’s it. Over until we all meet in Las Vegas next year but as I sit here in Terminal 1 at San Francisco airport waiting to go home lets think about what we saw this year.

After all I did see some things that really did excite me and I honestly think that we are going to see some HUGE changes in our industry over the next year or 2 and VMworld gave us a sneak peak at where things are going.

So 3i really blew me away. I have now had chance to play with this. Indeed in the office, I plugged the USB key into the back of a Dell D600 laptop and booted and a minute later, there we had a ESX server sitting on the network ready to go. So as I already run all my VMs off the SAN this now means that I can have real diskless servers with the OS (3i) running locally on the server in flash memory. I can take the server out of the box and have it running on the network in minutes and of course we are talking real servers here not blades.

On top of this we discover that HP have been shipping their DL380s and DL580s with internal USB ports for 2 years now which means that our existing estate will support this today.

Yes this really caught my eye.

But what else?

Still lots of talk about the whole green thing and several vendors were in attendance showing their wares. What I did spot however is a very neat solution to cooling that could work by combining a couple of different technologies which could knock 40% off our air con bill (and that’s a lot of cash). More on this at a later date.

DR is still not fully formed but things are moving in the right direction. Getting the VMs onto the 2nd site is easy, the new DR software from VMware will now let me boot these images on the new site but at the moment I still need hands on board to get the networks running so a true automated data centre fail over with zero touch is still not doable but we are getting there and I did see some stuff this week that gets us closer.

But the main thing this week was the attitude.

Last year in Los Angeles there were a lot of people (myself included) who were ready to go out there and do it. We had read the glossy brochure and were ready to go and set the world on fire with this new technology.

Well we are now a year on and have learnt a lot in the last year including what VMware doesn’t do. We are older, wiser and now looking to VMware to give us the cool stuff we know they are working on to take what is pretty good technology and make it into the best thing since sliced bread.

So as I stand here, I am still convinced that virtualisation will change the IT world as we know it. Taken a stage further, the server will become and appliance with solid state storage that looks nothing like a server as we know it but will run Windows, Linux Solarix etc. The physical server will just be a small, black box building block with everything embeded. Not blades but low power blocks.

So I look forward to next year. VMworld Europe is in Cannes in Feb 08 but I don’t think we will have seen much new stuff by then so I will wait 12 months so that Vegas is again full of new stuff.

And finally.

San Francisco was a fun city and somewhere I will return another day. You will find my photos by following the link on the right to my album and very last of all, thankyou to HP who made this trip possible.