VMware's largest UK user conference,Symposia 2007, was attended by almost
900 users at the Brewery in London.
Stephen Herrod, vice-president of technology at VMware,
presented the company's plan for its virtualisation technology, in
his keynote address.
He said one of the new developments VMware is working on is to
enable users to run larger
virtual machines. "At the moment a user can configure a virtual
server in VMware to emulate a four-way physical server with 16
Gbytes of memory," he said.
VMware is working on expanding this limit to enable users to run
larger virtual machines with more than four processors and more
than 16 Gbytes of memory.
The company is also working on improving the performance of its
virtualisation technology. "We need to support more memory," Herrod
said. Users often use VMware to run multiple copies of Windows
Server. This is not efficient as each copy requires its own memory.
Instead VMware is developing a memory sharing technology it claims
will enable VMware virtual machines running identical software to
share memory.
The third area of VMware's product strategy is to develop
desktop virtualisation.
Herrod said VMware was looking to offer virtual machine
synchronisation. This would allow end-users to use their PC over a
network as a thin client to access desktop operating systems and
applications that are actually run on a server as a virtual PC.
The technology VMware is developing is being designed to let
users continue working on their desktop when a network connection
is unavailable. The PC is synchronised with the virtual PC when the
user next connects to the corporate network.