VMware holds largest UK conference

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.