Around 800 people turned up at The Brewery, Chiswell Street for what was VMWare's largest UK event. The company gave a quick overview on some of the new areas it was working on like memory and processor optimisation and VM management.
The Big Question that I didn't really get a good answer to was the support and licensing issue I've been blogging on these last few weeks.
Was I wrong to raise this question of licensing Oracle and IBM software for deployment on a VMWare soft partition, or the Microsoft support issue?
The majority of those 800 were VMWare users after all - how are they getting around these issues?
I spoke to two VMWare reference customers, John Lewis, the retailer and Standard Life, the life assurance company. Both had experienced licensing issues. Both wanted VMWare and the industry to resolve these issues. It is all very well for VMWare's vice president for technology development, Stephen Herrod, to tell me the company is working with many software providers on licensing and support, but we need results. And until the biggest names in the software business are on board, server virtualisation is going to be marginalised.
