Paul Maritz sighting and validation of my VDI vision

Sitting in the first session of VMware Partner Day and Paul Maritz is presenting the vision for the week and future.  Just as I suspected, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud.  You can read a great synopsis here that actually came out last not from Scott Lowe.  Paul is basically regurgitating the same thing this morning, but I will add value by providing my $.02.

Okay, Virtual Datacenter OS.  I understand that (base VMware infrastructure and enhancements to run your servers and desktops).  Then we dove into Cloud and cloud management and that IT Managers are asking him how to “cloud enable” their datacenter.  This was all basically the same stuff that Scott has already reported on.

My biggest take away from Paul’s talk was about their comittment to the desktop.  Just as I predicted late last week in Vmworld Underground forums, VMware’s huge investment in desktop virtualization is a huge part of future VDI dominance.  Off-line VDI is key to the successful VDI deployments because 1. It helps address needs of people off-line (15%) and 2. Having a VM as close to the user as possible is just best for performance reasons.  Is Citrix going to do this?  Nope.  They don’t have client side virtualization.  Microsoft? – Yes, but it’s a Microsoft only solution (VMware is on Windows, Linux and Mac).  Parallels? – Maybe, but Mac only right now. VMware will own the VDI market in the next 1-2 years based on this theme of end-to-end virtualization, but that’s just one blogger’s viewpoint.

I came to this conference not too concerned about VDI, but I think I may try to hit a session or two now because it’s going to get big.  But in the short term they still have to deal with the protocol issue if they really want to take this market by storm.  If they can get their “ICA killer” up and running soon, VMware will probably eat Citrix’s lunch for them (not sure how Citrix can compete without a client-side virtualization platform).