Interesting there wasn't much mentioned of "Cloud Computing" such as Amazon EC2 or the Enomalism Elastic Computing offering. This areas seems like one of the fastest growing segments in Virtualization.

This piece seems a little like a big PR release for my taste.

Enomalism Elastic Computing Platform
http://www.enomalism.com

Indeed, no where close to where virtualization and those complimentary tools will end up being in 2008. I'd rather say that there is a lot to watch out for.

Security will play a major role and there all Start-ups (Bluelane, Catbird, ReflexSecurity) and grown-ups (Symantec, McAfee et al) will play a major role.

Backup/Recovery will be hot as well. But why the heck would you want to do that in-house when you can SaaS it! We're freeing our resources (admins) etc to do better smarter jobs, right?

Marathon will play a very crucial role as we move on from the hype(rvisor) and start looking at HA and real time architectures.

Elastic Computing is a big trend coming this way and watch some start-ups in 2008 going that direction.

Management Tools will be hotter than optimization tools (backup, security, administration) as vendors (even the likes of VMware after having acquired Dunes, Propero, Determina) will push their own consolidated package to the clients and start giving away the hypervisor gratis! Firms like CiRBA do seem to do good but there is no guaranty that VMware wouldn't want to move on to the NTI (Near Time Infrastructure) and gradually to Live Infrastructure.

So lot is happening there. Lots!

I heard that PlateSpin just came out with a "DR in a box" appliance running on VMware Hyper-visor...very interesting...definitely a company to watch in 2008

Hi Reuven, based on my recent conversations with CIOs, elastic computing intrigues them but they're not using it yet...many of them cite regulatory and security concerns. I am however, interested to hear success stories from any of you who are using elastic/cloud computing. Feel free to email me.

I see that PlateSpin just came out with a recovery appliance using VMware... very interesting.

How did you miss Green Hills Software? They are the only company with a secure hypervisor:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6840642681.html

Wondering if these companies are positioning themselves as environmentally friendly / sustainable. If so, they should get in touch with me. Have a major thought leadership executive report going to market this coming Earth Day, on April 22, 2008. Working with the likes of Bob Willard, Stanford U, IDC, and others.

www.kyotoplanet.com

Interesting to see that EqualLogic is mentioned as a top storage provider for virtualization but NetApp isn't.

Personally I think that NetApp is much further in providing a complete virtualization solution to VMware (or Xen) users. With their own virtualization and the SnapManager for VI they actually provide a lot of added value. And let's not forget to explore the possibility to host VMware storage on NFS...

For VDI solutions they provide even more value with their FlexClone technology