If you attended VMworld 2006 in Los Angeles and thought you were surrounded by a large flock of virtualization users, you probably wouldn't have imagined the number of people that descended on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this year. In my mind, two recent events have defined just how big virtualization has become. Obviously, the first is the not talked about enough IPO of VMware. And the second, the numbe If you attended VMworld 2006 in Los Angeles and thought you were surrounded by a large flock of virtualization users, you probably wouldn’t have imagined the number of people that descended on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this year. In my mind, two recent events have defined just how big virtualization has become. Obviously, the first is the not talked about enough IPO of VMware. And the second, the number of VMworld 2007 attendees and exhibition booths. I mean, who is going to argue with a billion dollars made from an IPO and the fact that 11,000 people all gathered around in one place to find out about one topic… not me! Virtualization is definitely more than buzz folks. Climb aboard.The VMworld conference officially kicked off today for everyone, although many people were in attendance the day before for Technology day and Partner Day, and of course, plenty of virtual fun at any number of bars located around the city. Virtualization engineers know how to have fun. Kicking the show off, Diane Greene said it best when she said that a year ago, we were talking about virtualization becoming mainstream, now, we’re talking about a virtualization industry.One of the most interesting things was watching Diane and Mark Jarvis, Dell’s CMO, introduce us to the embedded VMware (ESX Server 3i – no, it isn’t a new BWM) hypervisor.Similar to last year, the talk continued about virtual desktops, virtual appliances and the green computing initiatives that we keep hearing so much about these days. Pat Gelsinger, a Senior VP and GM at Intel, took the stage and discussed several virtualization areas of focus such as FlexMigration (helping live migration across processor types), Extended Page Tables and virtual processor IDs. The Intel talk included a discussion on the Intel VT-d architecture for directed I/O as well as Intel’s Virtual Machine Device Queues which reduces CPU utilization on network and storage devices. It then closed with a demo of the Xeon 7300 series processor and showed off some of its benchmarks.Hector Ruiz, Chairman and CEO of AMD took over and discussed their green computing efforts and the company’s energy efficiency which was showcased in the company’s datacenter in Austin by reducing power consumption by well over 70%. The company then discussed their recently announced AMD Quad-core Barcellona chip. The new AMD nested paging technology (AKA Rapid Virtualization Indexing or RVI) was explained – how it increases performance and helps reduce the size of the VMM. Karthik Rau returned to the stage to end the day’s keynote. And then, Day 1 launched into full gear as people scattered for the exhibit hall, breakout sessions and labs. Stay tuned! Software Development