The second day of VMworld 2007 ended with the same result as the first day... I was exhausted! I may have been tired from a long day, but a successful day it was. One of the best things about these forums is being able to meet new people. And with well over 10,000 people in attendance, there was no shortage of new people to meet. Along with the new faces, I was happy to see some old friends from conventions past The second day of VMworld 2007 ended with the same result as the first day… I was exhausted! I may have been tired from a long day, but a successful day it was. One of the best things about these forums is being able to meet new people. And with well over 10,000 people in attendance, there was no shortage of new people to meet. Along with the new faces, I was happy to see some old friends from conventions past as well as old friends that I have never had the chance to meet face to face with until now.The morning started off like a bolt of lightning for me, getting to the show early to get a jump on things (who said you could sleep in later when you go to a convention?). The keynote presentation was given by the Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chambers. John predicts a second wave of innovation since the Internet, built on top of virtualization and the power of the network, creating new services and support models that will be driven by consumers. We keep coming up with new words or numbering systems, and it seems like we are already heading to the Virtual Datacenter 3.0 where all aspects are virtualized. Did we ever complete Virtual Datacenter 2.0? Anyway, all of the infrastructure gets virtualized in this world, servers, storage and networks. I’ve been waiting for this version of the datacenter world since the early part of 2000. Slow and steady wins the race I suppose. Moving from talk to action, Cisco then demonstrated for us a corporate portal that makes use of VMware’s VirtualCenter APIs to help automatically provision resources as needed. In addition, we saw Cisco’s VFrame console, showcasing how additional servers could be deployed and provisioned with VFrame workflows doing the orchestration.The demo went on, and while interesting, I couldn’t help but wonder about what happened to any announcements about virtual switches for ESX Server. It was afterall something that many of us anticipated hearing about – and without it, something seemed to be missing from the keynote. Other than that, Cisco like many of us find virtualization and green computing a top priority for next year. Leaving the keynote, the rest of the day was basically spent walking around the exhibit room when I could to find out who was there, what were they showing, and what new companies were popping up onto the radar screen. More on the technologies at a later time. Suffice to say, there was no shortage of interesting products being displayed in the exhibit hall. And then it is off to Treasure Island for a little entertainment and fun. Software Development