Today I went to the VMware vSeminar Series for 2011, which was held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. This is the second vSeminar I've attended, so I had a basic idea of how the event would unfold and who the usual suspects (vendors) would be.

All and all, it was a good day, though they could have done more demos -- any demos really. The only ones we got to see, were pre-recorded videos, which is better than nothing, but it says to me that VMware are not confident that their products will be able to shine when shown live.


The two things that I was interesting to hear about at the event was VMware View/ThinApp, which I first saw at last year's vSeminar. I thought it was interesting and said to myself, I'll have to keep an eye on this product. They showed off a little bit of View but nothing on ThinApp, except for publishing web apps, which in reality, is a bit meh.


Finding out about vSphere 5 was cool, though VMware, if you need over 15 minutes and 10 page document to describe your licensing structure, then there is something really wrong with your model.


There was an illustration showing Steve Jobs in front of an iMac, which made me very intrigued and when an off the cuff remark was made that vSphere 5 now support Apple's OS X -- I nearly fell off my chair. At the end of the day, they were going to have a Q&A session using questions asked via twitter (#vss2011) or SMS. I asked two questions about OS X -- neither of which got answered. That was pretty disappointing since they was only about 4 other questions asked. I guess they didn't know.


Later on, it turned out they demoed OS X running on VMware -- but, it was just an Apple XServe (defunct product) running ESX. That's great, but not what anyone wants. We all want to be able to run OS X on a PC ESX server. Since vSphere 5 isn't out yet, only time will tell.