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VMware is taking its desktop virtualization and cloud computing products on the road.
VMware officials announced March 8 that they are packing such products as View for desktop virtualization, the vSphere virtualization platform and the vCenter Server virtualization management offering in a mobile data center that will travel to 150 cities in the United States and Canada throughout 2010.
VMware first announced its VMware Express tour Feb. 8 during the company’s Partner Exchange show in Las Vegas. It’s now hitting the road the week of March 8.
The traveling road show is being sponsored by Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, MDS Micro, NetApp and Xsigo.
“VMware Express represents a new way for us to go out into the community and show customers firsthand all the benefits they can achieve by using VMware solutions in their organizations,” Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer at VMware, said in a statement.
Among the scheduled stops are April 22 in Cincinnati for the Virtualization Forum show, May 10 to 13 in Boston for the EMC World event and June 27 to July 1 in Las Vegas for Cisco Live.
VMware’s mobile data center also includes a demo lab and a fully equipped conference room. It can enable businesses to create lab environments on the fly inside and outside the vehicle, company officials said.
Click here for a look at the mobile data center.
More businesses are looking to take advantage of virtualization in both their data centers and their desktop environments.
In the data center, Gartner analysts in October 2009 said virtualization is continuing to see adoption in x86 server environments. Virtualization in x86 systems has been around for more than a decade-promising better system utilization, data center consolidation, and reduced capital and operating expenses-though currently only 16 percent of workloads are running in virtual machines. However, Gartner expects that number to grow to about 50 percent of all x86 workloads by the end of 2012, which will represent about 58 million deployed servers.
Gartner analysts said small businesses were the fastest-growing market for VMs.
Desktop virtualization also is getting a lot of attention from top-tier vendors like VMware, Citrix Systems and Microsoft. A host of smaller companies, such as Wyse Technology, MokaFive, Pano Logic, Wanova and RingCube, also are looking to gain traction in the increasingly competitive space.