As VMworld 2008 approaches, the virtualization industry faces a time of change as Microsoft, Citrix and Virtual Iron continue to step up VMware's competition. VMware made some significant announcements at VMworld Europe 2008 -- namely, the VMsafe application programming interfaces (APIs) and improvements in VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) via support for offline usage and thin clones. This year's VMworld will be held at the Venetian in Las Vegas from Sept. 15 through 18 – just a few short weeks away. What will VMware unveil? Rumors are rampant. Rather than offer more speculation, let's review VMware's strengths and weaknesses to highlight where new announcements would be the most useful.

VMware has the most mature, most feature-complete technology available on the market today. With a feature set that includes VMotion, Storage VMotion, distributed resource load balancing via VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and fault tolerance via VMware HA, VMware has a sizable lead on the competition. And they've already demonstrated more technologies that will increase the lead, such as continuous availability. This technology -- mirroring VMs in real time on separate physical servers -- was publicly demonstrated at VMworld 2007, and it appears to enable some exciting new possibilities for disaster recovery and business continuity. With other companies looking to unveil similar functionality for competing platforms in the near term, VMware will want to capitalize on this window of opportunity and get that ability released as soon as possible.