ServerWatch's Amy Newman attended VMworld, and while the show's over, some themes became prevalent, intentionally or not. For instance, the stock market's wild gyrations weighed heavily on the minds of attendees...

Instead, the economy remained the elephant at the show. Whether it was casual hallway conversation or presentations, Wall Street loomed larger than Silicon Valley on everyone's mind. VMware spared no expense at the show, from the Wednesday night party at the Las Vegas Speedway to amenities throughout the show, and it seemed both incongruous and surreal. More than one attendee commented that it felt very much a it was a last hurrah.

On the technology side, there was a noticeable shift toward desktop virtualization. Is server and storage virtualization already passé?

Even more interesting was the focus on the desktop, or rather, the "client." Mobile devices may well be what ultimately drives acceptance of virtualization into the user side of the enterprise. In fact, client-side virtualization seemed to occupy the "hottest angle" role that storage previously held, perhaps because virtual storage has gained mainstream acceptance, and client-side virtualization will actually impact storage.

Catch the rest of her VMworld coverage, here and here.

Richard Adhikari over at InternetNews reports on VMware's focus on Virtual Appliances, the company's term for prepackaged virtualized computing environments.

VMware already has 900 software vendors who are offering virtual machine packages through its Virtual Appliance Marketplace, formerly known as the VMTN Virtual Appliances Directory.

VMware Studio, which can be downloaded from VMware's Web site, enables vendors to build customized virtual appliances that can be shipped in Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), a set of guidelines developed by a number of virtualization industry players.

Adhikari also covered the keynote where some of the themes included envisioning IT infrastructure as a "a single giant computer on which applications can be provisioned" and the future of application development.

VMware will evolve its infrastructure so that any management changes to the infrastructure do not impact the application layer at the load level, Maritz announced. "We want to help IT make sure the infrastructure is reliable, robust, secure without having to predict how it impacts their application load."

That distinction is critical because application development is changing, Maritz said. He said that the OS as we know it will be deconstructed and made more applicable to the application framework.

Did you attend VMworld? What was your take?