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During last week’s vSphere launch event at VMware corporate headquarters in Palo Alto,  a few VMware employees with a passion for photography were allowed full access to photograph the event.  Employees, Guests, freedom of movement during the launch presentations…full access.  I was one of those photographers.  (Personally many thanks out to VMware Marketing to to allow us to do this!)

These photos are just a sampling of the full set from the vSphere launch that are available on my photography website.  The event took place on in the VMware fitness facility with employees packing the open area between the buildings and on the stairs of nearby buildings.

There was a slight delay in getting these photos up online as I had some personal commitments right after the launch event (my sister was in town visiting…family comes first) followed by this week on the road visiting customers.  There are a few more images that I will post later this week as well as a few videos that I shot during the launch (though the audio is not the best).

My favorite photo from the event is the front row of technology industry leaders who were present for the launch:

Left to right: Pat Gelsinger (Intel), Frank Hauck (EMC), Joe Tucci (EMC), Chad Sakac (EMC…guess he’s not just a virtualgeek but also a bit of a photo geek), Christopher Rence (FICO), Steve Harrod (VMware), John Chambers (Cisco), unknown, James Mouton (HP), Michael Dell (Dell).

(For those who are interested: I was using a Canon 5D mark II with a 70-200mm F2.8 L or 24-70mm F2.8 L lenses.  For the pixel peepers: yes the original images are 21 megapixels and the videos were shot in full 1080p HD.)

Tonight VMware has done their online announcement of vSphere 4.  While some may consider the branding of vSphere 4 as a Cloud Operating System just trendy technology marketing, there are enough new features, enhancements to existing capabilities, API hooks to enable new product add-ons, and partnership activity to have justified the re-branding away from technology to provide enterprises with Virtual Infrastructure to a solution that enables enterprises to operate their own cloud computing enrionment…a Cloud OS.

In case you haven’t read the disclosure like over on the right, I am currently employed by VMware as a Global Solutions Consultant.  This means that I have been talking to global customers about vSphere 4 for quite a while now.  And when it takes two hours to give a product road map that just touches on all the capabilities that a release includes, it’s big enough to be worth the re-branding.

Here is my launch day link roundup to VMware vSphere 4 for Enterprises:

• First Off, the Simulcast of the official launch by VMware Executives and Partner Community (9am PDT on April 21st) [Look for me snapping photos during the event, probably from behind a big white lens...stay tuend for more on that tomorrow]
• vSphere list of Key Features (PDF)
• Summary of VMware product name changes
• vSphere is organized into two main sets of services
  • Application Services
    • Availability
    • Security
    • Scalability
  • Infrastructure Services
    • vCompute (ESX and ESXi are still there as the rock solid foundation)
    • vStorage: What’s New Whitepaper (PDF)
    • vNetwork: What’s New Whitepaper (PDF)
• vSphere editions for Enterprises
• vSphere Pricing, Packaging, and Licensing Whitepaper (PDF)
• vSphere Upgrade Center is now also live…start planning your migration from VI3 to vS4!

For non official teaser screen shots of various parts of vSphere 4, check out Jason Boche’s A random collection of what’s new vSphere eye candy.  I’m sure that there will be dozens of other blog posts in the near future talking about the various new or enhanced aspects of vSphere in wonderful technical glory.  I’ll try to share the best ones that I come across and that my customers post via my Twitter feed.

While vSphere contains enough things to keep every member of an IT staff talking for days, my focus over the next few days (besides discussing various parts of vSphere to my clients) will be to talk about the key aspects of vSphere that I think can help an enterprise continue to drive cost savings while enabling agile service delivery to the business, items like:

• Distributed Resource Scheduling and Distributed Power Management as they relate to an internal cloud
• Distributed Virtual Switching and it’s hooks into Application Services like vShield Zones and VMsafe
• Storage savings features of Thin Provisioning
• Fault Tolerance and the hidden revolution this provides
• Easing the Management burden using vCenter Orchestrator and vCenter Server Linked Mode and new licensing model

Enjoy the launch day festivities…