The week before last I attended the VMworld 2004 conference in San Diego. This event, hosted by VMware, surprised me. I got to the venue a little later than I had planned and went into the general session expecting to see maybe 300 or 400 people. There were about 1,600.

Now, I've been a big fan of VMware for some time because it makes it possible to run multiple copies of multiple operating systems on one machine. Indeed, there was a series of Gearhead columns on the product, which you could characterize as wildly enthusiastic.

VMware was gaining significant interest when EMC acquired the company last January, but little did I realize just how much of an impact VMware had made until I ran into these 1,600 fans.

Moreover the attendees weren't, as one vendor put it, "just from community colleges"; they were from Fortune-size companies, and about 20% came from overseas. Add to that about 30 partners, such as Dell, HP and IBM, and about 250 channel partners, and you can see something profound is happening.

I talked to several attendees, and it appeared two main issues were driving their interest. The first was server consolidation. Some customers have managed to reduce their server population by one-third.

In most enterprise environments server loadings are frequently far below platform capabilities. Running multiple virtual machines lets you take two or three servers running at 15% or 20% utilization and aggregate them onto one server that now runs at maybe 60%. Even better, you can move virtual machines from one physical server to another to readjust physical machine loadings.

Add to that the amount of rack space regained, the decreased power and cooling required, the reduced amount of hardware to maintain, and the fact that you can preserve the politics of server ownership within the organization, and you come up with a very compelling argument for VMware.

Then there is server management. Because of the architecture of VMware, activities such as provisioning, recovering and maintaining servers is vastly simplified. In short, virtual machine technology creates a more cost-effective enterprise infrastructure in just about every important category of service.

Among the partners at the event I saw a number of products that got me way overexcited: Softricity's SoftGrid is what I've wanted for years. It insulates Windows from applications and vice versa, and provides for applications the same vastly improved provisioning and management that VMware provides for operating systems. The combination of VMware and SoftGrid is amazing.