I'm making a mad six-hour dash to VMworld and back today. I'll be spending most of my time walking the expo to take a look at what technologies are worth looking at. My first fly-in-and-then-back-out conference experience, its a long day but only a short time to gather as much information as possible.

There have been a lot of rumors bandying about about what to expect from this year's VMworld. Cisco has some new technologies that enhance how networking works with ESX. Microsoft just before the conference announces their own no-cost ESXi equivalent called Hyper-V Server. This morning, I check up on Alessandro's web site, www.virtualization.info, and find a few bits on ESX 4.0 which is expected to be announced this week.

There's detailed info on his web site here. But the short of the new features to expect out of 4.0 are:

• 64bit kernel and console operating system (COS)
• clustered VirtualCenter Servers
• ESX hosts profile management
• cross-hosts virtual networking
• 8-way virtual SMP
• virtual machines fault tolerance across multiple hosts (the famous Continuous Availability presented last year)
• VMs and media library
• alarms on physical hardware faults
• access control on storage resources
• configuration change tracking
• full support for SATA local storage

I'll leave most of the pontification on this year's VMworld to those that're going to be there for longer. I will, however, report back on what I find in my own travels later this week.