With VMworld Europe 2008 behind us, looking back, one of the more interesting announcements from the show was around virtualization security and VMware's VMsafe. VMsafe is the company's new security architecture that includes an API for security vendors to gain much needed access to the hypervisor layer. According to VMware, the APIs will allow its partners to develop security solutions for virtualized applications in ways previously not possible with physical environments.

One of the claims to fame of VMware's virtualization products have been their ability to perform very well over the last few years - creating a benchmark, in my mind, for others to reach and achieve with their own platforms. Performance has been and continues to be one of those hot topics covered in the virtualization space. People are always trying to squeeze out every bit of performance that they can in their environment, and rightly so.

Desktops running on Pano Logic's ultra-slim thin-client device now run on VMware's latest hypervisor and support a variety of user-access models.

VMware has been the dominant player in the desktop and server virtualization market with products like VMware Workstation, VMware Server and VMware ESX Server. And now, the virtualization giant has enhanced its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution with the release of VMware Virtual Desktop Manager 2 - yet another product from VMware that was created by integrating technology acquired from one of its acquisitions, this time, Propero.

Tek-Tools Software, a provider of IT resource management software solutions, announced a new module for the company's Profiler Suite - Profiler for VMware. The new module is designed to optimize capacity utilization, performance, and availability of virtual IT infrastructures. With the addition of this module to the Profiler Suite, end users can now monitor all four IT infrastructure components – servers, storage, backup and apps – from one console including virtual servers.

One of the things I like about being in the IT industry is the sense of community. And as both VMware and virtualization in general continue to expand in popularity, the virtualization community continues to grow around it. Case in point, VMware offered a new feature with its VI 3.5 product, Storage VMotion, and members of the community have already started helping others through the creation of additional 3rd-party utilities that help expand the ease of use of this VMware feature.

Channel partners will bundle LeftHand's virtual SAN appliance with VMware licenses for an ESX infrastructure that can run on one piece of physical hardware.

VMware stock was the Wall Street technology darling with a story book beginning last year. Originally priced at $29, VMware stock (VMW) quickly soared as high as $125 last fall. However recently, the company's stock plunged by more than 30% after VMware posted "disappointing" earnings. So what was so disappointing in the news?

Tek-Tools tries to tame VMware's virtual servers along with storage.