I am not at VMworld Europe this year but many of my colleagues are, including Geert Verbist and Vincent Vlieghe. I am staying home because, among other things, my colleague Tim Jacobs and myself are preparing our VDI seminars.

But these days, with Twitter and tools like Tweet Grid and Twitter Fall it’s possible to get a feel for what’s happening at the event realtime without being there.

So this being the day that Citrix officially announced free XenServer Enterprise, what was going on?

• VMware launched Partner University. Only partners (VIP, VAC, …) can access this and it’s a virtual campus with, in my opinion, good information about learning paths for sales, pre-sales and post-sales professionals.
• Microsoft is at VMworld, as they always have been. Maybe this time with a little less controversy than in Vegas?
• Many bloggers reported about partner day. Here and here for example. Gabrie van Zanten has a good overview about partner day at Virtualization Pro.
• Of course there is a strong focus on VDI with 2009 being touted as the year of client virtualization in all its aspects. There was a session about VDI with VMware View followed by a critical article by Brian Madden (he was in that session). Of course he’s right on the mark when he says that VMware should include TS/Citrix as an alternative and point at the pitfalls of application virtualization but you cannot blame VMware for focusing on VDI with the products they have (View/ThinApp and no TS/Citrix-like solution).
• It was known already but more was said about vCenter Server Heartbeat. Technodrone has a good overview. VMguru.nl has a summary with some pricing info at the bottom of the post. Pretty pricey if you ask me.
• VMware also talked about VMware vShield Zones, something they will provide more details about later this week. Session DC13 talks about it in more detail.
• A good post about VMware’s strategy for the coming years and the products that will take center stage can be found at VMGuru.nl. Products like vCenter Chargeback, CapacityIQ, Orchestrator and ConfigControl are what customers expect from VMware to continue to take the lead in the virtualization space. Some VMware partners that make competing products might not like this expansion but in our experience, customers typically expect these solutions from VMware and not some 3rd party vendor. VMware will have to make sure that these new tools integrate well into the existing infrastructure.
• There was a session about AppSpeed as well with more details and a general session coming this week.
• Duncan Epping talked about VMware vCenter on Linux Technology Preview. This is VirtualCenter Server and not the VI Client on Linux.
• Alex Barrett has an article on SearchServerVirtualization.com asking about the beef in VDC-OS. Indeed, the concept of VDC-OS is pretty good but the realization of this concept is still a way off. With the announcements coming this week however, we will be coming a few steps closer.
• Veeam is one of the first with VMware Ready Optimized certification or status. Their management pack for VMware has the logo.
• The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative will be launched. Eric Sloof reports about it here. If you are a PowerShell fan (like me), you will find this interesting.
• As always, Eric Sloof has a collection of movies at his site ntpro.nl.

As today was partner day, the avalanche of announcements from both VMware and its partners will only really start coming down tomorrow. Some interesting sessions are coming up as well like TA03 about Chargeback, DC01 about Orchestrator, DC18 about ConfigControl and TA22 about CapacityIQ.