VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas kicks off today

Event will show IT leaders how to get the best out of the vSphere 5 virtualisation platform

The four-day VMworld 2011 starts today in Las Vegas, focusing on the latest virtualisation technologies and strategies to help organisations deliver a cloud computing approach to IT.

The major theme will be vSphere v5.0, VMware's primary virtualisation platform, which will be made "generally available" at the event.

There are nearly 150 sessions devoted to how to deploy, manage, and secure the system.

The big new feature in vSphere 5 is the ability to allow virtual machines (VMs) to use 1TB of memory running with 32-way symmetric multiprocessing.

The high availability architecture has also been upgraded, and storage distributed resource scheduling (DRS), profile-driven storage and automated host deployment had been added to the platform.

Also at VMworld 2011 will be nearly 80 group discussions with topics including applications management and networks, cloud security, data protection, memory management and storage. There'll also be 34 panel sessions, and 20 lab architecture sessions and 26 "hands-on" lab sessions.

Attendees can also schedule 15-minute one-on-one meetings with up to three experts at the event, and also see local rock band the The Killers performing at the VMworld party on 31 August.

The European VMworld 2011 event takes place in Copenhagen, running from 18-20 October.