This week I’m attending the second of two developer conferences on my schedule for this month. I noticed an interesting trend that I hadn’t seen discussed anywhere else before. Nearly every presenter is using some kind of virtualization technology to give their talks.
This is a terrific idea — it’s awesome to have a more or less pristine copy of your development environment that you can put into cold storage and spin up right before your talk is slated to begin.
I’m not sure why it’s taken until 2007 for this kind of virtualization to reach a tipping point, although it might have something to do with the success of Parallels on the Mac — as well as the fact that Microsoft released Virtual PC as a free product last year. (Although I should mention that I overheard more than one conversation at VSLive two weeks ago from presenters who were slagging Virtual PC’s performance.)
I’d be willing to bet that this trend will work its way into technology sales organizations soon if it hasn’t already.
Virtualization lets you start from a known good configuration but it presents new challenges in terms of syncing your virtual machine to external monitors and projectors. Getting your laptop to talk to the projector is always the big challenge whenever you do a technical talk, and virtualization doesn’t seem to help much. Right now I’m watching a presenter struggle with getting a VMWare machine on Windows to talk to the projector at the MySQL conference; the talk was supposed to have gotten started seven minutes ago.
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