The keynote focussed on a number of areas, but the major ones were virtualisation, Operations Manager and cloud services.
They made quite a big deal about the HyperV and Live Migration - mentions of VMware were noticeably absent from that part of the speech! Basically, there's not much in that space that we don't have already.
Upcoming, however was application virtualisation which did raise one or two interesting ideas. EUT (well, Mike) is already looking a little at virtualised applications for deployment purposes, but one of the ideas mentioned for forthcoming technology is to run virtualised server applications. The idea is that you can hot-migrate an running application from Windows server to Windows server, between physical and virtual. Key point there is that you could migrate the application off, patch and/or reboot the server operating system, then migrate back, which might have interesting implications for server uptimes and SLAs.
Operations Manager Virtual Machine Manager was the next major topic - VMware did rate a mention here, mainly because it can manage both VMware and MS environments, and can manage physical and virtual hosts, something that VirtualCenter can't do. It can also drill down to applications and services (primarily web services), and report availability across multiple servers too. Given the renewed push for Service catalog and application SLAs, this could be a useful reporting tool. But, naturally, you need to put in the runt work to model the applications and dependencies first!
Cloud Services was the final major thing - going forward, MS is developing all their services such that they can be run locally or in the cloud (Microsoft's Cloud!), and migrated between. One of the demos they did showed moving 5 user mailboxes from Exchange running locally to Exchange Online - including content - with no end user reconfiguration or intervention. Naturally, they didn't talk about security or firewall ports required, but I'm sure the info is available somewhere.
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