Thousands of developers and IT pros are gathered in Barcelona right now, busy attending VMworld 2014, VMware’s European follow-up to its San Francisco event back in August.

Plenty has happened since then, not least an EMC shareholder’s open letter to the hardware storage giant urging it to sell off VMware.

So what can we expect from this year’s event? Here’s five things CBR is on the look out for…

Software-defined data centre

This was a central theme to VMware’s San Francisco event, which wants to be the provider behind a software-enabled data centre.

It announced a spate of moves towards a fully virtualised infrastructure, including new capabilities for its hybrid cloud platform, vCloud Air, for customers to build and deploy mobile and web apps.

Another covered its hyper-converged infrastructure, Evo: Rail, a software-defined back-end giving small offices and private clouds networking, storage and management.

A denial EMC has hurt its software-defined storage business

After Elliott Management bloodied noses at EMC with its open letter, expect VMware to provide a firm rebuttal of the points in that letter, particularly the one about EMC’s interest in legacy hardware storage affecting VMware’s performance in the software-defined storage market.

A new OpenStack framework

Another announcement from San Fran, VMware will hopefully expand on how adding OpenStack APIs to VMware infrastructure will allow customers to build on their infrastructure without the hardware costs.

VMware seems to hope that by providing OpenStack support, it can continue to be customers’ go-to software platform as they shift more infrastructure to the cloud.

But this is obviously a recognition on the part of VMware that cloud apps don’t need VMware technology to run on: opening up to OpenStack, then, provides a reason not to ditch VMware if they develop in the OpenStack cloud.

Big enhancements to NSX

Security will be a big theme for VMware’s network virtualisation software, NSX. Indeed, the NSX 6.1 release supports ‘micro-segmentation’, where virtualised networks can be divided into tiny, software-defined segments to reduce any malicious application’s scope of targets, because its network access becomes as small as those segments.

Back in August, it had 150 customers on NSX – it will be interesting to hear how many there are now.

Windows 10 support

At the start of the month, VMware released a Windows 10-ready virtual machine solution, Workstation 11.

Nicolas Rochard, a director for end-user computing at VMware, said: "VMware Workstation 11 will be the ultimate Swiss army knife that helps developers and IT administrators extend their virtual environments from their laptops, to the data centre and the public cloud."

It will hope this pushes its VM business ahead of rivals including Citrix.