The annual event - hosted by US-based virtualisation-software company VMware and described by American journalists as the "Super Bowl" of cloud computing and virtualisation - took place from August 29 to September 1.

To accommodate all the participants, the conference sprawled through the huge halls and meeting rooms of the Sands Expo and Convention Centre, as well as filling the ballrooms of the adjacent Venetian, Palazzo and Wynn hotels.

The huge attendance became obvious when participants formed up into long queues to wait for registration before the four-day event. Breakfasts and lunches were served in a 35,000-square-metre hall, and the main sessions took place in a 16,500-square-metre hall, with an adjacent 17,500-square-metre hall used for trade exhibitions and recreational areas.

This year's attendance was more than 10 times larger than that at the first VMworld held in 2004, when there were about 1,600 participants.

The long hallways of the convention centre were often packed as people moved from one meeting room to another. There were hundreds of breakout sessions, group discussions, and "hands-on labs" for bloggers, analysts, consultants, customers, partners and journalists. All were described in an 84-page "pocket guide" given to participants.

Black-and-red VMworld 2011 backpacks were also distributed to every registered participant, and despite the busy conference schedule, the familiar black-and-red give-aways popped up regularly at nearby casino tables and slot machines.

At this year's VMworld - the theme of which was "Your Cloud, Own It" - executives of VMware focused on promoting desktop virtualisation and the company's expanding array of end-user computing products. VMware's goal is to make virtual desktops function in a way that is indistinguishable from physical ones.

Although VMware, with its 80-per-cent share of the global market, is often known as the "Microsoft of cloud computing and virtualisation", it is often attacked by the real Microsoft for its pricing scheme and marketing strategy for the cloud industry. The real Microsoft is also a player in the cloud-computing field.

Among the new VMware products launched during VMworld 2011 were View 5 for desktop virtualisation, Horizon Application Manager for Windows-based applications, and Horizon Mobile, which uses virtualisation to split work-issued smart phones into personal and company workspaces.

VMware said the new products "would help organisations break free from device-centric legacy desktop models and accelerate their journey to a new way to work in a post-PC era."

Even before this year's VMworld was completed, the date and venue for next extravaganza were announced: August 27 to August 31, 2012, in San Francisco. At that event, the number of participants jostling from hall to hall could exceed 20,000.