Having seen a demonstration of how an iPhone could be used to manage virtual machines at last year’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas, I was disappointed that VMware executives didn’t have any news on the matter at this week’s VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes.

However, when I asked VMware vice president of emerging products, Dan Chu, about it this week he said the VMware  suite includes a web client that could be used on the iPhone to manage virtual machines.

Of course, the web client does not have the full set of features that the vClient software offers, he said. “Or at least, the public version of the web client doesn’t,” he added.

Now this is open to interpretation, but it sounds to me like VMware is developing a feature rich web client that could be used on a variety of devices in place of the current vClient offering. Could this be another sign of VMware’s gradual move away from relying on Windows PCs to host various parts of its management suite?