My first VMworld 2011 – A speaker’s recap – Day 1

How do you start to describe your first VMworld?  I think the best way is to use one word “WOW!”

It all started off with attending a session by Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) and Frank Denneman (@FrankDenneman) with Chris Colotti (@ccolotti) moderating.  This session was titled “VSP1682 – vSphere Clustering Q&A“.  It was very well organised and kudos to the guy that “Stumped the Chumps” and won the book for the unanswerable question.  During this session I met Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) who works in Technical Marketing and is a close friend of PowerCLIMan.  I had spoke with Alan numerous times on Twitter, and was cool to finally meet him.  I thoroughly enjoyed the live Q&A Duncan and Frank did, and was impressed with the sheer amount of people that turned up at 8am.

Once the session finished it was off to the Speaker Resource Centre with Chris Colotti. We were presenting a session titled “CIM1264 – Private vCloud Architecture Technical Deep Dive” three times that week. We wanted to make sure everything was perfect so spent quite a few hours reviewing and tweaking the Slide Decks ready for Tuesday’s session.  It was then time for lunch, a critical time of the day for any English man such as me.

After lunch I visited the hands on labs and spent a couple of hours in there playing.  Again I was blown away with the sheer number of people wanting to try the latest and greatest VMware products.  The labs were impressive, and knowing that everything was running using vCloud Director gave me a nice sense of satisfaction that we have a great product.  For those of you who are not aware, I work in the Global Cloud Centre of Excellence.

It was now time for the keynote with Paul Maritz.  I always enjoy the keynotes, its good to know what other divisions of the company are doing, and what the future plans are.  Then 5pm hit and I guess people started tweeting about the free beer in Solutions Exchange, so off we went trying to find some free beer….

Once in the Solutions Exchange, I was again impressed by the structure and layout of all the booths.  EMC had a nice booth, and this is where I met Tee Glasgow (@teeglasgow) for the first time.  He is one of the awesome vSpecialists over at EMC, who I always enjoy talking with when I meet them.  While I was there I finally recognised Nicholas Weaver (@lynxbat).  I have met this guy a few times previously, but he changes his hair and beard styles so often I am never sure if it is him or not.  The last time I met him after Partner Exchange in Orlando, he was neatly shaven, and had short hair… He also works in the vSpecialist Team.  Moving on around the solutions exchange, we stopped at the VirtaCore booth.  They gave us a demo of there latest vCloud Express offering.  This is really cool, they have built an awesome web front end to there vCloud director environment using the vCloud API’s.  It really is impressive.

After eating some of the roast beef and spring rolls, I met up with Duncan and Frank and we headed on over to the Fusion IO party across the road at Treasure Island.  The only way I can describe that party is “crazy”.  They have a great marketing setup, with the Marvel comic characters, and had a bouncy castle the full length of the room.  Was good fun.

It was now getting late, so I set off back to the hotel to get some rest to continue the next days awesomeness.