Virtualization, Windows, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Well, it starts a bit later today in the US, I went last year and it was a very useful and educational week, my only gripe was about scale – there were too many people and the place was too small, crazy queues for every session.

It seems they’ve moved to somewhere much bigger this year and I hear the attendance is up on 14k people from 10k last year.

I couldn’t make it this year, but I am going to Microsoft Tech-Ed – I’ve been to both of these a couple of times in the last few years and in my opinion they’re brilliant value for money. It costs about £1.5k GBP +expenses to go for a week.

Yes, it’s away from home and there plenty of opportunities to jolly it up after work hours but, to put it in context a normal 1 week technical training course on VMWare or Microsoft stuff in the UK costs upwards of £2-3k. I find most courses frustratingly slow and plodding and they focus in a narrow set of a products functionality and only ever at a high level, never really drilling down into the intimate details of a product as courses are delivered by trainers who are divorced from the technology and delivering a training package.

Whereas with VMWorld or Tech-Ed you can drive your own schedule; you can pick from various deep technical or high-level sessions across a wide range of products and tech.

There is always a good attendance from technical members of the product and engineering teams and partners, over the years I’ve had lots of in-depth discussions with the people who wrote the code and have gained far more understanding than I could ever get from a training course.

Tech-Ed, VMWorld are the only way to get up to speed with their current products, if I were to put it into numbers I’d say a training course could give you maybe 5% of what you would get out of Tech-Ed/VMWorld – unless your day job has a very narrow focus to one task and one product which has been around for a while. If you’re a consultant or Architect tasked with making and implementing technology decisions there is no argument – best money you (or your employer) will ever spend.

So, for those of us that couldn’t be here tonight here are my round up of links to the best “virtual event” coverage

Eric Sloof http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/

Scott Lowe http://blog.scottlowe.org/

VMWorld site http://vmworld.com/vmworld/index.jspa

Enjoy!

Edited for appalling spelling!