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

I took a different approach to VMworld this year, usually I try to cram in as many sessions as possible and don’t usually spend much time on the hands-on labs. – this year I am planning to do a 60/40 mix of labs and sessions. Because the sessions are audio recorded I can review them at a later date and make the most of the hands-on labs whilst I’m on-site.

From what I saw today queues for sessions can be big, although if you get there early it’s not too bad, but this isn’t a new problem for VMworld I don’t think they’ll solve it unless they start to move to Tech-Ed scale venues. with 16k attendees at this VMworld in the US maybe the tipping point is coming, although they have added Moscone West to the facility this year which has helped a lot.

Whilst session queues may have been long the hands-on labs have been pretty quiet in Moscone West with no major queues and it’s open 8am until 10pm Monday and Tuesday so I think I’ll focus on that.

There wasn’t a main keynote on day 1, I quite like this as in VMworld’s of old there was a general keynote on day 1 which was more marketing/product announcements with the more interesting technical keynote and demos on Tuesday.

I did all of the labs for an upcoming cloud related product that cannot be named until tomorrow – which is funny as you can take the cloud director (oops :)) labs today, which is going to be useful as I’ll be working with it when I start at VMware next week 🙂

I also did my joint session with Eric Siebert and Simon Seagrave, we ran out of time for most of the demos I had lined up so I’m going to upload them to YouTube in the next couple of days and post them on my blog if you are interested to see how the vTARDIS performs and is configured.

I look forward to the keynote tomorrow and will try and blog as much as possible – although there are certainly a lot of people doing twitter this year, so maybe just click this link and watch the #vmworld hashtag 🙂