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

Less than 1 week to go now until VMworld Europe 2009 kicks off in Cannes, I will be there blogging about the content and this is a quick post to let you know what I will be doing during this time.

“the tools”

I’ve been using twitter for a while but not extensively; I’ve found it useful during sessions to share information that later makes it into proper full-blown blog posts; IMHO twitter definitely isn’t the end of the blog but it’s useful for this sort of real-time event.

I have my Blackberry 8120 with TwitterBerry as my tweet posting client, Google maps to find my way around and it’s built-in camera/video recorder via Qik. plus the usual email etc.

My laptop; Dell Latitude D620, Windows Vista and Microsoft Live Writer (and tweetdeck) 3G and WLAN access (hoping WLAN will be good!) and the usual corporate application stack

I have remote access back to my home lab via an SSL VPN (I’ve got a big post on my refreshed lab in the pipeline) should I come across anything cool I want to try out.

I have a Mimo Flip camera as kindly provided by VMware, I’m no video wizard but I’ll try and post up anything interesting that I come across – and hopefully try not to be on camera myself 🙂

“the schedule”

I’m at Partner day on Monday – so will be posting anything of interest (subject to any NDA material)

I’ve not fleshed out my conference schedule yet; but will do so later and post it up; I note there is no pre-registration for sessions this year and they have the whole PM on Thursday reserved for re-runs of popular/oversubscribed sessions so hopefully that will work out.

There is also an interesting ancillary meeting with Microsoft around their virtualization strategy which I will be attending and will post what I can, if you have anything specific to ask the top virtualization people @MS, comment away and I’ll ask what I can.

Once I finalise my intended sessions I’ll post them up.

“the official capacity”

My rather excellent employer, ioko have a stand in the vCloud zone and I’ll be manning the stand occasionally with my colleague TechHead. Typically lunchtime and the end of the day – if you have something specific you want to talk to me about drop me a line at simon dot gallagher at ioko.com or DM me on Twitter – I’d be happy to talk you through our managed services, my professional services team and the cloud reference architecture I’ve been developing for internal and customer use.

Zeus will also be at the event and are definitely worth checking out – indeed you might want to check out this joint case study on a project we completed to provide online video for Forumula One in record time. </plug>

“the ones to watch”

My twitter account is here, if you want to get in touch, or maybe meet-up DM me and I’ll see what we can arrange.

My Blog is obviously here and I’ve added the twitter feed to the homepage and the blog RSS feed here should you wish to subscribe

My Qik account is here, I’ll cross-post Qik links to twitter

VMWare have the virtual vmworld event here – free registration

The unofficial vmworld underworld site is here

“My hopes”

I hope for the following at VMworld…

• No crazy queues, and large session halls (SF 2007 still haunts me!)
• Good, stable Wireless
• ESX4 release or public beta dates
• More tangible vCloud technical information and roadmap
• Some interesting discussions with the community
• some good free stuff 🙂

Enjoy!