Those who follow me on twitter know that I was one of the Lab Captains at VMworld. I was not allowed to talk about the topic of my lab as the product was to be announced at VMworld(vCloud Director). I must say that I have never worked so hard in my life. Days of 14 hrs were considered “normal”, all just to ensure that the quality of the labs would meet your expectations.
It was the first time at VMworld US that it was self-paced labs only, and I guess you can say it was one huge hit. To be honest, I expected nothing less after the successes we had with this concept in Europe.
Many people have asked for the final numbers so I contacted the Lab Cloud team and here you go:
- Lab Cloud served up 30 lab topics. In 2009 we had 21 lab topics to select from. We had 480 lab seats, with 44 hours of labs resulting in a total of 21120 total lab hours!
- Every hour Lab Cloud was creating (deploying) and destroying (un-deploying) approximately 4000 Virtual Machines
- Lab Cloud delivered 15,344 labs. In 2009 we delivered approximately 4500 labs in total.
- Lab Cloud deployed a total of 145,097 VMs
The Top 10 labs were:
- VMware View 4.5 Install and Config (1515)
- VMware vSphere Perf & Tuning (1229)
- VMware ESX 4.1 new features (1112)
- VMware vCloud Director Install & Config (1019)
- Basic VMware vSphere Install & Config (829)
- VMware View 4.5 Advanced (811)
- VMware vSphere Troubleshooting (791)
- VMware vCenter SRM Install & Config (789)
- VMware vDS & Cisco Nexus 1KV (761)
- VMware vShield (734)
I am proud that the lab that I was responsible for, vCloud Director, came in fourth out of 30 topics. Especially considering there were many other excellent labs. By the way, the picture above is the actual dashboard that was used to display how many labs were done, VMs deployed etc…
Although VMworld EMEA will clearly not have 480 seats, I am 100% confident the labs will be a hit again. If you are planning on going to VMworld make sure you reserve time to attend the self paced labs, I guarantee it is worth your time!
For Dutch speaking visitors, I have a short interview online with Bob van der Werff, SE at VMware and also responsible for the labs at VMworld.
http://www.vmug.nl/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=183:vmworld-2010-interview-bob-van-der-werff-over-de-labs-op-vmworld&catid=46:vmworld-2010-san-francisco&Itemid=37
Those are some impressive numbers! I believe I completed a total of 10 labs (yours included) and they were all excellent! The whole setup was awesome and as someone who uses Lab Manager on a much smaller scale, I can definitely appreciate the design and execution of a project like this!
Thanks to you and the rest of the lab cloud team for their very hard work this year! The labs were a huge success in my opinion and definitely are worth your time at VMworld!
I’ve read on Twitter or maybe was it on a blogger post, that there are some guys who have completed all the 30 labs during the event! Is that true?
Yes it is true,
I think two actually managed to complete all labs.
Do you think VMware will ever release these labs to VMware Customers for a annual fee? I would love something like that.
I did about 10 Lab’s at VMworld and they were all great. It was excellent work that was put in to it.
Thanks.
Great work Duncan !
I know for sure that @ronsdavis completed all 30 labs first. I saw his initial tweet that he was on task to do just that. I met him at the Tweetup and he was well on his way.
There’s a link to his tweet in my blog post where Irish Spring (Greatest name ever) gave me a tour of the labs :
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/enterprise/b/tech-center/archive/2010/09/01/tour-of-vmworld-2010-hands-on-labs-with-irish-spring.aspx
Great work to the entire team on the labs !
Great job Duncan, too everyone involved. It was definitely the highlight of this years VMworld for me. I only did 3 or 4 labs but loved the fact that they was self-paced and easy to follow.
Shane,
I only had time to do one of the labs, but the entire setup was impressive. Everything was executed beautifully and I wish I had more free time to go to the labs. No doubt, going through ALL 30 labs required some discipline — I figured that would have consumed almost my entire trip.
Labs were excellent. Thanks to you and the entire crew for making such a positive experience for all. The hard work really payed off. Its always awesome when companies use what they sell to deliver real solutions.
Yes, the labs were my favorite part of the this years vmworld. So much improved over last years labs. I had some slowness here and there but for the most part I was impressed with their quality. I have been wanting to test many of the products, but didn’t have the build time to set them all up so the time in the 10 labs I did was invaluable to me.
Duncan helped me out personally with vCloud Director. Interesting product.
great job Duncan. I did both the install and configure and networking labs for vCloud Director. I’m really looking forward to your series in posts talking about the networking concept because it really is the most difficult to understand. Even after doing the lab, it still doesn’t completely make sense. Hopefully I can make it to more labs if I make it to Copenhagen to speak in October. Cheers Duncan and it was great meeting you at the B-Bar tweetup
I spent about 31 hours in the lab room to actually finish all 30 labs. I actually finished in the 34th hour. The other person who finished all 30, Michael C. Martino, finished very late in the day on the last day. These labs weren’t just fluff. There is a lot to learn in every lab. The key is, you can always go back and watch the sessions a couple weeks after the conference. At this point you can’t go back and do labs. I felt the best use of my time was to do labs first sessions later. The fact that they put up a contest for those who did the most labs was just icing on the cake. It only changed the number of labs I completed, 30 instead of a dozen or so.
I, too, finished all 30 labs. I had to restart a couple when I ran out of time due to some sluggishness (e.g. it took 60 minutes to instll the connection broker in the View 4.5 Install lab the first time). But overall my experience far exceeded my expectations. I finished around 4pm on Wednesday. Then, I revisited the vCD labs – definitely two of my favorite. Thanks Duncan for the excellent work (as always)! I had a Thursday morning flight or I would have been in there all day as well. The labs were absolutely invaluable! Again, hats off to all involved!
Thanks to Duncan for, as usual, writing this down and adding it to the collective web memory. Perhaps I can add some perspective to a few things as a member of the VMworld Labs Coreteam.
If anyone caught Dan Anderson’s advanced session on the LabCloud architecture & design, you’d hear him talk about the challenges of setting up the equiv. of three Fortune 500 DCs in less than three months, including gear that was lent, not purchased, for the effort. Many of the technologies used (like Infiniband) have never been used for this before. And yet, we were still able to run a full room all day with only minor balancing tweeks.
As for lab slowness, we discovered a ‘tipping point’ in our architecture that, once crossed, caused some but not all labs in a DC to suffer dramatic performance degradation (about 20x). We rebalanced and much of that was addressed live during the show. New ideas have been floated about how to re-architect to avoid this in the future.
2 videos of the labs (with stats) for those who missed it …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azC3A063Bms