As many of you know 300 people received this award during VMworld Europe 2009. During VMworld 2009 in San Francisco there was a vExpert “Session” hosted by John Troyer. John invited Steve Herrod for a Q&A session where the vExperts, and especially Mike, challenged Steve Herrod. Now most of these questions were product related but a couple were related to the vExpert Award and this is where I think it got interesting. As of now Steve Herrod is the executive sponsor for the vExpert program. What this will lead to is still unclear but during the session there was talk about Lab access, beta invitations and possibly NFR licenses which should be an incentive to start contributing to the community in any form or way. I guess this all will get shaped in the upcoming months as the new award rounds will most likely be started in November/December. For the next round however the amount of vExperts will be reduced. John has not specified a specific number yet but it will be more exclusive that’s a certainty.

The list of vExpers that signed up is immense, and I’m really glad to see that guys like Eric Siebert, Scott Herold, Steve Beaver and Scott Lowe are participating. (Amongst many others of course.) I guess the full list will be published soon and I hope all of you take some time to visit the community booth and ask the vExperts some challenging questions! I know I will so you vExperts guys better be prepared.

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to write any technical content but you can’t imagine how busy I’ve been. I’ve gathered all useful links and added them to this post. But just to give you an idea what I was up to during VMworld:

Arrived on Sunday at 15:00, dropped luggage at hotel and went to the Hands-on Labs. Started unpacking the thin-clients and helping with the lab environment till 20:00. Changed clothes and went to the Veeam party.

Monday, 08:30. Preparing the labs again. Testing lab manuals, setting up thin clients and solving SAN issues. Finished at 21:00 and went directly to the Dutch VMUG Meet and Greet.

Tuesday, 08:30. Back to the labs again and do some final testing. At 10:30 first people entered the labs and I had Community Booth duty the rest of the day till 19:30. Quickly changed clothes and back to the VMware Benelux party.

Wednesday, 08:30. Watched the keynotes and hurried off to the community booth again. Helped a couple of minutes at the labs but mainly booth duty. Went to the hotel at 18:30 to change clothes for the VMworld Party Cloud9.

Thursday, 08:30. Lab duty for the first couple op hours. Booth duty the rest of the day. Couldn’t feel my feet anymore after a couple of hours. When the solution exchange closed at 16:00 we needed to put everything in the original boxes again. All thin-clients / monitors / keyboards etc. 19:30, done, change clothes and went out for a decent meal… actually the first decent meal this week.

This, was just a quick write-up. But you can imagine that most VMware employees have been running around all day long, no time to eat / drink / sit down. Talking to people all day long, answering questions or just random chit-chat, there’s even no time to reflect and digest all the announcements. Keep in mind that even weeks before VMworld people are doing preparations. For instance the VI-Toolkit lab had been tested by at least 6 people two week before VMworld. When I visited VMworld as an “attendee” last year I honestly didn’t have a clue how much work an event like this really is.

For the Hands-on Labs: At least 1000 attendees visited each day. Yes a THOUSAND at least. I really loved the format of the labs, the open floor instead of the closed lab sections was also a great idea! I would have never expected that there would have been queues, but there were… Sometimes even over 20 people were waiting just to get in. Definitely a big compliment to all Hands-on Labs staff, they/we did a great job.

And let’s not forget the team that organized this event, great job! Thanks!!!

I hope I will be able to attend VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. Over 15.000 attendees are expected at the Moscone Center:

Congrats to all of you that will receive an email today! I know a lot of the vExperts will be at VMworld, so if you’re there please visit the Community Lounge/Booth today and introduce yourself… (if you haven’t already!)

Update, before I could click “Publish” a couple more names appeared, keep watching Twitter cause it will be chaos over the next couple of hours. I’m not going to post every single name cause soon John Troyer will release the complete list!

VMware vExperts are recognized for their service to the greater virtualization community. We’ve gotten a number of applications and nominations from both inside and outside of VMware. If you would like to apply yourself or nomination someone for consideration, the deadline for applications is midnight California time, Friday, February 6, 2009. We plan to announce the award winners later this month. Good luck!

[Update: just to be perfectly crystal clear, Friday night 23:59:59 PST, which is UTC - 8 hours. We might not pull the form down right away, because I'm not sure our web team will appreciate having to pull it at midnight Friday after a hard week of work. If the form is still there, I'll probably still accept your application, but I wouldn't be counting on that. It's an easy application, so I'd stop procrastinating at this point if I were you.]

Head over to the vExpert website and make sure your favorite bloggers has at least one nomination.

If you aren’t active in online places like the VMware Communities or the blogs, or if you aren’t active in your local virtualization community, then this award isn’t for you. However, if you’ve been thinking about getting started, I hope these awards are an inspiration. Being active in the community is a great way to get exposure to technologies that you don’t normally touch in your day job and to keep learning every day. (As the Roman smart dude Seneca put it “We learn by teaching.”)

I think this really captures the essence of what being a blogger / active VMTN member is about “we learn by teaching”. This is definitely what got me started and keeps me going. Writing down your thoughts clears your head and writing a technical article forces you to really understand the topic.

Now a lot of people have asked me who I will nominate. I guess I can come up with at least 20 people that deserve the nomination. I guess most of them are already nominated by now. I’m not going to list the people I will be nominating, but I guess most of you can probably guess who anyway.

Now headover to the vExpert nomination form and start nominating those who deserve this recognition in your opinion.