Don’t miss VMworld 2012!
Barcelona October 9-11

Learn about the latest virtualization technologies and strategies which can help your organization realize its’ vision for a cloud computing approach to IT.

So you guys might want to update your calendar!

Alan Renouf (left) and Frank Denneman (right)… always working on a new blog article

Carter Shanklin (left) and Simon Long (right)… yes it was a very long day

Luc Dekens

Massimo Re Ferre’ watching his back in the train… I guess he is used to Italy.

Kyle Gleed

Mike Laverick

Fabio Rapposelli

Bouke Groenescheij

Chris Colotti and David Hill

Jason Boche (left) wondering what Frank Denneman (right) is talking about…

First of all, let me say that I love the city of Copenhagen. I like the fact that it is clean, they have great public transportation and in most restaurants the food is great and the service okay (for European standards). The Bella Conference Center is an excellent location in my opinion. The rooms are nicely setup, to be honest the lights and audio were much better than in Las Vegas. Surprising in my opinion as you would expect that in Las Vegas they are better equipped for conferences like these.

I also love the fact that it is relatively “small” show compared to VMworld US and for some reason it also seems that the audience is different. Definitely one thing I noticed during the sessions I attended is that it is difficult to break the ice. Even at the end of the sessions I noticed far less people asked questions then during the sessions I attended in Las Vegas. This had me worried for a while as Chris Colotti, Frank Denneman and I were scheduled for a Q and A. As Chris stated on twitter, without Qs there will be no As. Besides a couple of sessions I had a lot of meetings scheduled, the week before VMworld my schedule looked fairly empty but it completely filled up with meetings the days before it started, but I cannot complain as I learned a lot from these meetings as well. Every customer has a different use case / perspective and that helps me again when writing articles or when providing feedback to the Product Managers and Engineers.

We started on Monday at the TAM day with a technical discussion panel on Cloud and all challenges around it. We had a lot of questions around security, availability, compliance, networking, storage and resource management. It was definitely an interesting session as it gave a good perspective of the challenges our customers are facing and the things people care about when it comes to cloud infrastructures or offerings.

On Tuesday I had my Experts One on One session scheduled and I actually managed to attend some sessions. The Experts One on One was great, particular one 15 minute slot as that person showed up with a full diagram of his environment and we discussed some design considerations around his metro clustering solution. My vSphere Q&A session, which I co-presented with Chris Colotti and Frank Denneman was scheduled on Wednesday at 15:00. It was scheduled  in one of the larger rooms and the place filled up. Chris Colotti kicked off with a short introduction of the session and himself after which Frank and I followed. This was the point at which the audience needed to start asking questions… luckily the first person got up and our lovely assistant David Hill ran up and handed the microphone. We were off and it did not stop until the very last second. Great questions and in my opinion it was a very entertaining and educational session. Considering our survey scores I would say that the audience fully agreed. I could not be happier about the outcome (see below).

• How would you are the session: 4.72 out of 5
• How likely are you to recommend this session: 9.14 out of 10
• How likely are you to implement what you’ve learned: 4.61 out of 5
• How would you rate the speakers overall effectiveness: 4.78 out of 5

For everyone who attended the Q and A please feel free to leave your comments here on how we can improve it in the future, or if there is something you would like to see different. (Different topic, different panel members, different format, etc etc.) I am open to all suggestions.

On Thursday I had my Group Discussion (GD43) planned. Again I did not know what to expect as many had told me that some of the Group Discussions were more a monologue because the audience did not speak up. I might have been lucky or I phrased my questions differently, but whatever was the reason is besides the point… It was GREAT again, just like in Las Vegas we ran out of time, but the interaction was awesome! Excellent discussions and great use cases provided by the audience. I hope they will do these at VMware Partner Exchange as well and of course next year at VMworld!

One of the other things that was definitely a highlight for me was the show down between the Dutch vMaffia and Matt of VMworld TV and the Monster VM. I think all of us had a huge laugh. Things like this is what makes VMworld fun and it is the reason I love working for VMware.

I want to thank a couple of people for an excellent time this week, Chris and Julie Colotti, David Hill, Alan Renouf, Raymon Epping, Mark Erica, Luc Dekens and Frank Denneman. I really enjoyed your company. See you at Partner Exchange or VMworld 2012 in San Francisco or Barcelona!

twitter.com/dutch_vmaffia

PowerCLI @ VMworld Europe from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.

I am so looking forward to this, PowerCLI-MAN is my hero! PS: Add PowerCLI-MAN on Facebook!

• Tuesday 13:30 – EXPERTS-01  – Knowledge Experts One-on-One
  These are 15 minute one-on-one session where you will get the chance to ask me anything. So if you want to sit down and discuss something make sure to schedule / book it!
• Wednesday 15:00 – VSP1682  VMware vSphere Clustering Q&A  (Twitter hashtag: #VSP1682)
  Our Q&A session… Frank Denneman and I will be answering anyone question related to HA, DRS, DPM or Storage DRS. Chris Colotti will be moderating it! We will be giving away a bunch of signed copies of our book again to those who manage to ask a question which stumps us. As Chris likes to call it stump the chumps.
• Thursday 11:00 – GD43  vSphere Clustering with Duncan Epping (Twitter hashtag: #GD43)
  This is a true group discussion. Room for roughly 50 people and I will ask several questions around HA / DRS / SDRS and we will discuss scenarios / environments / challenges. Make sure to sign up quickly as there are only 50 spots available!

Frank and I are also planning a book signing session, as soon as we have the details we will fill you in!

1. vSphere 5 Clustering Tech Deepdive (Self Publishing)
2. Admin VMware SRM Pre-­Publishing (VMware Press)
3. VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference (Wiley)
4. VMware vSphere Design (Wiley)
5. Cloud Comp w VMware vCloud Director (Usenix)
6. vSphere 5 DVD Training (TrainSignal)
7. Cloud Virtual Data Storage Networking (Taylor & Francis)
8. VCP VMware Certification for vSphere 4 (McGraw Hill)
9. Managing VMware Infrastructure w Win PowerShell (Sapien)
10. VCP4 Exam Cram (Pearson)

I want to thank DigitalGuru.com for giving us the opportunity to sell our book at VMworld.

There are a couple of sessions I want to plug as they were really successful during VMworld US and are worth attending in my opinion! Now mind most of these are not beginner sessions!

Yes I know… a lot of great sessions and I probably missed out on a few. Considering my session is scheduled on Thursday I am hoping to attend some of these and possible live blog them. The “regular” show runs from Tuesday morning until Thursday 16:00. The Monday before is Partnerday / TAMday / Education-Instructor Day. So if you are a partner, TAM customer or a VMware certified instructor make you sure you sign up for these! Another thing I wanted to point out are the keynote sessions:

Tuesday – 15.30 – 17.00
Wednesday – 09.00 – 10.00
Thursday – 09.00 – 10.30

I’ve been told that Steve Herrod will be speaking on Tuesday this year… be prepared for some cool demos!

** update: time slot changed for our session **

1. HOL-01 – Building your hybrid cloud
2. HOL-10 – Advanced Troubleshooting and Performance
3. HOL-05 – Datacenter Migration and Disaster Recovery Protection
4. HOL-14 – vSphere Automation with PowerCLI
5. HOL-07 – Using Virtual Distributed Switch and Network IO Control

Once again, great work by the VMworld Labs team… I know how much work it is, I have all respect in the world for the people organizing this every year and the people assisting every year!

Once again, it was my pleasure to meet all of you. Thanks for your support, thanks for the compliments, thanks for the feedback and lets hope we will meet again next year! I plan to be there in 2012 – San Francisco. For those who will be attending VMworld EMEA, see you in Copenhagen!

Before I forget, The Killers were amazing! One of the best bands these days in my opinion. I think I partly lost my voice due to the shouting along with The Killers. I think they played every single song I love. One of the few European bands that would be able to top this show would be the Arctic Monkeys or Editors! I’ve seen Editors live, they rock and I guess I don’t need to say anything about Arctic Monkeys!