VMworld – Day 1

I am dead tired so it will be a brief overview of my first day at VMworld. I had two sessions planned today and attended another 2 sessions. (Besides other meetings of course)

We started the day with #VSP1682 aka “vSphere Clustering Q&A. The room was packed to our surprise, you never know what you are up against at 08:00 on a Monday morning… It took off slowly but after the first two questions the questions keep on coming. There were some excellent questions. No need for me to write all of them down as Scott Lowe attended and man can he type fast judging by his session transcript! Thanks Scott for attending and for writing this great summary. Everyone else who attend thanks, much appreciated that you took the time to visit this session on a Monday morning at 08:00 in Las Vegas. If you have the time provide feedback, I just checked our feedback and it is looking excellent right now… although someone had a complain about our accents, but hey Frank and I are Dutch not much we can change about that :-). Hopefully it wasn’t too bad.

The second session of the day was on I attended, #VSP3116 by Frank Denneman and Valentin Hamburger. This session was titled “vSphere Resource Management Deepdive” and I thought it was good. Frank and Valentin explain all the caveats around Resource Pools, Limits, Reservations and DPM and there was a good interaction between them. Andrew Miller from Think Meta blogged most of the slide content, if you want to get an impression of what was discussed in more depth, check it here! Yes I agree with his summary, Frank is a Rock Star and Valentin really knows his stuff!

Next up was #vsp1956 aka the ESXi Quiz Show… I was one of the people who organized this and to be honest we didn’t know what to expect, it was something completely different and new and I thought it was cool for a first time. Yes I realize we had some difficulties and my apologies for the poor audio quality. Anyway, it seemed to me that many people enjoyed themselves and that was our goal for this session… entertainment, nothing less / nothing more. The vPredators managed to beat the vRaging Bulls in the pre-qualifying rounds and in the finals they beat VMware’s own vRaminators… Great job guys and once again thanks everyone for attending.

The last session I attended today was the General  Session. What can I say about it that you haven’t already read on twitter or all the other blogs. First of all was that intro great or what? I don’t know who’s responsible for creating these but they manage to surprise me every single year. The graphics were amazing once again, and especially on those big screens really impressive. Rick Jackson was up first and there were two things that stood out for me…. the VMUG leaders that were recognized and the fact that VMworld 2012 will be in San Francisco again next year August 27th until the 30th. Paul Maritz than came up spoke about the strategic direction of VMware for the upcoming years and how recent acquisitions fit in. I always enjoy listening to him. Especially the story around how the applications will evolve and how the world will look like 3 – 5 years from now. I guess what was exciting was vFabric Data Director, there’s a press release to be found here. vFabric Data Director is a self service database provisioning and operations solution which in the first release supports a virtualization optimized version of PostgreSQL. The cool thing about the vFabric Postgres is the fact that it is optimized for memory and snapshot management in a virtual environment.

After that we walked around at the solutions exchange… it is huge this year. I bumped in to the folks of HyTrust, Tintri, Veeam, Mozy and more… Definitely worth checking out!

Now it is time to get some sleep to wake up on time for the General Session by Steve Herrod. After that I will be manning the VMware Storage Booth for a couple of hours (until 11:30) so if you feel like it stop by and say hi.

PS: I spoke with the people at the VMworld Bookstore and our book is the number 1 selling book this year! How cool is that?!