VMworld Europe 2013: Day 0

Having arrived in Barcelona yesterday for VMworld Europe 2013, I made it to the vRockstar event at the Hard Rock Cafe where everyone who’s anyone appeared to be there - you couldn’t move for those Xtravirt guys, they’re everywhere.

Not travelling on the Monday meant a full day of labs for me today and thankfully it was a highly successful experience after last year’s fiasco messed up my planned schedule.

I deliberately arrived for their opening to beat any queues as I wanted to get through as many today as possible, since it’s unlikely I’ll take any more when the main conference starts as there is too much else going on. Not everybody seems to know that they are usually open the day before the advertised start of VMworld, so you can effectively get an additional conference day if taking labs is something you wish to do. It’s advertised as a partner day, but particularly with the labs open it’s worth arriving early if you can. Although you can take the labs online these days via the excellent Project NEE I rarely find the time to dedicate to do this, so having a day to concentrate and blitz through some is most useful.

You can tell I was there for starting from the following photos, my Tumbleweed iPhone app came in most useful, it was like a Ghost town:

Consequently, I didn’t need to queue for either of my first two labs since there were a lot of empty seats between 8 - 10am.

Early kick off:

After late morning the place had filled up and there was usually around a 10 minute or so queue to get in, which is not a problem when there is such an excellent learning opportunity to hand. However, I managed to get through five labs, vCloud Automation Center (which was running version 6 - there’s a sneak peak for tomorrow ;-)), OpenStack, PuppetLabs (which had some interesting integration with vCenter I wasn’t aware of), VSAN and vFRC, and Operations Manager / LogInsight, and still spend some time catching up with the good community folks over in the bloggers lounger.

Headed over to the VMUG event this evening, always good to meet new folks who support this great community organisation.

Something I’m trying out this week following some inspiration from Darren Wollard is tracking the number of steps taken on a typical day of the conference. I’ve been using the Moves app for the last week or so and have typically been averaging around 3 - 4k steps on a normal working day -i.e. I sit on my butt coding a lot and really it isn’t enough. Fast forward to today and with the additional public transport commute the number of steps has increased a fair bit, so if you’re attending a conference like this you may want a comfortable pair of shoes :-)