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.
First up on Wednesday I managed to squeeze into the early 8am PowerCLI session of Alan and Luc who covered some great info on PowerCLI Best (or recommended :-) ) Practices. I stayed in the same room for another automation session from William Lam and Alan who covered some of the new features in 5.1. William also demonstrated something engineers have been working on which I think was a way for linux based engineers to talk to vCenter and automate tasks in a similar way to PowerCLI.
So last day of VMworld and a short post to finish things off. The general session has some non-VMware sessions up with some football playing robots and the Google self-drive car.
I visited the vSphere Design session with Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie which was one of the best sessions I attended all week. Lots of useful information for the thought processes you need to put into a vSphere design.
So I’m finding the choice of food, shall we say interesting. If you’re not used to the American ‘breakfast’ then you might need to shop around yourself, here I was hunting for some fruit:
First up today was the Keynote with Steve Herrod and today was all about End User Computing. There were a lot of bloggers in the community lounge, so I figured it would be good to watch it in there where it would be live streamed on the big screen.
So after yesterday’s poor start I was really hoping for better today and thankfully it was.
First up was the keynote, starting out with some drummers, which seemed to influence some of the speakers later using words they shouldn’t be using at that age like ‘jiggy’.
It was streamed live and you can watch it here if you missed it.
The first main announcement was around vSphere 5.1 and it being bundled up into the vCloud Suite along with vCloud Director and Site Recovery Manager.
So, I have been looking forward to this trip for a LONG time. Having been to a couple of VMworld Europe events I decided it was time to cross the pond and check out the US version. Decided to fly out a few days early and check out some San Francisco sites, which has been great. Today was the first official day of the conference with registration open and the labs advertised as available for most of the day.
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend VMworld Europe 2011 in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, so here’s a wrap up post of my experiences there. I wasn’t sure until pretty much the last minute whether I would be able to go or not since my change in employment status was happening around the same time. Thankfully it worked out and my new employer allowed a few days off early in the contract to be able to attend the event.
If you are not already aware of the phenomenon that is PowerCLI-Man, well, where have you been? My sources tell me he may be making an appearance at VMworld Europe, so if you are not already going, I highly recommend you attend. In particular I would encourage you to attend VSP1882 or VSP1883 for your best chance to see him………
PowerCLI @ VMworld Europe from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.
I made my first trip to a VMworld conference this week and had a fantastic time learning in sessions and labs and mixing with some great virtualisation minds from around Europe and the rest of the World. I would highly recommend anyone with an interest in virtualisation to take the opportunity to go to one in the future if possible. I thought I would put together a post of some of the highlights, so in no particular order other than notes I made on the way, home here goes!