VMworld Europe 2010 – Wrap Up

Posted: October 18th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Travel, Virtualization | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments »

(the photo shows @BasRaayman, Me and @VMdoug, in order of appearance)

So VMworld Europe has come to an end, sadly this kind of events are always shorter than expected, but I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of interesting people and fellow tweeps.

I enjoyed many sessions, my favorite surely was BC7803: Planning and Designing an HA Cluster that Maximizes VM Uptime, presented by Duncan Epping and Marc Sevigny, this session covered many advanced aspects considered when designing HA clusters in simple and even complicated scenarios, like stretched campus clusters, very interesting.

Another session that I enjoyed was TA7805 Tech Preview: Storage DRS by Irfan Ahmad which is a cool guy and a great presenter (I didn’t fall asleep even if I was in a post-lunch coma :-) ) showed a really cool new feature that can literally disrupt what we do today to ensure storage fairness.

But the killer feature of VMworld this year were the hands-on labs, as I mentioned in a previous post, all the labs were hosted on the “Cloud” which was physically located across the Atlantic in Florida and Virginia (more information about the labs can be found here). All the labs were delivered via Wise Thin Clients using the PCoIP protocol, I completed several labs and never experienced a delay, the end user experience was awesome. Also it’s worth mentioning that every Lab was provisioned using virtualized ESX servers which is just plain cool! (and make me proud of my discoveries on how to run a virtualized ESX 3 back in 2007).

I also hung around the Blogger Lounge and had a quick chat with @plankers (which incidentally runs one of my favorite blogs: The Lone Sysadmin) and the one and only @BasRaayman (who is now part of the vSpecialist army), met the vNinja @h0bbel who took A LOT of pictures during the event (including the one featured in this post). I shook hands with @DuncanYB and @FrankDenneman (if you lived under a rock until today, they’re two of the most respected Virtualization Gurus around) and met a huge amount of Italian people interested in Virtualization, this meeting has sparked the creation of an Italian chapter of the VMware User Group, we created a LinkedIn Group and more than 70 people already subscribed to it.

We’re facing interesting times, let’s see what happens next :-)

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