Tech Field Day Hometown gift exchange: a delegate experience.

As you may guess, I was lucky enough to be selected as a Tech Field Day Delegate recently and being my first TFD I wasn’t sure what to expect from it, but let me tell you: it’s definitely the best way to hear and know about Enterprise IT products, there’s no Kool-Aid involved and you get to talk with top notch people.

A new thing for Tech Field Day was the hometown gift exchange that took place the night before starting the visits.

All the delegates were requested to bring something for each delegate from home that could represent their hometown and who they are, to better know each other and to break the ice with the other delegates, an awesome idea if you ask me!

Everybody brought something from their own homeland: we got candies, cards, bottle openers, books, shot glasses, coasters, everything has been awesome but not for the gift itself, but for the story behind it, and the story behind every delegate as everyone was brought up to talk about himself and distribute the gifts.

So if you’ve been selected as a Tech Field Day delegate and you’re reading this because you don’t know what to bring here’s a three-tip list for you:

1. Bring something for every delegate (or make sure that everyone could share what you brought).
2. Don’t spend too much on it (I spent approximately 9$/each).
3. Bring something that represents where you’re coming from or that has a meaning to you.

I would like to thank again Stephen and Matt for letting me be part of this, it’s been an awesome experience.

Technorati Tags: techfieldday, Tech Field Day, tfd7

VCDX #58

So I finally made it, on Friday night I received an email from Melissa of the VCDX certification team stating:

Congratulations!  You have achieved the VMware Certified Design Expert on VI3 (VCDX3) certification.

Your VCDX number is:  VCDX58

I exploded with a scream of joy, I felt a mix of relieve, excitement and proudness, I really couldn’t believe that I made it.

I already wrote about my Defense experience in a previous post, I have nothing to add to it so I will just thank everybody who supported me through this journey, especially my wife, @esignoretti, @Andrea_Mauro, @drakpz and all the other guys on twitter!

This is truly the most difficult and rewarding achievement in my whole professional life, I wish the best of luck to everyone who will defend at PEX 2011 which will also be the last chance to become a VCDX on VI3.

Technorati Tags: travel, VMware, vcdx, virtualization

My own VCDX Defense experience

So today was my day, I spent the whole monday studying my materials like a recluse in my hotel room (my wife had an extra reserve of patience to burn , Today I woke up at 5:00am in order to prepare myself for the defense, I took a shower to clear my thoughts, had a quick breakfast and then drove from Burlington to Alewife to catch the T red line to Kendall, where the VMware offices are located.

I was a bit pessimistic about public transport (well, I’m used to those in Italy) so I ended up being very early (7.25am) to the appointment, I left my wife with a good book to read and I started rehearsing my initial presentation, at 8:05 they made me walk into the Panel room where I hooked up my Mac to the projector and the (in)famous iPad timer started running…

Everything is under NDA so I cannot disclose the questions, and I will not disclose who was on my Panel too (they can do that if they want) but it definitely was intense, unfortunately my spoken English is quite bad so I had to try to explain myself with simple articulations, I still don’t know if they were effective, definitely I was not satisfied with them.

The 75 minutes flew thru like they were 5, and if you normally don’t believe what you read on the internet about stuff, this is definitely not the case, BELIEVE everything they say about the VCDX defense.

After the defense I got 15 minutes to spare, I had some tea, visited the men’s room, checked out the stunning Boston panorama (the VMware offices are located on the 10th floor) and relaxed myself on the overly comfortable armchairs in the cafeteria, believe me, they were the most refreshing 15 minutes I ever had in my whole life.

After the break I walked into the room again for the Design and Troubleshooting part, obviously I can’t go into details here, I will just say that I was probably on the right track for the Design but I spent too much time on two things only, If I had to retry this I would have done things differently.

The troubleshooting scenario is the one that I was most confident with, I think I found the root cause and hope that my explanation of the problem was enough verbose and correct.

Now they’re going to let me know the outcome on Friday the 12th (or even Monday the 15th), I will eagerly wait for that email, in the meantime I still feel a sense of relief

For the VCDX candidates still having to defend here’s an advice that I quote from the great Jason Boche:

Tips for the Defense:

1) Know your design, I mean really know it.

2) Refer to tip #1

This is definitely the wisest advice.

Technorati Tags: travel, VCDX, VMware

VMworld Europe 2010 – Wrap Up

(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

Technorati Tags: VMware, VMworld, VMworld Europe

VMworld Europe 2010 – Day 1

I’m sitting at the blogger lounge right now with a couple of fellow tweeps: @h0bbel, @BasRaayman, @vladan, @maishsk and @VMDoug, with special thanks to Bas from which I borrowed the Macbook charger

First day at the VMworld Europe has been exciting so far, the networking options are really incredible, and I had the possibility to meet many fellow tweeps in person.

This morning at the keynote we saw some interesting demos, I really appreciated the Project Horizon demo, coupled with the iPad View client interaction which looks really stunning, also in a “eat your own dogfood” fashion the VMworld labs are running on a real hybrid cloud with farms located in Miami, FL (provided by Terremark) in Ashburn, VA (provided by Verizon) and locally here in Copenhagen (provided by Colt / VMware).

Back to Project Horizon (its name is now vCloud Request Manager), interestingly it seems that all the new products coming from VMware are converging to a more service-oriented architecture, also they’re moving from the old client/server model for their management products, we saw a quick demo of “Alive” which is a software made by Integrien which was acquired recently by VMware and it’s probably going to be the foundation for the next generation VMware management platform (think of it as a next generation vCenter).

So it’s everything for now, I’ll try to update this post this evening as I got back to my loculus*..Ahem..*Hotel Room

Technorati Tags: travel, VMware, VMworld, VMworld Europe