The labs were packed and my sessions I wanted to hit weren’t until this afternoon so I decided to get out and try and get some pictures of VMworld before it was too late.  All of the labs were in Moscone West building, the lines were pretty long already at 9am:

This is a shot of the registration area, I checked in on Sunday – the lines were pretty long but moved quickly.

This is a shot of the Roadside stop that had snacks and pop:

Note to my employer:  I did not blow off VMworld to try and get into the Apple announcement today:

Everybody is trying to figure it out:

Xsigo was giving away a ride in your choice of 3 sports cars, here was the Bugatti:

That is it for now! Back to the labs for me.

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The keynote was Tuesday morning and started out with a video asking “what is cloud” highlighting the fact that there isn’t a real definition of a cloud. The video made a reference to a cloud being like a pizza place – if you don’t have a kitchen at home you can use a dumb device (in this case a phone) to order your pizza.

The first speaker VMware’s Chief Marketing Officer who gave some stats on VMworld. This year there was 17,021 attendees and of those 55 have been to every VMworld since the inaugural one back in 2004. This year instead of having all the equipment onsite they are using a private cloud: some of it is onsite, some is at Terremark and some with Verizon. They are deploying 4000 virtual machines per hour from this hybrid cloud.

Paul Maritz, the CEO of VMware, spoke next and described the 3 phases of the IT journey. He said phase 1 is about IT production and focusing on hardware efficiency. Virtualizing things like file, print and web servers. Phase 2 was about the business resiliency core apps and finally phase 3 is having ITaaS agility and being able to enable the business. As we go through the phases, being able to migrate a workload from one virtual datacenter to another is important. With secure hybrid cloud computing you can migrate your workload from your virtual datacenter to a service provider cloud.

Finally Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware, spoke about some of the new maximums in vSphere 4.1 which was released recently. He focused on increased vMotion performance and how this is important when we are migrating workloads. Some of the other new features to 4.1 are being able to place shares on storage and network resources and VAAI which I hope to blog on in more depth later.

One acquisition he mentioned was Integrien, which offers proactive analysis for VMware environments.

Another announcement was what was formally called Project Redwood is now VMware vCloud Director (also planning on blogging on this more later).  He also mentioned the new vShield products which I had touched on in my previous post for a VMware View session I was in.

Finally Steve mentioned there is a new program called vCloud Datacenter Service which will have 5 partners at launch: Bluelock, Colt, SingTel, Terremark, and Verizon.  More information about this is available by clicking here.

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Sessions
The sessions were a little different this year as many have already noted. You didn’t need to register for a session, just show up and get in. After my first session I didn’t stand a chance on getting into my sessions I was hoping for and by that time it was too late to get to the others as well. Personally I would have preferred it like it has been other years – having to register before the event but knowing you will be able to get to the sessions you want. Having been to a VMworld before I wasn’t too disappointed by not getting into the sessions as I realized all the sessions will be available online and the true value of VMworld isn’t in the sessions (more on that later in this post).
Labs
The labs were great, albeit slow. I spent 43 minutes in the morning trying to get the installer to get to the license agreement step for the installer which was like step 2. I ended up leaving and coming back later to finish up. I did 2 labs today (was there 3 times, but had to finish the one I couldn’t my first time) and I think there is definitely value in doing the labs. Since the labs aren’t available post VMworld I think I will be spending more time in there and less time in sessions. These pictures don’t quite do justice to the size of the lab area but hopefully they can give a rough idea:

People
I can’t even begin to describe the people here, I have met some of the best VMware people that are out there and what really struck me is how friendly everyone is. There isn’t anywhere around Moscone you can go and not be able to strike up an impromptu virtualization discussion. I also thought it was funny how many of the MN VMUG people I have met for the first time while in San Francisco. I can’t say enough good things about the networking that is available at VMworld – worth the ticket price alone. As a side note, if you read this and I haven’t met you yet – shoot me an email, leave a comment on the post or preferably send me a tweet on Twitter.

That covers it for Monday, hard to believe it’s only the first day.

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