This was a fantastic conference, almost as good as Novell Brain Share. The only problem was that it was way over crowded, although the sessions where outstanding. The conference was held in the Venetian in a 5 story conference hall, with a huge vendor area, and extra large key note hall. What I did not do was attend the conference party, which from what I hear was a real fun time. First thing is that VMWare was really selling SLES10sp2 as the best OS to run on ESX host. This is because of the Paravirtualized kernel that Novell has included in SLES10sp2. I must have attended 5 sessions where the instructors mentioned SuSE as the best OS to be virtualized. One other thing mentioned was Novells acquisition of Plate Spin, a virtualization management engine. Plate spin has a few products and the ones that VMWare made sure we knew about was Power Recon and Power Convert. I am currently demoing power convert, and it seems to do it's job very well. Power Recon will take a look at your virtual environment, and then take a look at machines you wish to virtualized over a specified period of time to let you know not only if your virtual environment can handle the P2V workload, but also includes your savings in power and AC, very cool. Power convert handles migrations of workloads from P2v, P2P, V2P, and V2V. The nice thing about this, is that it works with Linux and Windows and does not require Active Directory. The main thing I was looking for at vmworld where products that did all the cool stuff, that could integrate with LDAP and not require AD. So what did I do at VMWORLD 2008.
Sunday: Arrived in Vegas, checked in to the Hotel, Meet up with my buddy Jack, his wife, and jacks boss. Jacks boss whos name I shall not mention due to national security reasons was a very technical old school directory who new his stuff so well, you had to keep on your toes around him. Lots of knowledge with a great outlook on the past to the present, and a great vision for the future. It was very good to see Jack as this was the first time I got to see him in almost 3 years, he still looks as cute as he did 3 years ago.
Monday: Registration at 8am, no breakfast, no lunch. Today is only for LAB's, no sessions. There was a small vendor party at 4:30pm where the vendors opened the booths for the first time and served all sorts of junk food and soda. Monday night was not a complete wash because I was able to spend a bit of time with my family that I brought with me.
Tuesday: Sessions begin, I did three sessions on Tuesday and learned a lot. On the way to the conference I was handed free poker chips from Microsoft. Those poker chips where attached to some card that I threw away. I wonder what was on the card? I spent the majority of my time in the vendor area, making contacts and calling Jack on his cell phone to bug him. Jack filled his schedule up with useless classes and spent no time in the vendor area. Tonight we all went to a small vendor party in a suit at the Venetian. Free beer and free food. Only problem is that I went to a buffet after the conference with a co-worker. We went to the buffet at the Wynn, very awsome, very expensive. You have to pay before you are seated, and you are also expected to your tip down. What I did not like is that they wrote the amount you tipped on your ticket that you gave to the seater. I think this set you up for seating and the service you would receive for the rest of the night. We didn't tip great because it's a buffet, and I find it hard to tip when I don't know how the service or food is yet.
Wednesday: More sessions, more vendor area, more Jack wasting his time in sessions and more me out getting free gear from the vendors. I meet up with Jack and his wife, plus Avy to head off to the conference party. When you see 17,000 people trying to load onto buses to go to a party, well it turns you off wanting to go. We all decided to go out for a nice dinner and have a night on the strip. Avy missed the gym so much he decided to use the treadmill at Baileys, I'm not sure but the treadmill looked a lot like a walkway to the casino. In Avy's defence moving walkway or not he did get a workout at Baily's even if people walking past him thought he was drunk. Before we went for our workout we had a good time at the Paris hotel drinking pina colada from what looked like a giant penis, descised as a ifle tower. I don't know but long, hard, and full of white stuff fits the description of a penis if you ask me.
Thursday: Final day of the conference, where I actually attended more sessions and learned lots about linux on VM. Jack finally broke away from classes around 3pm, but we only had an hour and a half to run through the vendors to get free stuff. The experience was a blast and I was so sad to say goodbye to Jack. I think I may be going to Brain Share this year since VMWORLD 2009 is in San Fransisco. Next time it's in Vegas I am there.
I stayed until Friday morning and we had a nice flight home. I brought back many free t-shirts and a lot gained knowledge on ESX and host performance. Make sure if you get a chance, go to a conference, they are a lot of fun.
Next time you are out, and it's cold out. Ask yourself "Jackit On, or Jackit Off"?
