Being the first ever VMworld for me, everything is new! Booking a hotel on time is a good idea, having excellent walking shoes and a matching physique is very helpful and being able to process very much information in a short time is key.
Arriving on Sunday was a bit early, but it gave me some time to enjoy Barcelona. The weather was really good, the sun was very much present. I walked all over town and also visited the Ramblas, which is heavily guarded now. Everyday life has continued, but the fact that you see people in uniforms with big machine guns does remind you of the fact something terrible happened here. The beach was crowded, but I managed a nice lounge chair, a big beer and a plate of real Galician pulpo. For the ones that don't know, this is squid, cut into pieces on a wooden board, with olive oil and some spicy herbs. Fantastic, if you love seafood.
In the evening, we had our first meet-up at the vRockstar party, for which I got a ticket from Rob Beekmans. It was a nice start and got me a few new contacts and a few beers as well. The party is hosted by Patrick Redknap and Marco Broeken and their team. You may know him from Xtradesktop, the only VMware Daas provider. Now part of Uniserver, they have a nice future ahead of them.
The Monday was a day for VMware partners and has its limitations without a partner exchange pass. This is an addition to the normal fee which gives you access to certain sessions and a lunch. Other than attending two sessions about VSAN and NSX I also managed to do two Hands-On Labs. These provide a real life simulation of all kinds of VMware products to help you get to know them, or even practise your troubleshooting skills. These labs are always available online:
Here at the venue there is a separate space available for hundreds of visitors, either on a provided computer or on a BYOD basis. There are also expert lead labs where you get help and guidance throughout the lab they are presenting. There is also a really cool dashboard showing all kinds of metrics about the cloud systems all these labs are running on. They are based on actual virtual machines for granting you a real life experience. Yesterday, there were already more than a thousand labs created and Completed and more than 13000 virtual machines created. Have a look for yourself:
Yesterday evening we joined the #hackathon as Team1, under the leadership of Wouter Kursten, named CheckyMcViewcheck. The name of the event is a bit confusing, since it has more to do with coding than anything else. It was loads of fun, we learnt lot and tried to bribe the judges, which didn't work out as planned đ
Wouter has already posted a nice write-up of the evening, you can find that here.
Stay tuned for more in the days to come!