Diary of a Bad Golfer

Overall I had hoped the event would be more technical.  It was held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.  This picture is looking outside from Moscone West.

The sessions were good but didn’t really go as in depth as I would have liked.

On Tuesday I sat in on the following presentations:

1. VMware Infrastructure 3 Design - Technology and Architechture Choices (Customer Panel)
2. VMware Infrastructure 3 Deployment - Best Practices and Overcoming Obstacles (Customer Panel)
3. Best Practices - Architecting Disaster Recovery Solutions for Geographically Disparate Sites
4. ESX Server Architectural Directions
5. Virtualization Assessment Considerations - The Second Step in a Successful Virtualization Project
6. Design, Build and Manage your SAN Environment with Fault-Tolerant, Disaster Recovery and Performance Criteria using VMware Infrastructure 3
7. Virtualized Recovery for Real Disasters

This was followed by a cruise around the San Francisco Bay sponsored by EqualLogic.  It was a pretty nice boat and a REALLY nice night out, unfortunately I could barely keep my eyes open and didn’t even make it to the top of the ship to take in the view.  Pics didn’t turn out good (again, BlackBerry) but here were a few.

At Pier 40 waiting for the ship.

Walking towards the ship.

Looking out the back of the ship.

The crappy picture does not do this justice, this was the Giants stadium, and from the bay you can see right into the stadium, I think this is where all the boats usually are on game day for home run balls.    

Wednesday started with the following:

1. Simply Addressing the Disaster Recovery Needs of Virtual Infrastructures
2. Optimizing Storage for Virtual Desktops
3. Scaling iSCSI SANs for Large Scale VMware Deployments
4. Scaling your Virtual Infrastructure - Getting Started
5. Scaling your Virtual Infrastructure for Larger Workloads
6. Tips and Tricks - Disaster Recovery in a Box

Wednesday night was the VMworld Party at Treasure Island which is an artificial island in the San Fran Bay.  There was a local band opening and the headliner was Smash Mouth.  There was a LOT of people there, everything was free, all sorts of carnival games, different types of food, live jazz, comedians etc.  One of the buildings was setup like a street town with different "businesses" along it, there was a comedy club, a sports bar, an arcade, a mexican restaurant among others.  I managed to grab a picture of just how packed this building was:

Thursday morning was a speech by John Chambers, possibly related to the free alcohol I did not make it to this speech in time.   The sessions I did make it to were:

1. Successful Disaster Recovery Testing for Virtualized Disaster Recovery
2. Building Scalability and Redundancy into a Multi-Site VMware Implementation
3. NFS & iSCSI - Performance Characterization and Best Practices
4. Exchange and SQL on ESX Server - Best Practices on Virtualization of Transcational Application Workloads
5. Best Practices for Multi-Site Data Center Relocation and Consolidation

I spent a fair amount of time in the Solutions Exchange, unfortunately there weren’t as many technical people at the booths as most people there would have liked, but it was still interesting to see some of the new products.  A number of virtual appliances that looked promising.  All in all it was a great trip, and next time I take a trip I will make sure to check that my camera works before I leave!

What a trip, really good event - I think I heard there ended up being about 12,000 attendees.  Unfortunately I missed the opening speeches where ESX Server 3i was unveiled - although this had been a rumor for awhile now.

Speaking of 3i that was one of the items in our gift bags, a USB stick with a beta version of 3i, the service console has been removed and it runs in a 32mb footprint.  Unfortunately I left mine at the hotel.

When I got out there I found that my camera no longer works so the only pictures I have of the event were taken with my BlackBerry, which didn’t exactly do a great job.

Example: