Today was day one at VMworld Europe, this year was my first time at VMworld so I didn’t really know what to expect.
As it was partner day today there was limited access to the show floor with the labs being open to the general public and a dedicated area for partner keynotes and sessions, as I work for a VMware partner I have access to the partner areas as well as the labs, I’m not going to blog much about the partner content but there was a big focus on the management tools as well as the usual cloud information.
Much of my time today was spent in the labs, I figured it was best to get in as many labs today before the general public arrive tomorrow. Altogether I sat four labs, the first lab for me was the EMC lab, the lab focused around their solutions in their product suite we looked the VNX vCenter plugin the Isilon product and also the Avamar backup product
I enjoyed the content of the EMC lab I’m not had much experience with EMC products so it was useful to see what was in their product range and how to work with it.
The second lab was VMware troubleshooting lab I took the first lab of the two part series, the first part goes over the basics of troubleshooting and although there was number of elements within this lab that I was already aware of there was still some items that i was able pick up on, there was also a sneak peak of a tool in production vTop that produces the ESXTOP content in a GUI fashion, I’m hoping to do the second part of the lab tomorrow.
My third lab was the VMware thinapp lab, although this is an area where I am quite comfortable I was aware it contained a sample of what to expect from the VMware ThinApp factory. I was very impressed! This is one of the longer labs that I have sat through so far with some 225 pages of information / instruction to read through.
My final lab of the day was the PowerCLI session, I decided to start from the beginning which was aimed at beginners as I didn’t want to miss anything. The scenario was aimed around building a new vSphere 5 environment by copy all the settings and configuration from a vSphere 4 environment. Whilst their were some very impressive scripts in action to copy the settings and apply to the new environment the lab was written in such a way that you ran the scripts then looked at how it worked, I would have preferred to have been walked through how to create it etc. The more advanced section at the end concentrated on a number of areas, I was very interested to learn about invoking actions inside a VM with invoke-vmscript commands which I hadn’t used before.
I was very impressed with the labs, the labs were one of the main reasons I wanted to attend VMworld and I haven’t been disappointed, there seems a good mix of content, the speed has been good and the small problems I have had with the labs have been sorted very quickly. I am going to continue to plough through the most relevant content first then will step out my comfort zone and really start digging into the vCloud Director labs.
Most of the rest of my day involved various partner sessions, I met up with a lot of the London VMUG crew it’s been great to chat and hope for more of the same of that as the week goes on. I also finally briefly met John Troyer himself, Gabe from GabesVirtualWorld and EMC vSpecialst Bas Raaymen amongst many others.
Food and a band was put on for partners in the evening prior to the various parties going on around the city, most people have gone to the Danish VMUG party tonight sponsored by Veeam, call me old or boring but I have given it a miss to crash out to ensure I’m ready for tomorrow.
I am going to try and get in a lab at 8am prior to my 9am session, VMware View Troubleshooting. The solution exchange also opens tomorrow so I look forward to seeing what all the vendors have to offer.
Virtualised Reality 