Today was the partner day at VMworld EMEA taking place in Barcelona, this is my third VMworld and my second in Barcelona. With VMworld being back in Barcelona the show seems to have been tweaked somewhat for the better, with the Solutions Exchange being directly above the Sessions and the Hang Out Space, Hands on Labs and General Session, this should hopefully limit somewhat the walking from one side to the other but with the size of the venue this is still going to be inevitable.
Today as usual the show started with the Partner only day but the Hands on Labs being open to all, I started my day taking lab 1309 as a refresher on Mirage, in this lab you follow through many actions in Mirage such as creating and deploying an application layer, upgrading an XP desktop to Windows 7 and reviewing the new web interface. I have sat this lab before on Project Nee but it served as a good refresher, if you are looking to get a better understanding of the Horizon Suite I would recommend the lab.
Passing between the labs and the sessions halls you will pass the VMware time machine where you are able to go back in time to see VMware’s journey to where they are today.
The day offered a good opportunity to catch up with old friends and new faces in the bloggers lounge.
Photo By @JeremyBowman
Whilst in the blogger area I used the opportunity to try one of the labs using my tablet, as Firefox was recommended I actually worked in the lab via a View desktop from my Surface RT, the lab I concentrated on was 1308 which concentrates on the VSAN, this was a really interesting lab for me and I am going to be interested to see how the VSAN progresses out of beta into a finalised product, from both a technical and pricing perspective. If priced appropriately it could certainly offer a serious alternative to traditional shared storage. I didn’t complete the lab due to time but I look forward to coming back to this lab at a later time.
The rest of my day at the show was spent on various partner sessions generally focusing on a firm passion of my end user computing, what is very apparent in end user computing is there isn’t a single solution that fits all use cases and that a hybrid approach is the only way you are going to have a successful end user solution. As such the Horizon suite is looking to fill this gap with View for VDI, Mirage for physical and Workspace brining all the components together including SaaS and data. It was made apparent during the sessions that we can expect some End User Computing announcement during the course of the show.
The partner day finished with the partner keynote focusing on the success of VMware with its partners and how it continues to build on its partnerships and finally a partner appreciation style that took a street theme with street painters and performers, this theme is being taken throughout the show through to the party on Wednesday. It was also announced that VMworld would be back in Barcelona next year during the same week in October.
My evening was spent catching up with lots of friends at the Pernix Data party at beach club boo which offered a lovely beach front location with views over Barcelona, I look forward to learning more about Pernix over the course of the week.
Along with a number of community members I have been tracking my number of steps using my FitBit One the total for today was 20,236 which was approx 9 miles.
I’m looking forward to day 1 and if you see me about please say Hi, I am particularly interested to hear your end user computing stories and compare notes on what does and doesn’t work when it comes to VDI.
Virtualised Reality 