VMWorld Wrap-up

I know, I know, I said I would try and do a recap at the end of each day, and it showed so much promise at the end of the first day, but then I was out late at events, or I was out walking around looking at the crazies, or something else seemed to take my attention away from posting here, so that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it!

The last 4 days have been pretty crazy and I’ve gotten a TON of information from the vendors and the presenters here at VMWorld.  I will have to say, they put on a heck of a show overall.  The talks do get a bit preachy about the glories of VMWare and how much Hyper-V sucks (according to all the VMWare employees at least,) but the other resellers, such as Dell, HP, etc, seem to have embraced all the major virtualization players (VMWare, Hyper-V, and Citrix) and are more than happy to discuss the pros and cons of each one in purely an academic sense with very little bias towards one or the other. 

Since the last time I posted a large number of the sessions I have attended have been geared more towards the future of virtualization and what we as an IT community can do in order to move our environments towards that future.  It has been nice to see what’s out there currently in the market, and what’s going to be out there in the near future and it has greatly helped me come up with ideas of what I can do to help Blue Ridge move towards the future and give my users the best in cutting edge technology.

While most of the days have been filled with session, after session, and lab, after lab, there has been downtime and time to talk with IT professionals and see how other people are using the technology in their environments, of course, there’s also time to party!

Last night was a great time at the VMWorld Party.  The cover band that opened for INXS was really good.  They played pretty much everything ranging from The Who to Salt ‘n Pepper.  Sadly I did not get to see INXS because I was at the ARCADE!!!!  Yes, VMWorld bought out an entire Arcade for us geeks to play in for a whole night for free!  Not only were all the games free, but they also had free b33r!  I ended up spending the better part of the night there, but I had a great time and enjoyed meeting a number of other attendees and racing/fighting against them in various games.  I will have to admit though, this morning was a little rough (for myself along with a number of people I’ve spoken to today.)  But all-in-all it was a great time last night and nice accent mark on a great week. 

Today has been much of the same as the previous days, more sessions, more labs.  I went down to the exhibit hall for a bit, but it looked like a few of the vendors had already given up and their booths were empty.  The ones that still had some people around it had staff that looked pretty worn down, you would be too if you had to be happy and excited for 4 solid days.  As with everything else at this convention, I’d have to give all the exhibition staff an A+ for effort, even though the number of booth babes was a bit appalling at times, oh yeah, and I didn’t win an iPad *grumble, grumble*

Well, I have to admit, my first couple of days here were a bit of culture shock (there really are a large number of actually crazy people here in San Francisco) but in the end, they just become part of the background noise that makes up this town.  I do wish I would have had a bit more time to do some sight-seeing and check out Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Warf and the like, but for now, I’ll just have to be content with the small piece I did get to see, hey, I did get some Cheescake Factory for dinner one night so it really can’t be all bad!  Hope you all enjoyed reading my various Facebook, Twitter, and Blog posts, I’ll be back to gaming and “normal” IT life when I get back home tomorrow morning!

~C