Yes­ter­day I attended VMware Forum 2011 in Oslo (Norwegian).

The venue and loca­tion at DogA — the Nor­we­gian Cen­tre for Design and Archi­tec­ture was very nice, but sadly I must ask VMware who the intended audi­ence for the VMware Forum event is?

Accord­ing to the invi­ta­tion the audi­ence tar­get is:

Peo­ple that will ben­e­fit from attend­ing VMware Forum 2011 include:


CIO, CFO and Gen­eral Man­agers
Infra­struc­ture and Dat­a­cen­ter Man­agers
IT Man­agers and Direc­tors
Secu­rity Man­agers
Sys­tems Admin­is­tra­tors
Desk­top, SOE Man­agers
Appli­ca­tion Man­agers, Appli­ca­tion Admin­is­tra­tors
Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­ers
IT Pro­cure­ment Mangers

Sadly I fail to see how the VMware Forum 2011 in Oslo would be very ben­e­fi­cial for exist­ing VMware cus­tomers, at least not at a tech­ni­cal level. To me it seems like VMware Forum 2011 was more geared towards poten­tial new cus­tomers that haven’t seen the ben­e­fits of vir­tu­al­iza­tion yet, rather than being an even for exist­ing cus­tomers who are already run­ning their prod­ucts in their pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ments. To me this is a bit strange, since it’s very likely that all of the atten­dees are exist­ing cus­tomers already!

There were three “tracks” you could fol­low dur­ing the event, one of them mainly led by VMware employ­ees, the other two were spon­sor dri­ven and as far as I could gather it was mostly mar­ket­ing and not geared towards the more tech­ni­cal atten­dants of the event. Even the VMware led pre­sen­ta­tions were mostly mar­ket­ing biased, and did not dive deep into any sort of real world sce­nar­ios where I as an exist­ing vAd­min could get any real value out of it.

Even with pre­sen­ters like Vit­to­rio Viarengo, VP of Desk­top Prod­ucts at VMware, VMware failed to bring any­thing sig­nif­i­cantly new to the table and the pre­sen­ta­tions pretty much all started with VMware explain­ing their vision of “The Cloud” and their cus­tomers “Jour­ney to the Cloud” (pri­vate, pub­lic or hybrid). I don’t mind VMware evan­ge­liz­ing their cloud vision, and I fully expect them to, but as an attendee I don’t see why every pre­sen­ta­tion needs to start with the same slide deck explain­ing their three steps to the Holy Grail of Cloud­i­fi­ca­tion:

IT Pro­duc­tion ⇒ Busi­ness Pro­duc­tion ⇒ IT as a Service

In the keynote, that’s fine, but why do I need to see that slide, and it’s expla­na­tion, in every other ses­sion too? I under­stand that VMware is deliv­er­ing a mes­sage, but frankly doing it this way is some­what insult­ing to some­one who grasps the con­cept and got up at 05:00 am to catch a plane to attend the event.

Per­haps I’m being overly crit­i­cal, but VMware Forum 2011 did not meet my expec­ta­tions by a long shot. Of course, meet­ing up with Lars Trøen (blog) and Veg­ard Sag­bakken has a value on it’s own, but that’s not the pri­mary rea­son I had for attend­ing VMware Forum 2011.

Next year, please include a “tech­ni­cal” track us exist­ing vAd­mins can fol­low and get some real value out of. Give us some real world use cases, pre­sented by the clients them­selves, high­light­ing some non-marketing/fluff based sce­nar­ios.
Admins want the real deal, not cloud­speak.


I did get one real thing out of the event how­ever, and that is what Fusion IO and HP are doing with inte­gra­tion in their blades. You can read more of that over on Lars new site Core four. Fusion IO, HP Blades and VMware View sounds like VDI nir­vana, even if Atea did bring a paper­board Don­key and Horse on stage with them while presenting.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.