Archives for posts with tag: conference

VMware Forum 2012 Oslo

April 26, 12 //
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Just like last year, I got up really early and caught a 06:40 am flight from Bergen to Oslo to attend the VMware Forum. A cou­ple of things have changed since the last time, one of them being the venue.

This time around it was held at Ull­e­vaal Busi­ness Class, and the venue itself worked great for a one day con­fer­ence like this, divided into three sec­tions, two for par­al­lel ses­sions and one for the exhibitor area.

One of the other changes from last year, is that I now work for a VMware Part­ner, who was also a Plat­inum Spon­sor of the event. This was my first event work­ing for a part­ner, and I even had booth duty! Talk­ing with cus­tomers in a part­ner set­ting is quote dif­fer­ent from being a cus­tomer your­self, so that was inter­est­ing in an of itself. Sadly this also meant that I missed most of the ses­sions, but I did man­age to catch the keynote by Brian Gam­mage, VMware´s Chief Mar­ket Technologist.

I even got a “1-on-1″ ses­sion with Mr. Gam­mage, accom­pa­nied with a cou­ple of my col­leagues from EVRY Con­sult­ing, which was really inter­est­ing to say the least. Lis­ten­ing to some­one extremely knowl­edge­able and vision­ary, in a small non-speaking set­ting was an eye-opener with regards to how VMware sees the future of end user com­put­ing. Sadly I can´t go into details about it, but I´m con­fi­dent that VMware has a strat­egy in the works that might just sur­prise more than a few people.

Unfor­tu­nately this “1-on-1″ ses­sion col­lided with both Joel Lindberg´s and Lee Dilworth´s ses­sions, so I didn´t catch any of those, which in real­ity was the two ses­sions I was look­ing most for­ward to before­hand. Also, what´s up with sched­ul­ing both those ses­sions against each other, that sounds like a bit of bad plan­ning from the orga­niz­ing committee.

I did how­ever get to meet both of them in the exhi­bi­tion area, even if only ever so briefly. I also met up with both Veg­ard Sag­bakken and Stein Will­helm­sen from VMware, Mike Beevor from Whip­tail and Linus Svens­son from Veeam.

All in all I think VMworld Forum 2012 in Oslo was a step in the right direc­tion com­pared to last year, but it´s still not a very tech­ni­cal event and I don’t´really think it is sup­posed to be. Per­haps my expec­ta­tions for it last year were a bit high, and this year they might just have been a bit to low.

Oh, I even spot­ted Cody Bunch´s Automat­ing vSphere with VMware vCen­ter Orches­tra­tor book in the wild!

Tech Field Day #6 — Arriving in Boston

June 8, 11 //
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Yes­ter­day I arrived at Logan Inter­na­tional for Tech Field Day #6 in the greater Boston area. Christo­pher Wells had already arrived ear­lier in the day, and I was lucky enough to be picked up by Stephen Fos­kett at the air­port and chauf­feured to the Sher­a­ton Fram­ing­ham Hotel and Con­fer­ence center.

The travel itself was pretty unevent­ful, the only trou­ble I had was that when I landed at Schipol for trans­fer to the US flight, my board­ing pass was nowhere to be found, and I don’t think I even received it when I checked in at Bergen Air­port Fles­land. At the self-service tran­sit coun­ters at Schipol I even got told, by the machines, that my reser­va­tion was non-existent. Of course, this was kind of trou­bling, but thanks to the very nice and ser­vice minded KLM employ­ees at Schipol, that issue was quickly resolved and I was on my merry way. At least as merry as one can be when trav­el­ing transatlantic.

The flight from Schipol to Logan was incred­i­bly bor­ing though.Normally I have no prob­lems sleep­ing while fly­ing, but this time around I got the grand total of zero min­utes of sleep on the entire trip. Add in the 6 hour time dif­fer­ence, and you’ve got one tired trav­el­ing vNinja on your hands.

Stephen and I met up with Chris Wells at the hotel, and went out search­ing for din­ner. Stephen, who seems to know every­thing there is to know, and then some, about Boston and the sur­round­ing areas, guided us to a local Indian restau­rant where we got some great Thali.

After that we ended up at the Horse­shoe Pub & Restau­rant for some vTFD­beers! How many beers do they have on tap? Who knows, all I know is that it’s a lot!. I haven’t seen that many beer taps since I was at The Gin­ger­bread­man in New York many moons ago.

As you can clearly see, the world has indeed sur­vived the first ever meetup between the vSamu­rai and the vNinja. Meet­ing up with both Chris and Stephen was a real treat, and I can’t wait for the rest of the del­e­gates arrive dur­ing the day, Tech Field Day 6: You look awesome.

vSoup and Tech Field Day #6

June 1, 11 //
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vSoup Episode #10 is finally released, this time with Stu­art Rad­nidge (blog) as our guest. This episode is a bit unusual, as we didn’t really have a set agenda before start­ing the record­ing, so we jump around all of the place cov­er­ing a pretty wide area of top­ics. Be sure to check it out!

Tech Field Day #6 is approach­ing really fast, in fact it’s only a week away now! I will leave for Boston on Tues­day, June 7, for what looks to be a very, very busy but fun cou­ple of days. I don’t know what to expect, but Chris Dear­den has warned be that I prob­a­bly won’t be idle much.

This is the first Tech Field Day event that solely focuses on vir­tu­al­iza­tion and the pre­sen­ter list looks really promising:

VMware@VMware
Embotics@EmboticsCorp
Solar­Winds@SolarWinds_Inc
VKer­nel@VKernel
Syman­tec@Symantec

In addi­tion to these, there is a cou­ple of more pre­sen­ters that have not been announced yet. I’ve met a few of the other del­e­gates before, but the major­ity of them will be new acquaintances!

Since the entire vSoup crew is going across the pond, we’ll try to get some live vSoup record­ings done dur­ing the event!

The del­e­gates will also be attend­ing the VMunder­ground BPaaS (Bean­town Party as a Ser­vice): Tech Field Day 6 Edi­tion, so if you are in Boston on Thurs­day 9th of June, be sure to get a ticket and stop by and say hi!

VMworld 2011 Session Voting

May 9, 11 //
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VMware has opened the pub­lic vot­ing for the VMworld 2011 ses­sions. Per­son­ally I haven’t sub­mit­ted any­thing, but I do see a lot of famil­iar names in the vot­ing application.

The vot­ing is avail­able to any­one who has a vmworld.com account, and the vot­ing period is from May 9th to May 18th. The vot­ing is global, which means a vote for a ses­sion counts as a vote for both VMworld US and VMworld EMEA as 80% of the selected ses­sions will occur at both events. You can vote on as many ses­sions as you like, but only one vote pr. session.

There is a plethora of ses­sions, in fact there are 854 ses­sions to choose between! Thank­fully VMware has included a search appli­ca­tion that enables you to focus on your par­tic­u­lar areas of inter­est and find ses­sions that fit.

I’ve done my part and voted, and I must say that some of these ses­sions sound great! Some of the ses­sion sub­mit­ters have done a very good job with titling their sub­mis­sions, which cer­tainly helps in iden­ti­fy­ing what ses­sions to vote on. I won’t go through my entire list of votes, but a cou­ple of ses­sions caught my eye immediately:

Ses­sion ID Title Pre­sen­ters
2769 You Know You Must Dedu­pli­cate
Your vSphere Back­ups but Which Approach is Best for You?		 Ian Blatch­ford, Prod­uct Man­ager, Hewlett Packard
Doug Hazel­man, Senior Direc­tor, Prod­uct Strat­egy, Veeam Software
3276 From Epi­cen­ter to vCen­ter:
Sur­viv­ing nat­ural dis­as­ters with VMware SRM		 Christo­pher Wells, Sys­tems Archi­tect, TUV Rhein­land Japan, Ltd
1603 How VMware’s Prod­ucts Are Like a Mil­i­tary Unit Jase McCarty, Sr. vSpe­cial­ist, EMC Corporation
1425 Ask the Expert vBloggers Dun­can Epping, Prin­ci­pal Archi­tect, VMware, Inc.
Rick Scherer, Senior vSpe­cial­ist, EMC Cor­po­ra­tion
Frank Den­ne­man, Con­sult­ing Archi­tect, VMware, Inc.
Scott Lowe, CTO, vSpe­cial­ist Team, EMC Cor­po­ra­tion
Chad Sakac, VP, VMware Tech­nol­ogy Alliance, EMC Corporation
1623 Stor­age Super­heavy Weight Smack­down 2011 Cody Bunch, Blog­ger, ProfessionalVMware.com
Vaughn Stew­art, Evan­ge­list for Vir­tu­al­iza­tion & Cloud Com­put­ing , NetApp
Chad Sakac, VP, VMware Tech­nol­ogy Alliance, EMC Cor­po­ra­tion
Mike Kopo­nen, WW Solu­tions Mar­ket­ing Man­ager, Hewlett Packard
Eric Schott, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Dell Inc.

Goes to show that titling your sub­mis­sion prop­erly really does make a difference.

Go forth and vote!

VMworld Europe 2010 – The aftermath

October 15, 10 //
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VMworld 2010I’m back home again, after spend­ing the bet­ter part of this week in Copen­hagen, attend­ing VMworld Europe 2010.

Let me just say, straight off the bat, that attend­ing VMworld is prob­a­bly the best idea I’ve had in years. In real­ity, that’s not say­ing much, but the value of attend­ing is immense.

The way VMworld is orga­nized, with lots of simul­ta­ne­ous ses­sions, labs and other activ­i­ties is both a chal­lenge and a bless­ing. It’s a chal­lenge in the sense that you need to plan your sched­ule pretty well and really take con­trol over your own expe­ri­ence. The bless­ing is that you’re not locked into a pre­de­ter­mined path, and you can re-arrange your sched­ule at any time if you wish to do so. And trust me, you’ll plan one thing and prob­a­bly end up doing some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent in the end.
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