Undoubt­edly one of the most pop­u­lar “fea­tures” of VMworld 2010, both in the US and in EU, are the labs. These hands-on exer­cises in con­fig­ur­ing and using var­i­ous VMware prod­ucts lets you play around with­out the need for lab equip­ment or licenses installed locally.
VMworld Labs - Cloud Lane
What if VMware extended this to not only run dur­ing the VMworld con­fer­ences?

Let us get our hands dirty all year round! It’s hard to have a full lab setup in the office, and if we could book time in the VMware Cloud Lane to play around with VMware vCloud™, VMware vCen­ter™ Site Recov­ery Man­ager or even VMware Thi­nApp™ that would be great!

I’m sure VMware can see the value in pro­vid­ing their cus­tomers and part­ners with hands-on labs for train­ing pur­poses, as well as being a great show­case for their core “cloud” ser­vices as enter­prise ready.

While I’m not sug­gest­ing they give every­one and their mother lab access 24/7/365, VMware should indeed offer a way for cus­tomers and part­ners to book time and play around.

After all, VMware want us to buy their prod­ucts and their vision for the cloud, don’t they?

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.