Monday was the official first day of the conference, or atleast it was when the sessions started.

Being my first time at VMWorld, I didn’t realize how much running around to sessions and checking schedules and whatnot there would be, and there was a lot.

The general session in the morning was kind of fun I suppose, but if you would like to watch it yourself, you can check it out on the vmworld website.

Oh and did I mention there are a ton of people

Yeah, you don’t always realize how many people 20k actually is until the majority of them are all in One Room. There were also translators in booths, who were translating the whole General Session live, to those in the audience with the headsets. Pretty crazy, like United Nations type stuff going on.

Because I was at the general session, I missed my first scheduled session. So the first session I made it to was INF-STO1430 — Tracking Down Storage Performance Issues: A Customer’s Perspective. This was honestly awesome. The gist of it was a customer of NetApp was having some storage related issues, and how they, with NetAp, had to dive into all layers of the infrastructure to figure out the cause/s. Both presenters were good, and the issue the customer was having is one I am currently seeing in my own enviroment. Needless to say I took plenty of notes.

My next session was INF-BCO2065 — Disaster Recovery for All—VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 Puts Real-Time Replication and Disaster Recovery Within the Reach of Every Business. Wow, I didn’t realize how long of a title that was until I pasted it in…anyway. I was hoping it would slightly more technical of a session than it was, and after 30 minutes of listening to it, I decided it wasn’t for me and bailed.

The 2nd to last session I hit up was INF-VSP1232 — Avoiding the 19 Biggest HA & DRS Configuration Mistakes – 2012 Edition, by the great Greg Shields. I am aware of Greg, and although I have never met him, he was a great presenter, being funny, informative and knowledgeable.  If you have read the vSphere clustering books by Duncan and Frank, a good portion of the information in this session will probably be review for you. However, Greg approached it in such a way that it is easily understandable by all. And when you are in a giant conference room, that’s an important thing to do. Good Session

And last but not least I went to INF-VSP1856 — Become a Rock Star with PowerCLI and vCenter Orchestrator, by vGinger himself, Josh Atwell.

This was a great session, it’s goal, which Josh is clear about up front, is to give you the knowledge for how PowerCLI and vCO operate, so you can make your own decision as to what works best for both you and your environment. Josh himself was a good presenter, and although a couple of his jokes flopped, I would say he got far more laughs than he got crickets. If you are reading this and are at the conference, I suggest you check out Josh’s other session this week.

Oh and I went to vFlipCup, hosted by Actifio which was awesome. Although I wasn’t in the main tournament that happened, I got a pick-up team together afterwards. Not to pat my team on the back, but we didn’t lose a series. We were pretty much BA.

Great Day/Night


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vNoob » Looking Forward At 2013 · January 7, 2013 at 10:56 am

[…] went to my first VMworld and met some kickass […]

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