VMworld 2009 - Day 2 Wrapup
Day two at VMworld ended up being quite a bit more exciting than yesterday. The keynote by Steve Herrod was much more what I expected from the keynotes. He covered some of the "cool" stuff coming down the pipes in both the short term and longer term. The PCoIP demo showing Google Earth zooming up and down while connected to a machine in Portland, OR from the Moscone Center rocked. I want to have that to use while I'm sitting in the hotel room's blazing fast speeds while attempting to do something useful on one of my machines at home instead of using RDP with SSL.
I went to the IO DRS Tech Preview and got the same excitement I've had from previous years where you know your seeing something innovative. Several of the other sessions I hit were really partner style presentations that did not say much. So a good 25/75 day for sessions which is pretty good.
Now that the Self Service Labs were finally working properly I gave a shot at the vCenter Orchestrator product offering. The Lab was responsive and well documented. It was pretty nice and really hinted at the power this system can offer for DataCenter Automation. The theory is this is free with vSphere 4 so I'm going to have to really look into that and find out.
During my open times during the day I had some good meetings with some VMware employees to discuss some of the vStorage & vCloud directions, HP folks around OpenView and Virtualization tools, AMD & Intel on their functionality futures and Hitachi around their multipathing technology for VMware (still no roadmap).
The Party was fun. Foreigner still knows how to rock and I can actually climb rock walls. The nice thing about the party this year is it was right at the Moscone Center.
A very productive and long day.