Getting Ready for VMworld 2010 (Are You?)

VMworld 2010 San Francisco is set to start in just four weeks (August 30th – September 2nd).  This year’s VMworld is already shaping up to be a killer event.  Compared to last year’s VMworld, I personally am seeing a 500+% increase in the number of clients of mine who are signed up to attend.  The reasons for this are multiple:

• Increased demand for virtualization within my clients
• Expansion from core virtualization (server consolidation) to virtualization to drive business efficiency
• Planning and deployment of internal private clouds
• Increased activity in desktop virtualization to help reign in desktop costs and provide a more dynamic and managable desktop environment

If you’re planning on attending VMworld this year, here are a few bits of advice:

• Browse through the VMworld FAQ soon as possible
• Use the Schedule Builder early to get into the sessions you want (ever year I hear from clients that the couldn’t get into the sessions they wanted, plan ahead and book early!)
• The breakout sessions and labs this year are all Self Paced, no need to preregister for anything.  Just show up, pick a technical session from the menu and the environment will be dynamically provisioned for you in the VMworld Cloud.  This is similar to the environment that was used for the VMware Internal Technical Summit earlier this year and I think all VMworld attendees will be amazed by it…  (I’m hoping the Lab Team has the same real time lab cloud portal which shows how many labs are running at any give time, it was mesmerizing to watch.)
• Make sure you reach out to your VMware account team or TAM (if you have one) and let them know you’re going.  There are lots of opportunities for more direct 1-on-1 conversations that we can arrange, but only if we have time in advance to do it.
• Bring with some snack bars…there is so much to do and see, I am sure you’ll completely forget about lunch at least one day if not more…

I’ve also been asked by a number of people if I was going to do another VMworld Portrait Project again this year.  Sadly, I won’t be able to.  This year I will be on stand by during all of VMworld as my wife and I are expecting our first born and his due date is right around VMworld.  I’m also planning on taking a few weeks off once he arrives to help adjust to family life, which will make it impossible to quickly turn around photos for people.  What this all means is no portrait project this year…we’ll see what next year looks like.  (I may be walking the halls with camera in tow, so smile if you see me pointing it in your direction!)