Tuesday morning was another busy round of vBrownBag TechTalks, gettng more videos in the can. In the afternoon I was in front of the camera for a few comments with Colin Steele of TechTarget. Then off to take part in Tech Field Day with presentations from Simplivity and Commvault filling the afternoon. Straight from TFD to the vExpert and VCDX party where a trophy was presented to the first VCDX to hold two VCDX credentials, both Datacentre and Cloud. Like so many of the things I like about VMworld this was a place to meet people and talk to people I haven’t seen for a while. The rest of the evening was spent at the Veeam party, which was huge and fun as always.
Day three, Wednesday, started with a bit of a panic, John Troyer’s laptop that we were using to produce the TechTalks video’s decided that it was a great time to stop working. After a little running around we were able to procure a new laptop and get all of the parts together into a working broadcast system. As often happens with producing the TechTalks we had a dash around to find things we were missing, this time vExpert Anton Zhbankov loaned us his Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter so the stream didn’t need to go over conference wireless. Anton from Russia, so his blog is in Russian. Once we had the new gear in place we were back on the air, missing only half of Mike Letchin’s vExpert Daily. I spent the rest of the day around the TechTalks area helping Jon Harris get the sessions on air and working through the inevitable schedule changes.
Wednesday is VMworld party day, I’m not a fan of loud parties so I haven’t enjoyed the last couple of these and decided to skip the party and have some Ethiopian food for dinner with some of the vBrownBag crew and other friends. It was my first time with Ethiopian food and I really enjoyed it, using pieces of a flatbread to pick up food from a shared plate makes dining a more communal experience. After dinner we headed to the UnParty at the Chieftain pub, which got packed with my friends from the virtualization community, a great time again. Unfortunately it was also the last event of VMworld for some of my friends, who had early flights home on Thursday.
Thursday is always subdued, a lot of people leave early and everything starts to wind down. We still had a full morning of TechTalks although the rate of cancellations was a little higher than on previous days. Since my flight didn’t leave until 10pm I had a bit of spare time. Carelessly I had taken my luggage with me to Moscone when I checked out, so going to see the sights of San Francisco was not an option. Happily as I was hanging around the foyer I joined a conversation with a couple of guys working at a University in Minnesota who have been having issues with their vSphere environment. We spent a pleasant couple of hours discussing their issues and places to look to improve it. Then we spent an hour getting to know each other, a great way to fill in the waiting time.
There aren’t many flights from San Francisco to Auckland on a Thursday, so there were a lot of people I knew in the Air New Zealand lounge when I got there. Another set of interesting conversations before boarding the flight. The best surprise was saved for last, I got upgraded all the way to the front of the plane, a fully lie flat bed for the 12 hour flight so an 8 hour sleep, amazing.
I had an awesome VMworld USA and am excited about some things that are coming for vBrownBag. Catching up with friends from past VMworlds and meeting new friends is what I like the most about VMworld, I’ll be spending the next few weeks learning the details of the products that were announced and hopefully will be able to make some time to play with the vSphere 5.5 beta and hopefully get an AutoLab build together soon after the final code ships.
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