144 Bottles of Water, 48 Cans of Monster Lo-Carb, 50 Bags of Single Serve Chips, 270 Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers, 144 Bottles of 5-Hour Energy and 300 Oreo Cookies (unfortunately there has been no accurate count of alcoholic beverage)… that is how VMworld started for some of the members of the vSpecialist Organization within EMC on Thursday.

Actually, Über teams within the vSpecialist organization at EMC started months ago with a strategic plan to cause peoples minds to literally explode from all of the awesome-sauce VMware and EMC will jointly deliver the week of VMworld 2011. This includes a huge EMC core booth with 13 VDI enabled workstations showing the latest and great products, there is also a separate EMC vLabs booth that will have 15 workstations that will allow attendees to use and abuse 11 different products within the EMC family. This is all in addition to the EMC focused lab, which is located within the official VMworld Hands on Labs (which by the way are powered by EMC technology) inside the Solutions Exchange.

Needless to say, there have been endless hours already spent by the team (of absolute rockstars) to ensure the best experience possible for the attendees of VMworld 2011. The sessions, labs, solutions exchange, TweetUps, parties and ability to network with your vPeers makes this show undoubtedly the best information technology show of the year.

There are about 20 of us here, from around the global, working diligently on getting everything up and running as well as testing for usability/stress and for an overall great experience. The countdown officially started yesterday afternoon and we have until Sunday afternoon (3 full days) to make sure everything is 100%. So, what about after Sunday? Will we get to just sit by the pool, sipping on some tasty margaritas? Well, I’m hoping to have at least 30 minutes of that sometime this trip, but what about the other 107.5 hours of VMworld?

So here is my schedule, full of great sessions, fun networking opportunities, awesome parties and completely slammed….boy I love VMworld!

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Posted under Conferences, VMworld

it’s that time of year again! vmworld 2011 is fast approaching and some great sessions are now up for public vote! Included in all of those great sessions are (5) sessions that I’m part of and I’d love for you to review and vote on them if you’d like to see them in the agenda.

Session details are below and you can vote for them by visiting http://www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspa

1425 - Ask the Expert vBloggers
Rick Scherer, Duncan Epping, Scott Lowe, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac

1426 - Designing Virtualized Desktops for Success
Rick Scherer, Tyler Baker, Asif Khan

1427 - Battle of the Storage Experts
Rick Scherer, Chad Sakac, Vaughn Stewart, Eric Schott, Mike Koponen

1712 - Virtualizing SAP for Private Cloud
Rick Scherer, Eric Walter

2820 - Real World Storage API for Array Integration Effects, Design and Planning with VMFS and NFS
Rick Scherer, David Robertson

Once again, please check out my session abstracts and vote! http://www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspa

Posted under Conferences, VMworld

For those of you who haven’t purchased your pass to VMworld yet do I have a surprise for you!  Being an employee of EMC combined with EMC being a great partner of VMware allows me to extend some good perks to my readers.  If you use the following link (http://www.vmworld.com/registration.jspa?sponsorCode=EMC) to register for VMworld and enter in the promotion code EMC_EB_US2010 you will save $300 from the regular admission price (reg $1,795).

VMworld 2010 is going to have some great sessions, including some awesome Ask the Experts sessions as well as the opportunity to meet a good majority of the vSpecialist team. You can even pick yourself up a copy of Mastering VMware vSphere and have it signed by Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac and myself! Or even a copy of the VCP-410 study guide from McGraw-Hill.

I hope to see all of you there, be sure to visit the EMC booth to meet up and chat about all things virtualization.

Posted under Conferences, EMC, VMworld

Through a sponsorship with TradePub, I’m glad to offer FREE registration to a VMware seminar dedicated to the ISV market.  This seminar is located in Boston, MA and for the first 50 attendees you’ll get a FREE copy of VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion!

When: Thu, Sep 24, 2009 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST
Where: Westin Copley Place Boston, 10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02116

Attend a live seminar to learn how VMware vSphere helps you:

• Offer your customers a much improved TCO
• Deliver Proof-of-Concepts in days instead of weeks
• Simplify high availability and disaster recovery for applications
• Accelerate upgrades
• Simplify tech support and reduce costs
• Deliver your applications in an efficient SaaS model

You’ll also hear concrete examples of how embracing VMware vSphere as a go-to-market platform can directly influence an ISV’s income statement.

First 50 attendees will receive a FREE copy of VMware Workstation (for Windows or Linux) or VMware Fusion (for Mac).

GET MORE INFO & REGISTER NOW

Posted under Conferences

Nava Davuluri, one of the writers on the VMware Code Central blog wanted to reach out to my readers and invite them to VMware’s Technology Exchange Developer Day.

Technology Day is on Monday, August 31st at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, co-located within VMworld 2009. This event is dedicated to ALL developers building solutions on VMware platforms.

The event page can be found here
5 reasons to attend this event
Session schedule
For event updates(twitter) : @VMDeveloperDay

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Posted under Conferences

Friday, July 24th is another San Diego VMware User Group meeting.  I strongly urge you to come join us as we discuss all things VMware, this includes a discussion of users issues and resolutions along with a presentation from Cisco on UCS and demos from Nth Generation on new vSphere features. More information, including location and schedule can be found on the San Diego VMUG website.

San Diego VMUG Meeting - July 24th, 2009

Location:
Cardinal Health
Room B1-115
3750 Torrey View Ct
San Diego, CA 92130

Directions: -Click Here-

Agenda:
08:00am - Breakfast / Networking

08:15am - Bloopers Session - User Group members relate issues they had or are having with their current VMware project with VMware SE Asif Khan acting as the expert in this area

08:30am - Sponsor Presentation - “Cisco’s Unified Computing System and VMWare’s vSphere, the industry’s first cloud operating system, will help customers maximize the promise of virtualization with reduced TCO, increased business agility, and improved energy efficiency. This transformation enables the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services to be delivered both within internal clouds as well as from external clouds.”

09:30am - Break

09:45am - Nth Generation - Live DEMO

• Distributed vSwitches to attach virtual machines to a single virtual switch that spans multiple hosts, preserving network state during a VMotion
• Fault Tolerance to protect critical workloads from downtime and hardware failures
• Host Profiles for ease of deployment for new host servers and protect against mis-configurations
• Storage VMotion via GUI to migrate storage between datastores

11:45am - Wrapup / give aways etc.

12:00pm - Close

Posted under Conferences, VMUG

Join me July 27th through July 31st in my hometown of San Diego, CA for the Burton Group Catalyst Conference.  I will be speaking at two sessions, both on Thursday, July 30th.

Simplifying Storage for Virtualization
Time: 3:10pm
Room: Sapphire M

Reconciling Storage, Networking, and Security in a Dynamic Data Center
Time: 4:45pm
Room: Sapphire M

The Catalyst Conference is a unique event, tons of great sessions and amazing hospitality suites which are hosted by vendors - these are great places to meet and mingle with other I/T professionals.  I hope to see you there!

Posted under Conferences

Just a little note telling all of my readers to register and listen to my session on how The City of San Diego utilizes Virtualization for Consolidation and Application Deployment, tomorrow morning during the VMware Online Virtualization Forum. You can register online right now, FOR FREE, just visit this link.

Attend this free virtual event, right from your browser!

VMware virtual events are highly interactive events conducted online using only a web browser. They include all of the areas that you may find at a physical event, including an exhibit hall, auditorium, resource center and networking lounge.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about vSphere™ 4—The Next Generation of VMware’s market leading virtualization products!

Come see how companies within different industries like the Public Sector, Education, Healthcare and Technology are simplifying IT and increasing flexibility while cutting IT costs by 50%.

8:00am – 9:00am
Customer Spotlight: City of San Diego Uses Virtualization for Consolidation and Application Deployment

Attend the Online Virtualization Forum on June 9th and 10th. Don’t miss this opportunity to:

• Network with VMware product experts, customers, partners and other IT Professionals.
• Attend 30-minute presentations and get the latest info on VMware solutions, products and industry trends.
• Access real-time information from industry leaders without the hassle or expense of travel.
• Create a multi-media resource kit, including white papers, videos and podcasts.

Posted under Conferences, vForum

Tony Dunn and the rest of the VMworld.com team have opened up a number of breakout sessions and labs from VMworld Europe 2009 and VMworld 2008 for public access.  That’s right, you can now gain access to a number of sessions and labs for FREE!  Check it out right now, go log into your VMworld.com account.

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Posted under Conferences, VMworld

Most of you know that I was the featured guest on a Live TechTalk last week, NetApp has furnished me with the transcripts from the Q&A of the event - for those of you that submitted questions but were unable to get a response - the transcript below should have your answer.   I’m extremely excited to say that this transcript will only be available on VMwareTips.com and NetApp will even be sending the link to their customers, hopefully this will increase the traffic on the site.

If you have any additional questions in regards to the TechTalk event, please feel free to submit a comment to this post - or email me at rick (at) vmwaretips (dot) com.

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Posted under Conferences, NetApp, VMware