This day started with a keynote kicked off by Steve Herrod using 3 big-ass screens (of which each screen was driven by 6 HD beamers!) and an impressive musical show using drums.

Most items were summaries from yesterday and recapping that the Cloud infrastructure is the environment you want to aim for and start by virtualizing your current physical environment.

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A both cool and funny demo was given about using social media to monitor your vSphere virtual infrastructure. When a VM went down, some kind of tweet was sent with the warning message inside to indicate that a problem was active.

Next, all VMs that were somehow related to the offline VM and experienced a problem due to this, started liking the warning post so you could exactly identify the impact! Again a cool and funny way to see the working of it.

After the keynote it was finally time to do some technical sessions! My schedule for today was:

INF-NET2162 – VXLAN Deep Dive
INF-VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure
INF-VSP2203 – Datacenter of the Future
INF-SEC1388 – VMware Go: The Zen for Small and Midsized Business IT Management (Business Value)
INF-SEC1840 – VMware vSphere Hardening to Achieve Regulatory Compliance: Better, Faster, Stronger

Some sessions were interesting and interactive, some were rather boring and I had trouble keeping my eyes opened, but hey! I submitted feedback to VMworld about the specific sessions =)

I skipped the VMware Go session, because I had a different idea about this session. It appeared this was a hosted solution by VMware to use when you don’t have a virtualization environment yet and have minimal knowledge about virtualization. Since this doesn’t match my employer and myself, I traded this sessions for the GD16 – Virtual Networking and the vSphere Distributed Switch with Vyenkatesh Deshpande session.

This session was very interactive and I was able to ask some questions and even got some answers that I can use in live environments.

The INF-SEC1840 sessions was handy as well. Explaining the reasons and ways for applying best practices to your VMware environment is something I will try and perform at environments when I’m back in the office of my employer.

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Finally I visited the Solutions Exchange to get some goodies for my colleagues back in bad-weather Holland =)

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Today was a day full of waiting, but thankfully enough to see and great weather conditions!

After arriving at the Barcelona airport, me and my colleagues had to wait for transport, but it never came. We waited for about 1 hour until we decided to contact both travel agency and transport company but it appears that the transport agency was a ‘fake’ and scammed more people. The cab outside did it’s job for a small price, so hey, no hard feelings =)

The hotel is wonderful! We are staying in the Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel with a swimming pool on the roof (26th floor) with an incredible view on Barcelona, large room with modern bathroom, livingroom and kingsize bed. Again, a great view!

In the afternoon we headed for the VMworld 2012 registration and got our badges, receiving our goodie bags and continuing for some Hands-On Labs and the keynote where we are told that VMware is aiming for partners more then ever and they need us to sell more software. With all the numbers going on on the main screens I remembered why I chose to be a technician and not a salesman =D

This VMworld is going to concentrate around the vCloud products and setting up a modern infrastructure with plenty ways to keep you VMs up and running. Good to know that most of the sessions I registered on are about this subject, so I’ll be inside the clouds in no time!

But for now; some sleep is needed to prepare myself for the coming days!

Thanks for reading.

It’s time to fire up my yet so tiny blog and fill it with new posts during the days of coming week.

The reason for this is me being able to attend VMworld 2012 in Barcelona and want to share what’s going on inside for curious people who were not able to attend and colleagues that would like to know what’s going on in Spain =)

I have attended smaller events like VMUG and are in my opinion an effective and nice way to keep IT people informed about new technologies, best practices and different methods of designing and implementing infrastructures. I think VMworld will provide me with usable information which I can (hopefully) use in live environments!

Tomorrow I will start packing stuff for the trip and the coming week. Including enough energy and a perfect mood!

So; starting from now a regular update with news about VMworld 2012 and technical posts that may prevent you from pulling your hair =D