VMWorld 2011 or bust! + My Schedule

It’s about 11AM on August 27 and after 2 flight cancellations and many hours on the phone with my friends at Jet Blue I was able to finally secure a flight out to Vegas for VMWorld 2011.  Never mind the fact that getting to Vegas will consist of 3 flights.  First, I take off from JFK and head over to Seattle.  I will then have to stay over for the night, fly out to Long Beach, CA the next day then hop on my final flight from Long Beach to Vegas.  At this point I am super happy that I was able to secure anything since NYC was due to shutdown at noon.

Anyway, this will be my first time attending VMWorld and I am pretty stoked.  When I attended HP discover I missed out on many things I was looking forward to due to improper/late planning and also not pre-determining the key takeaways that I wanted to leave with.  So, with VMWorld I registered super early and reserved my sessions the day they opened up.  I also thought about some of the key things I wanted to walk away with, they are listed below (in no particular order)

1. It is inevitable that my firm will have to offer a public/private cloud system.  This event should help me understand in more detail on how we can properly build a highly available public and private cloud offering to our clients with vSphere 5.  What is offered in terms of an easy to use billing system that will meter all usage so at the end of the month I can spit out a report to our finance department so we can understand how to properly bill the client and to determine realized profits.
2. How we can profit from a public/private cloud offering.
3. Walk the vendor floor and see all of the new technologies that have been developed by VMWare’s partners.
4. Network with many of the people I have spoken to online in the VMWare and blogging community.  Putting faces to names is always a nice thing.
5. Understand the new licensing model more in depth.
6. Participate in the hands on lab sessions to satisfy the Engineering side of me.
7. Start preparing for the VCP 5 exam.
8. Calvin Zito @HPStorageGuy who is HP’s head blogger for Storage invited me to a Cloud Advisors reception that will include many of the popular bloggers in the industry.  Looking forward to meeting them all.

Below is my VMWorld schedule.  The sessions truly look awesome.

Monday
Start: 8:00 AMEnd: 9:00 AM		VSP1682Venetian – Delfino 4001	VMware vSphere Clustering Q&A
Start: 9:30 AMEnd: 10:30 AM		VSP3863Venetian – Palazzo Ballroom G	VMware ESXi Readiness and What’s New with VMware vSphere
Start: 11:00 AMEnd: 12:00 PM		VSP2360Venetian – Venetian Ballroom E	VMware vCenter 5.0: What’s New, What’s Cool
Start: 12:30 PMEnd: 1:30 PM		BCA1360Venetian – San Polo 3501	How A Global Enterprise Virtualized Exchange 2010
Start: 2:00 PMEnd: 3:00 PM		CIM4280Venetian – Palazzo Ballroom G	VMware vCenter Operations in the Real World
Tuesday
Start: 10:30 AMEnd: 11:30 AM		SUP1017Venetian – Palazzo Ballroom O	Transitioning to ESXi
Start: 11:30 AMEnd: 12:30 PM		BCO3420Venetian – Venetian Ballroom E	Avoiding the 16 Biggest High-Availability and Distributed Resource Scheduler Configuration Mistakes
Start: 1:30 PMEnd: 2:30 PM		BCO1990Venetian – Titian 2301	Protecting SMBs Using Site Recovery Manager 5.0 with VMware vSphere Replication
Start: 2:30 PMEnd: 3:30 PM		GD15Venetian – Toscana 3604	vSphere HA and FT with Tom Stephens and Keith Farkas
Start: 4:00 PMEnd: 5:00 PM		BCA1709Venetian – Delfino 4001	Successfully Running Active Directory in a Virtualized Environment
Start: 5:30 PMEnd: 6:30 PM		VSP3867Venetian – Delfino 4001	Top 10 Virtualization Support Issues
Wednesday
Start: 8:00 AMEnd: 9:00 AM		VSP2376Venetian – Venetian Ballroom E	Performance and Scalability Enhancements in VMware vStorageVMFS 5
Start: 9:30 AMEnd: 10:30 AM		VSP1926Venetian – Palazzo Ballroom G	Getting Started with VMware vSphere Design
Start: 11:00 AMEnd: 12:00 PM		VSP3305Venetian – Venetian Ballroom E	Upgrading to VMware ESXi 5.0
Start: 12:30 PMEnd: 1:30 PM		VSP1700Venetian – Palazzo Ballroom D	VMware vSphere 5.0 Storage Features
Start: 2:00 PMEnd: 3:00 PM		VSP2884Venetian – Delfino 4001	What’s New in Performance for VMware vSphere 5.0
Start: 3:30 PMEnd: 4:30 PM		VSP3868Venetian – Venetian Ballroom E	VMware vStorage Best Practices
Thursday
Start: 10:30 AMEnd: 11:30 AM		LAS4002Venetian – Bellini 2101	VMworld Labs Using Auto Deploy with Stateless ESXi
Start: 12:00 PMEnd: 1:00 PM		VSP3866Venetian – Palazzo Ballroom D	Performance Best Practices and Troubleshooting
Start: 1:30 PMEnd: 2:30 PM		VSP2757Venetian – Palazzo Ballroom D	A Deep Dive on Virtual Distributed Switching andCisco Nexus 1000v