The VMguy

I was very sorry to see it go but what a week it was!  Here’s some amazing stats from VMworld 2009:

• Over 12,500 attendees (still awaiting the final tally)
• Over 300 attendees at VMware’s first Technology Exchange – Developer Day
• Over 200 sponsors and exhibitor companies
• 300 break out sessions across 6 tracks
• 12 Instructor led labs and 9 Self Paced lab courses
• 920 new VMUG members recruited on site
• VMworld 2009 generated a strong volume of coverage with a total of 315 articles. 90 original US articles, 11 ANZ articles, 51 APAC articles, and 163 EMEA articles.
• Strong social media activity with:
  • 4,305 tweets on the event, 1205 contributors and 2,350 followers
  • New VMworld YouTube views: 5,714
• VMware produced 14 VMworld videos on site and released these on VMware TV with 13,509 total views
• 4,459 Self Paced labs taken with 41,043 VMs deployed. This has broken all previous self paced lab records.
• 6,149 Instructor led labs taken across 12 labs on offer during VMworld 2009.

And just for fun (yes these are real and not made up):

• Quantity of sodas purchased     54,742
• Quantity of bananas      14,813
• Quantity of apples         14,813
• Gallons of coffee          1,895
• Quantity of cookies       5,647
• Quantity of brownies     9,188
• # of beers consumed at the welcome reception monday night: 10,200

We’ll have to work on that beer number next year!!!

Every time I come to VMworld, I’m always facinated by the booths.  It’s only at the largest industry events that the vendors pull out all the stops and build these gigantic advertisements.  For you’re enjoyment, I’ve photographed a few for you.  I’ll apologize now to my RSS readers.  I post my entire articles in my RSS feed so those of you on it will get all these as well. I also want to mention that I only photographed a few of them, there were far too many booths to get them all in.  I tried to get the most noteworthy and those that were very creative. We’ll start with the VMware Booth.  It took 5 days to fully assemble and it was very difficult to get all in one shot due to the size.  It had 4 corners, each with demos on the related products (you can see Cloud Services and datacenter in the pic).  It also included a theater with scheduled sessions/presentations and a fully staffed genius bar where customers could ask just about anything. Next up was Red Hat.  They had a cool booth that was very tall.  It also had a theater and pods for demos and information. Read the rest of this entry »

I must say, I’m 39 years old.  I remember the band Foreigner in the 80s and I remember what they were like.  I was concerned how they would be received by the vmworld crowd.  Needless to say, there was nothing to be concerned about.  I spoke to another SE during the concert and told him: if you get the chance to hear a professional band put on a professional show, it can’t be bad.  It wasn’t.

The set list looked like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Got to the general session early to snag a good seat at the bloggers table.  First up: Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware.

Steve begins on the topic of desktops.  He says the industry wants to go from device-centric to people-centric(I totally agree – it’s a better model).  He talks about the goals the VMware has in it’s desktop strategy and he labels the user experience as the most important.  He describes why vSphere is the right platform for desktop virtualization.   Read the rest of this entry »

First up this morning was Tod Nielsen, Chief Operating Officer from VMware.

Tod thanked the sponsors for their support and gave us the number: 12,488 attendees at  VMworld 2009.  Quite an amazing achievement given this economy.  Tod also described the goal of VMware: To Energize and Save, wither that would be Financial Savings, Human Savings, or Earth’s Savings.  He then showed a video of customer testimonials from Siemens and Kroger.  Next up Tod introduced Paul Maritz, Chief Executive Officer from VMware. Read the rest of this entry »