VMworld 2012 - Day -1

2 minute read

This year I finally manage to go to VMworld. It’s been held in the beautiful Barcelona, just a few hundred kilometers from Madrid, and now that the event is gone, the dust has settled and everybody is back at home I decided to share my experiences from the conference in a few blog posts. Also don’t expect technical posts but personal ones :-)

My personal VMworld really started on Sunday morning when after a short flight from Madrid I headed to the conference venue.

There I found three of my colleagues from VMware Spain preparing to work as Lab Staff for the next four days. I took the below picture while we were waiting out of the HOL room, from left to right Jesus Huerta, Marti Perarnau and Carlos Sen.

During the afternoon the HOL Staff and other VMware employees willing to do to labs were allowed to do so. I jumped in and choose the Application Director 5.0 lab, I’ve been trying to find some free time to taste App Director and finally I could.

I was impressed with the product. All the creation process was very straightforward and in the end I had an application with a vFabric Web Server at the frontend, vFabric tc Server as the middleware layer and vFabric vPostgres as the backend. Finally the lab allow me to scale out the app in order to attend a fictitious higher demand. Like I said very easy.

After my satisfactory lab experience I moved to the Solutions Exchange area where all the booths were being built. The transformation process is really amazing. One day there is nothing and a couple of days later… Voila!

Before continuing with the story I have to say that during all day I was tweeting like crazy trying to get in touch with Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) and Josh Atwell (@Josh_Atwell), both from Cisco, and after a couple of funny moments with Amy showing my Twitter avatar to other VMware staff at the labs we were capable to meet and start the preparations for the evening.

Also thanks to Amy and after walking a bit through the Solutions Exchange area I was able to find my dear friend Fred Nix (@NixFred) from EMC.

We’ve been trying to meet in real life for almost two years without any luck so for me this was a very special moment. The above picture is from Tuesday when the VMworld was “on fire” but I believe it illustrates how funny and awesome is this dude :D

vRockStar Party

Amy, Josh and myself left the conference in the great company of Patrick Carmichael (@VMCarmichael), like yours truly from VMware, and headed to the vRockStar Party. This awesome party was organized by Patrick Redknap (@PatrickRedknap), Marco Broeken (@MBroeken) and sponsored by PHD Virtual, NimbleStorage, the DutchVMUG and ITQ, the company my friend Arjan Timmerman (@Arjantim) works for, and of course he was at the Hard Rock too.

We arrived at Plaza Catalunya by bus and from there we felt brave enough to walk a couple of klicks to the Barcelona Hard Rock Café, where the vRockStar Party was going to be celebrated. After a very long and funny walk with me trying to help Josh to improve his Spanish, and Josh and me complaining about Patrick navigation skills, we arrived at Hard Rock Café. We meet there the one and only J Mezt (@drjmetz) and the party begun…