VMworld 2011: Day 1
Three days of breakouts, super sessions, keynotes, meetups, tweet-ups, solution exposition, and parties.
A victim of its own success
I’ve been attending VMworld since 2004, when they were acquired by EMC. Now, VMworld has grown to have almost 20,000 attendees, 6,700 of which are Partners. It has outgrown a single venue in Las Vegas, and is spread across the Venetian and Winn hotels as well as the adjoining Sands Expo and Conference Center. Next year it will be back at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Can you imagine a venue with 20,000 attendees each carrying at least 2 WiFi devices, sometimes 3: smartphone (mostly iPhones), laptop, and tablet (usually iPads)? It was like a ’60s telephone party line. The WiFi network was saturated early and often. It was hard to connect reliably, even before the event began.
This year all talks required pre-registration. If you didn’t register before you arrived, over half the talks were "sold out" for attendees. People "signed in" at the room of each talk with a bar code scanner. Well organized.
Cloud, cloud, cloud
VMworld evolves each year and seems to be in front of the curve of the latest wave of computing fashion. It has moved beyond its initial focus on Server Virtualization. This year it’s Cloud, as it has been at the last couple of years. Last year the motto was "Virtual Roads, Actual Clouds," but this year the motto is "Your Cloud. Own It." As we moved from Compute to Virtualization to Automation to Cloud, Las Vegas was the place to be. There are more network data centers there — due largely to the nearby availability of power from the hydroelectric operations of the Hoover Dam on Lake Mead.
For VMworld 2009, they build a Private Cloud, in 2010 it was a Hybrid Cloud, for VMworld 2011 it is a Public Cloud using three different providers:
- Switch Supernap in Las Vegas
- Colt in Amsterdam
- Terremark in Miami
This represents 200,000 virtual machines!
Thanks for coming along,
