Only a few days now until I’m off on the pilgrimage to VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.  I have to say the weeks leading up to VMworld have just flown by and completely caught me off-guard so I am feeling all rather disorganised at the moment.

Off to VMworld… and a big thanks!

I have been fortunate enough to have received a bloggers pass for VMworld  from John Troyer and the VMware team to attend and cover the event. Thank you! 

 
This was originally a 100% self-funded trip (annual leave and cash) hence making a total Geek holiday out of it and visiting many of fine Techie ‘must see’ spots around San Fran and down in the Silicon Valley area.  Including such sites as the HP Garage,  PARC, VMware, Apple, Google, Intel, Facebook, Yahoo and Stanford University to name a few.

I’m not sure how many of these sites I’ll be able to find though I’m going to give it a good go and hey, lets face it they’re not going to be small buildings!  I’ll be taking photos and will blog the ‘Tour de Geek’.

The kind folks over at Servers Plus and SITS Group have stepped in and offered sponsorship for the TechHead trip to VMworld – a massive thanks to both companies for your support.

Regular readers to the TechHead site will be familiar with Servers Plus as I’ve been using them for quite some time now for buying much of my home IT lab kit.  I have always found them to offer competitive pricing and most importantly good customer servers – hence the reason I started recommending them on the site.  This combined with the positive feedback I’ve had back from TechHead readers who have used them means I continue to recommend them.  They also offer much more than home lab server level equipment with a comprehensive range of Enterprise servers and networking products from all the major vendors.

The SITS Group are a Newcastle (UK) based company who specialise in virtualisation technologies.  They offer consultancy services based around the leading virtualisation products and peripheral services. Involved in the design and planning process right through to  the virtualisation IT solutions implementation they assist their customers in “reducing the size, cost and administrative overheads of existing server and desktop infrastructures”.  Check out their website here for more details on their virtualisation services.

VMworld 2009 – San Francisco

Although the Geek trip around Silicon Valley will be fun the main purpose of visiting San Francisco is to attend this years US based VMworld.  As many of you have probably heard it will be another year until the next VMworld with the European edition being moved to October 2010 – this being another reason to make the trip.

The theme or ‘catch phrase’ for this VMworld (not a cartoon type characture to be seen this year, so far) is…

 
The keynote speech kicks off at 8am on the Tuesday (1sst September) at 8:00am with VMware’s President and CEO Paul Maritz and then on Wednesday at 8:00am the ever popular Dr. Stephen Herrod (VMware Chief Technology Officer) will be speaking on “The Future of Virtualization: From the Mobile Phone to the Cloud”.

Both will be worth following and if not attending you can do this by pre-registering for a live webcast of each speech.  Click here for more details.

TechHead Coverage:

TechHead will be covering both of these keynotes including the key areas outlined below along with the conference in general so watch this space for regular updates!

• A look at the Hands-On Labs – which are shaping up to be very popular
• Genius Bar – meeting the VMware Engineers
• Various Technical Sessions
• Vendors – meet the many vendors at the event and find out more about their products and any announcements

Tech Kit:

So what techie goodies to pack for attending and covering such an event?  After much deliberation I’ll be taking the following:

• My trusty MacBook (running boot-camp with Win7 and Microsoft LiveWriter for blogging).  I only have one battery so may have to take the plunge and buy a second if I it is to have enough juice to last each day.
• Flip Ultra HD – for video coverage and any informal interviews.
• Apple iPod Nano – for entertainment whilst away out.
• PowerMonkey – iPod and Phone ‘on the run’ (not from the police) power top-up when needed.

To get into the VMworld atmosphere I have created TechHead VMworld 2009 stickers – I am hoping that they turn up in time before I leave..  These will no doubt become highly sought after collectors item in years to come (lol) so if you see me wandering around VMworld come and say ‘Hi’ and receive one of these collectors items.  What a good way to meet people. 

More updates in the days to come….

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