Wow, what a hectic lead up it’s been to VMworld Europe 2009.  I had hoped to have had a couple posts out before flying out to Cannes highlighting the event and what we may expect to see in the way of announcements – all speculation at this stage of course.

As you may have noticed I have re-designed the look of the website, this was primarily motivated by the need to accommodate the Qik video feed box in the top right hand corner. I am quite happy with the new look though will be making some improvements to it in the coming  days/weeks.   I would appreciate any feedback, suggestions or ideas you may have towards the site as I’m always on the look out for ways to make it better.

This is the first VMworld I have attended so am looking forward to seeing what it’s like.  I have heard good things from others that have attended past VMworlds with the only complaints being long queues to get into the more popular sessions and flaky conference WI-FI.  I just hope that these have been resolved for this VMworld.

I have used the VMworld Scheduler to prepare my plan of attack for the coming 3 days of sessions and have included them below for anyone who is interested to see what session specific topics I will be blogging about in the coming days.

Tuesday

• VMware ESXi 3.0 Troubleshooting
• An Introduction to VMware vCenter Chargeback
• What’s New In the Enterprise Cloud ?
• Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for the Future of VMware
• Tech Preview: vCenter Server

Wednesday

• VMware VMFS Deep Dive and Best Practices
• VMware View Reference Architecture: Building Large and Small
• Managing VMware With PowerShell
• VMware ESX and Future Architectural Directions
• PVSCSI: a paravirtualized storage adapter for ESX

Thursday

• Fault Tolerance Performance Preview
• Unattended Deployment of VMware Infrastructure 3
• DRS technical overview and performance best practices
• Technology Preview: vCenter CapacityIQ

I will also be in the vCloud Pavillion on the ioko stand.  ioko is the company I  work for in London and we have a great new Cloud based service offering that we will get the opportunity to tell attendee’s about.  For more information see here and if at the event come and pick up a  brochure, find out more and a free pen!

I will be using Twitter to post regular updates on things.  I will cover the sessions in blog postings that I will publish (hopefully) at the end of each day but will use Twitter, combined with the streaming video, to present a ‘feel’ for the event and of course any major announcements.  I’ll also cover the rest of event with (free WI-FI permitting) streaming live video whilst I wander around.  This will give those of you that are not attending a feel for what’s going on.

I look forward to finally meeting up with many of those involved in the VMware Community that I have chatted with on Twitter and via my/their blogs.  It’d also be good to meet any of you that read my site – drop me a line. 

In preparing to attend VMworld Europe I put together a number of essential Geek items that I would bring.  These being:

Netbook – No need to carry around a full size laptop between sessions.  I bought a Advent 4211 (a re-branded MSI Wind) about 8 months ago and have found it brilliant to use.  The keys are almost full size and the 1024×600 screen is more than adequate for most use.  I have added another 1GB of memory to it taking it to the maximum 2GB.  I also installed the Beta of Windows 7 (build 7000) on it the other evening and I have to give full credit to Microsoft for producing such a decent, easy to install and use OS – and this is only a BETA version!  I didn’t even have to install any additional drivers.

I have MS Office 2007 Professional installed on it and will be using OneNote in all the VMworld sessions to take notes which I will then use to create a related blog posting.  I’ve also installed MS LiveWriter that I use for creating and uploading all my blog postings – it works great with WordPress though my only gripe is that the latest version doesn’t work with many of the 3rd party LiveWriter plug-ins that I rely on. 

Of course, one of the most important items for the Netbook is battery power.  I don’t know what the power arrangements will be like at the conference centre so am relying on 2 x 6 cell 4400mAh batteries to get me through the day.  I get about 4 hours approx from each so that should see me right.   I am also hoping that the Windows 7 energy saving features will also extend the usage I get from each battery.

I do have a USB data dongle though this is UK based so using this in Cannes, France would cost a fortune.  I will therefore be relying on the free conference WI-FI for any internet connectivity.  I really hope it’s a decent installation capable of handling the demand from so many VMworld attendees/geeks trying to use it all at the same time.  Going on past reports I’m not holding my breath.

Nokia N95 8GB – I only purchased this yesterday so am still getting to grips with it though I have to say my impressions of it so far are very good.  I will be using it to stream live video footage via the conference WI-FI.  Check out the video  feed in the top right hand corner of this site.  For all other clips click on this link to my page up on Qik.  

This is pretty much all the tech kit I’ll be using during the event though I have brought along my trusty iPod Nano for my music requirements and for listening to my favourite podcasts.

Keep checking back on the site as I will be adding plenty of content over the coming days.

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