VMWorld 2014 Expectations

A little over one week from now I will be hopping a flight to San Francisco for VMWare’s VMworld Conference, my first, held at the ever popular Moscone Center. Last year I had the privilege of attending Cisco Systems’ Cisco Live but from everything I’ve seen, read and heard as well as my experience in getting even to this point VMWorld seems to be a bit of a different animal. In this post I’ll cover some of my impressions so far and things I’m looking forward to as well as a list of the sessions that I’m (at least at this point) scheduled to attend.

Costs

In terms of the price of the conference and directly related matters (outside educational events, community shindigs) VMWorld is pretty reasonable with a standard cost of $1995 knocked down to $1695 if you register early.  There also a variety of ways to even get discounts under that. In my case I was supposed to be eligible for another $100 off either because I am a VCP or from my VMUG Advantage subscription, but because of a computer system flub on their part they showed me as an Alumni of VMWorld giving me another $100, making the final $1495. I offered it up as a mistake and they said to let it go. Further I opted for the $55 5k fun run Sunday morning which isn’t bad as well as the vBrownBag/ VMUnderground Opening Acts panel educational series Sunday afternoon at the great value of free.  I highly recommend these as the line up looks great, filled with a who’s who of the virtualization social world riffing on a variety of topics.

Past that the costs get a little nuts when compared to my experience last year for Cisco in Orlando, FL.  You really couldn’t even get in the door of the conference hotels for less than $270 a night and even then many of the available options filled up within the first two weeks of registration being open. Compare that to the $139 a night I paid for the Courtyard 2 blocks from the venue in Orlando.  Further I’ve been told to expect higher than normal costs for food (the conference food is evidently atrocious and I shouldn’t really consider that an option) as well as flight cost for going across country and it really starts to add up.

Community Focus/ Party Party Party

To truly condense what I think I know about VMWorld in comparing to CLUS so far is while there is a healthy dose of outside get togethers available at CLUS VMWorld vendors seem to take the sponsored events to a whole other level.  Every single night, including Saturday when I get in there is multiple vendor or community sponsored events going on, almost all of which start with a “v,” vBreakfast, vStogies, vBeers, vFlipCup vOdgeball, etc.  They even go so far as to provide a iCalendar with nothing but theSocial Events. Further one of the nice things that I’m not personally going to be able to utilize this year is a regular’s wife organizes a variety of sponsored activities for the spouses who decide to travel as well called, aptly, Spousetivities.

All of this lends itself to the basic idea that one of the things that VMWare has fostered very well is the sense of community; that while the conference itself provides a trove of education through its sessions and such the true value of the conference is the uniting of a community that is already integrated through social media. Last year I dutifully attended a large number of sessions at CiscoLive where I truly learned a great deal, but it was the time just casually discussing things in the Social Media Hub where I truly felt enriched by the experience. VMWare seems to understand this as well.

Where in the World is Jim

As I sat down to write this and dumped the list of sessions which I’ve scheduled to do so I realized that I’ve scheduled more than I thought I had.  Another thing that I learned last year is that sessions that seemed like a great idea before hand don’t seem that great when you are in the middle of a conversation regarding a topic you are very much so interested in with people you consider far smarter than yourself.  I had this thought a number of times with people such as Chris Wahl, Jody Lemoine, Amy Arnold, and Jake Snyder.  So for that reason I don’t think I’m going to find myself shy this year to hop on the VMWorld app and dump myself out of sessions if the timing isn’t right.  The beauty of these major conferences is that all the sessions are recorded and later access is included in the cost of attendance.

Anyway, for now this is what I’m looking forward to seeing:

• NET1214  —  NSX Certification – the Next Step in Your Networking Career
• OPT3021-SPO  —  Size Does Matter: Performance, Uptime, Growth and You
• INF1469  —  Extreme Performance Series: Monster VM Performance
• INF1212  —  Best Practices in Virtualizing Remote Offices and Branch Offices with VMware
• SDDC1600  —  Art of IT Infrastructure Design: The Way of the VCDX – Panel
• STO3162  —  Software Defined Storage: Satisfy the Requirements of Your Application at the Granularity of a Virtual Disk with Virtual Volumes (VVols)
• STO2754-SPO  —  New Kids on the Storage Block, File and Share: Lessons in Storage and Virtualization
• STO2496  —  vSphere Storage Best Practices: Next-Gen Storage Technologies
• INF1192  —  Ask the Experts : Design Advice for Small and Midsize Business
• INF2336  —  Separating Fact from Fiction – ESXi Hypervisor Security
• NET2745  —  vSphere Distributed Switch: Technical Deep Dive
• INF2427  —  DRS : Advanced Concepts, Best Practices and Future Directions
• BCO2701  —  vSphere HA Best Practices and FT Tech Preview
• SDDC1176  —  Ask the Expert vBloggers
• EUC2621  —  Storage Overload: How to Make Sense of Storage Choices in a VDI.next World
• INF1601  —  Taking Reporting and Command Line Automation to the Next Level with PowerCLI
• STO3247  —  VMware VVOL Technical Preview with Dell Storage

As you can tell my focus this year is really on storage, something I know I’m a bit weak on but also a topic that is currently my employer’s greatest need at this time.  Other than that I’m really looking forward to a lot of the panel discussions with many of the names I’ve come to know in the community.

First Impressions Are Important

While I am very much so excited for the trip for all of the reasons listed above, I really do feel like I need to put the bad out there with the good. Keep in mind that the only thing I have to compare VMWorld’s setup against is CiscoLive, a conference that when you include it’s earlier versions has been going on for 25 years, so when I talk about how the lead up to the conference experience has gone for me I really do feel like I am comparing against the gold standard.  With that disclaimer made, from a organization standpoint I feel like the conference is a bit of a mess.  With Cisco’s annual get together before you leave the conference floor for the last time registration is already open for the next year, VMWorld didn’t even have an updated website until about 3 months before the event begins. Even with that up until a couple of weeks ago there were still portions of the site labeled “coming soon.”

I could really go on and on with things that have irked me a bit, but my take on it is that the organization of VMWare’s conference really doesn’t seem to ramp up on the same time frame as Cisco, I feel like Cisco at any point in time is working at least a year or two in advance on all facets of the get together, where the feeling for me with VMworld is about 6 months out somebody went “oh crap, we forgot to plan the conference!”  It might be completely off base but that’s where I’m at.

Conclusion

All in all though I am very much so looking forward to the event. Truthfully I’ve never been further west than Minnesota so the idea of California is appealing in and of itself, but the opportunity to get together with some of the brightest minds in virtualization today as well as seeing what next both from VMWare as well as their related vendors is appealing to say the least.

If you’re going I hope to see you there and if you want to get together feel free to reach me @k00laidIT.