VMWorld 2011: Cloud Power

I attended VMWorld 2011. As usual, an excellent conference put on by VMware! It was very well organized and many sessions to choose from to enhance one’s understanding of virtualization, and to see trends in the market! This year’s theme was: Your Cloud, Own it!

Attendance was around 19,000 (seemed more like 190,000). Apparently this was bigger than previous conferences and the limit that Las Vegas can hold. So, VMworld 2012 will be held back in San Francisco.

There were plenty of sessions to attend. I liked being able to sign up for a session-- that way you were guaranteed a seat. I noticed there were still plenty of seats available after 15 minutes, so walk-ups were no problem! I enjoyed the “Group Discussion” sessions. These were smaller sessions of about 20 people, with a lot of interaction and discussion. VMworld had a cool indoor park setting with artificial grass and trees, and several benches to sit and relax.

The “Solutions Exchange” was huge. There were many vendors displaying and sporting their goods, like fisherman dangling colorful lures (iPads) in hopes you would take the “bait” to come over and listen to why their product was the best! I didn’t have much time to spend at the Solutions Exchange, since my days were full with sessions. I was more interested in getting technical information, rather than finding out about new products.

I thought it very exciting that the new vSphere 5 can support:

• 32 CPU’s
• 1TB Virtual Memory
• 2TB Virtual Disk

Now that’s some serious cloud power!