Here's what I wrote to my boss:
I would like you to seriously consider sending me to VMWorld
2008, to be held in Las Vegas this coming September. As we move towards a virtualized enterprise,
I’ve found the resources of the VMWare community invaluable.
I believe sending me to VMWorld 2008 would provide excellent
value to (my company) for the following reasons:
Hands-on labs.
The ability to configure and tinker with live hardware and software in a
test environment under the supervision of instructors is valuable and
impossible to replicate elsewhere.
Seminars.
Live seminars present information on security, disaster planning,
optimization, troubleshooting and a myriad of other virtualization-related
topics. Additionally, attendees have the
ability after the event to download videos of all seminars, even those which
they were unable to attend.
Access to solutions exchange. The vendor expo, which affords me the
opportunity to talk to representatives from various vendors to determine which
products are best for us.
Keynote presentations. Affords me the ability to stay abreast of the
future of the platform, to anticipate changes and opportunities for our company
well in advance of the platforms evolution.
Networking.
Being able to network with other VMWare users to bounce ideas off of each
other and exchange contact information provides free resources for problem
solving in the future.
The information that I was able to bring to (my company)
after attending VMWorld 2007 was immense.
It helped us determine if virtualization was the right choice for us,
choose products, develop an implementation strategy, and begin our
implementation. I believe that VMWorld
2008 could be even more beneficial than the last conference, now that we have
some experience on the platform and are beginning to embrace it fully.
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We're a small manufacturing company (about 120 employees) with an IT staff of 3. I'm the only guy that does VMWare (among other things). We plan to virtualize all of our servers, and are about 1/3 of the way there (12 physical servers will become about 30 VMWare servers on 4 physical servers).
