After attending VMworld 08this past week, I was able to develop and document methods for attending the conference that are extremely effective. The intent is to avoid standing in line, avoid dull content, attend the best sessions, and know about the best after parties. Despite the fact that giving away this method may actually erode the advantage it gives me, I have outlined it below.

1. Arrive just a couple of minutes before doors open for the morning keynote. Follow the guidance of the ushers, but at the first chance you get go directly to the press / analyst area near the front and sit down. Get out notebook and begin looking as busy as possible, which usually means catching up on twitter.

2. Arrive about 5 to 10 minutes late for all breakout sessions. You won't have to stand in line and you can still get a great seatby just walking to front row. This also allows you to avoid the intro slides and get there just in time for the best content.

3. Use twitter constantly. This has lots of advantages. The biggest is that you can find out what the good sessionsare, so that when your session is a dud, you can go directly to a much better session.

4. The second benefit of twitter is that you will hear about all of the parties and dinners that people are attending AND hopefully get yourself invited. To get invited you will need to have done enough twitter posts that others know you are and are curious enough to want to see what you look like.

5. Wait until the last day to get trinkets and swag from the expo hall. None of the exhibitors want to take that stuff home and they will absolutely load you down with bouncy balls, t-shirts, and usb memory keys just to avoid having to pack it back up.

Just a having a little fun on Friday with this post! I hope that everybody enjoyed the conference as much as I did.

Todd

These are my notes from the VMWworld 2008 session KNVMWare earlier today that featured Paul Maritz the CEO of VMware. Stephen Herrod and another gentleman from VMware were also on hand to assist with questions.

This are my notes and all questions and answers have been paraphrased. I believe that I got the general intent and thought that those unable to attend might like the quick summary read. (I missed the first couple of questions). Hopefully they will post the audio of this session at some point.

Does he see open source as threat?
PM - Debate internally about whether to OpenSource ESX or not. See need to stay ahead of open source with innovation

Intel FLexmigration - Backward compatible?
SH - No

Will new technologies impact datacenter operations? How do I plan for the new stuff?
PM - Preview available in lab. Working with partners to build platform, chart roadmap

Are you working with AMD on any technologies?
SH - Yes - nested tables, and similar AMD version of flexmigration

Thumb drive for clients - Can it be encrypted / secured?
PM - Intent is to secure local data on thumb drive or local HD and it will be encrypted

vCloud initiative?
OtherGuy - SRM will be extended to work with VCloud federation

How is VDC-OS an OS?
PM - It abstracts away many datacenter details, similar to how OS does for hardware and software. It will have APIs, etc, and be similar to traditional OS, but isn't an OS. Hypervisor is a specific capability within the VDC-OS

Can you delineate the specifics of the Cisco partnership?
PM - Tune into Cisco keynote for details

VDI?
PM -Desktop opportunity is at least as big as VMware is today. Next 12 to 24 months

Multiple Datacenters - How to run VMware across them?
SH - working with partners to overcome limitations of VMotion

SMB, Educational Discounts Products?
PM - There is a program in place, no specific timeline for additional enhancements to existing program

Extension of VMware on MAC platform in future - ACE, Fusion?
PM - Details in ACE, Fusion sessions

Diversification of Hypervisor support? Esp with liability in terms of worm or security failure?
PM - Not today, but we are looking at it and are open to doing it. Issue a few weeks ago was "amateur hour" and it will not happen again

Mid-market opportunity for VMware?
PM - Any org that has a collection of 5 servers has the opp to use VMware with new vCloud. Smaller than that we have other products

In order to use VMware across entire datacenter - need time drift to be fixed?
SH - Challenges with some versions of linux. Move to paravirtualizaiton will alleviate this to great extent

Interested in customer feedback - Advisory council recommends federated Virtual Center for multiple datacenters? When? Need it now
PM - How to scale management across federated datacenters is difficult. 2009 for some, 2010 for more

Virtual Center client for MAC / LInux?
PM - I would love to release one. Need to make a platform independent client

Performance of I/O virtualization? How do you see this area progressing? Working with partners?
SH - Working with partners on accelerators - VMdirect Path, NetQueue - Breakouts on

Protection of data in the cloud?
PM - In general notions of Quality of Service will have to be better defined and included as part of the cloud. We have to evolve to get there - not there today.

Todd