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Part of VMworld US opened today in San Francisco with Partner Day which is not open to general attendees but for VMware’s partners to be enlightened with their tailored VMworld info. I flew in yesterday and managed to make it (barely) to vBeers at The Chieftain. Was great to see the #LonVMUG crew (a bit strange to fly half way across the world and then enjoy a Guinness with people you see in London 🙂

Today, I started the day getting stuck into some serious networking over vBreakfast, fuelling up for the day ahead. I was very glad to meet Brent Quick, Chris Well of NetApp, Matthew Brender and Will Huber and see again Jane Rimmer and Gabrie van Zanten. The anticipation, excitement and interest in all things virtual was a good primer for the day.

I then headed off to register at the Moscone Center which is decked out in resplendent VMworld everything. As a blogger rather than partner I took the opportunity to head off to the Hands on Labs. Labs have changed a little this year. The labs will be available to access remotely after the show so perhaps the stats busting numbers of VMs deployed may take a hit this year. Labs can be completed in an hour or less and there are now lightning labs which are 15 or 30 minute modules of a bigger lab that you can take when you have limited time and come back and finish the other modules later.  Also for the first time you can use your own device via wireless and run the labs from your laptop or tablet within the conference venue. Labs are open at the following times but remember as the labs take up to an hour you need to be there in time before closing.

• Sunday August 26, 2012: 11:00am – 8:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Monday August 27, 2012: 10:30am – 8:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Tuesday August 28, 2012: 7:00am – 7:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Wednesday August 29, 2012: 7:00am – 7:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Thursday August 30, 2012: 7:00am – 3:00pm

As part of my theme for VMworld is Looking into the future  I started looking at some labs which show new technology.

That was the plan but it didn’t really work in reality. It seems there was a technical issue with the labs today but unfortunately this information didn’t reach the very long line of people waiting to try them out. Apparently due to some provisioning issues only 40 out of the 480 seats were available which caused an inevitable backlog. After 2.5 hours in the queue and then asking and finding out that once you actually registered at the front of the queue there was still ANOTHER 2 hour wait, I decided to abort mission labs for the moment and left PowerShell guru Jonathan Medd to brave the queue. Unfortunately none of this was properly announced to waiting lab hopefulls so unfortunately this left many grumpy people in line none the wiser as to the situation.

So, I spent the first part of the afternoon walking around the admittedly glorious sunshine in San Francisco taking in some of the sights. I returned at 4pm when the Solutions Exchange opened with the Welcome Reception and had a quick orientation and then headed off for EMC #v0dgeball Charity Tournament 2012 that was ultimately won by Arista Networks raising $12,000 for charity. Back to the Solutions Exchange for some more vendor looking around and free T-shirt snatching and then on the way back to my hotel spotted the Hand on Labs still open and working and no queue, so attempt 2 for lab attendance was initiated.

I did lab HOL-OPS-04 – DynamicOps by VMware – Rapidly Deliver Private and Hybrid Clouds Across Multi-Vendor Environments.

I am very interested in DynamicOps and how VMware will bring Private Cloud to the masses as I’ve blogged before on the challenges of vCloud Director for private cloud deployments. The lab was sold as to “demonstrate the ability to use DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center to rapidly deploy Private and Hybrid Clouds across complex multi-vendor environments.” The lab went through the scenarios of using the DynamicOps Cloud Automation Suite as an admin and also user to show how the product can be used to request and manage IT resources. This is very much in setting up a Service Catalogue to create resources on one hand and consumers on the other hand to create a private cloud. The interesting thing about Dynamic Ops and its big selling point is it can administer not just virtual machines running on ESXi, Hyper-V and XenServer (one of the lab modules is to create a resource on Hyper-V, remember we’re at VMware’s VMworld!) but also to administer physical machines and cloud VMs hosted on Amazon along with storage and networking devices. This is a great orchestration engine to truly reach across all your disparate infrastructure and from a single requester console allow your users to create and manage resources in a much broader infrastructure than VMware has before been able to manage. What I do wonder is how on earth VMware is going to integrate Dynamic Ops which is by its nature is so broad into VMware’s existing automation/deployment engines such as vCloud Director. Both do the same thing in many respects although are very different. Time will tell how VMware will incorporate DynamicOps but I hope VMware’s recent self realisation that people funnily enough do have to manage physical resources and VMs running on other hypervisors or clouds will mean it is happy to manage beyond its traditional sphere of influence.

I then met up again with new VMware evangelist Mike Laverick and went to the #vmunderground party and continued the social networking theme, meeting up with Chris Wahl, John Troyer, Alan Renouf, Conrad Ramos (vNoob) and Alaric Davies.

I’m now very much looking forward to tomorrow when the conference kicks off in earnest and to hear the announcements VMware has up its sleeve to keep us interested.