VMWare Virtualization Forum 2008 (Singapore)

This is a belated entry on the conference which I attended on Thursday, 16th October 2008 at Suntec City.

Good News… Bad News

Let me start with the bad news… The Event Planners from both VMWare and Spark Planners are pretty lost.

Registration Process

1. There was a very long queue of people even past 9AM whereby the event started.
2. The Event Planners tried to collect namecards and asked the attendees to collect their badges later during the coffee break.
3. But oh no! The Event Planners lost some namecards, including mine and a lot of people ended up wasting even more time filling in the forms (aka walk-in attendees drill).
4. Some of the attendees are at their last namecards due to networking with old friends/ex-colleagues and guess what? The Event Planners do not have any photocopying machine to zap the namecards. They wasted even more time writing down the namecard details by hand.
5. Everyone ended up filling the same survey questions 3 times (on the web, on registration and end of event survey). I really wonder why…

Coffee/Lunch Breaks

1. There were overcrowding. Good problem IMHO, but the crowd management was subpar.
2. Some attendees were told, “eh, the food on this table is not for consumption yet, it is for the next batch of attendees coming out of the rooms”
3. There were no printed info on where the Lunch will be held, some attendees were let wondering hungry at the booths.

Breakout Sessions

1. Speakers from the next partition interfered with the other speakers causing lots of background noise and echoes.
2. Crazy bell-ringers chasing attendees into the conferences adding more noise into the breakout sessions.

 

 

Now for the Good News.

VMWare never fails to draw lots of crowd and mind you, I find quite a number of key customers and decision makers in the crowd.

VMWare also has some strong partnerships with other ISVs and I had a great time talking to NetApp, Quest and F5.

NetApp has some cool technology. But better explained here. I liked the block level deduplication, ability to create any number of snapshots and saving 50% of storage space at the same time.

Quest is known for its management toolset which covers from Databases (yes, I was a proud Toad user), Applications (Exchange/SharePoint), Windows (you should try their free tools for Windows System Management. PowerGUI is one big favorite, basically a GUI for PowerShell) to Virtualization (the next hottest thing).

F5 (best known for speeding up Network Hogs) and guess what, Virtualization is the next Network Hog. If you add the maxim “Bandwidth/Storage/Memory/CPU Cycles is never enough…”, you got a big problem to solve.

Acronis was also there… but I am not sure what exactly they have to do with Virtualization, I know they do P2V pretty well but it overlaps with VMWare’s toolset. I have used Acronis on the enterprise before. Pretty impressive upstart company which managed to kick some butts of the incumbents (hint: Symantec and Computer Associates).

 

 

I find it unusual for EMC to be there. EMC is the parent company of VMWare and is a huge behemoth in the storage space.

How will Dell, HP, IBM, etc… think ? Customers will surely ask “So is your storage solution for VMWare better than EMC ?” (which I heard several times in the exhibits)

I guess we are still shocked (since 2005)

 

Now the even better news !

Virtualization is one of the RECESSION-PROOF jobs !

 

On the whole, I had good breakout sessions and great networking sessions with my partners, customers and catching up with ex-colleagues. Event organizing could be beefed up next time to make things better.

7.0 out of 10.

Conway’s Makati Shangri-La Philippines

These videos are from my last trip to Manila, Philippines.

Jamming Beautiful Girls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHFBQDxWcKk

Jamming Grab Yourself More Beer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9AvvC_Epl0 

Random Jamming !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtjABY3IBy0