VMworld 2011 sessions now online

The sessions from VMworld are now finally available here (logon required): http://www.vmworld.com/community/sessions/

I think the quality of the speakers at VMworld is better better and better for each year. The content is still varying a bit, but the one single thing that has become much better this year was the hands on labs (HOL). Yes, the HOL manuals are also available, but the online lab cloud is not available yet. The hands on labs this year had quite good performance, better than previous years, and as far as I can tell it was working flawlessly. I attended a few labs myself, and I regret that I didn't attend more, but  there were so many things to choose from and so little time.

The atmosphere in the HOL was calm and they played quite cool music. Some of it was chip tunes and others were of newer age. A line of VMware SE's was always there to help anyone out. Yep, a line of people who were full of lab competence :)

In addition there was a big screen showing statistics of VMs being created and destroyed, labs being finished and so on with very nice animations:

I don't know what service they were using here, but it's probably an inhouse application made for VMworld.

Having a good overview over the performance of your environment is important so what is better than having two different product side by side showing their view of the lab performance? Both VMware vCenter Operations and NetApp Insight Balance were giving their stats side by side:

The labs we were running were not hosted locally, they were hosted by two overseas datacenters, and we were using Wyse P20 terminals with dual screens to access the labs. VMware have said that they will make these labs available in 2012. I think it will be of great value for partners and customers to have such a resource available. I guess we'll just have to stay tuned and wait.