As my third VMware conference in three months I don’t think I had a normal vForum. Of course I started the festivities by arranging the second VMdownunderground party. Veeam and Netapp sponsored the event that allowed conference attendees to start the conference with some socialising. It was great to catch up with so many people there, a lot of people I don’t see more than once between vForums.
My main objective for the vForum conference was to get some Australian and New Zealand input into the vBrownBag Tech Talks that we started recording at VMworld in San Francisco and then carried on at VMworld in Barcelona. Happily I managed to convince a few people that they could stand up for ten minutes and talk about something.
The first Tech Talk was one that was fated to be trouble, Vaughn Stewart had had to stand me up in Barcelona when he got pulled into customer meetings. I returned the favour by messing up my travel schedule in Tuesday. Luckily Vaughn managed to give me a few minutes on Wednesday during the keynote and we got a few of his thoughts recorded.
Later in the day Michael Webster talked Business critical apps in the cloud, Josh Odgers talks about VDI design, Simon Sharwood talked about how to get quoted in and even paid by the IT media and Grant Orchard talked with me about the VMware community.
While I’m talking about recording video there was another videographer working. Craig Waters was interviewing people like Bogomil Balinsky, Vaughn Stewart and Steve Herrod. As the Melbourne VMUG leader Craig has some good contacts to do these interviews and I’m looking forward to watching them when they are published.
On Wednesday evening I was surprised to find that there was no party, although I imagine that the hall crawl in the solutions exchange went on for a fair while. As a vExpert for 2012 I was invited to join the VCDXs, vChampions and VMUG leaders in a mixer hosted by Steve Herrod. I knew about half the crowd pretty well as these are the people who engage in the community. I was very proud when Steve mentioned VMdownunderground and I was able to thank him for taking part in an awesome vBrownBag podcast.
I also had the pleasure of a couple of dinners with Erik Ullanderson who is VMware’s director of certifications and seems keen for me to make the move from VCAP to VCDX. To be fair it’s not just me, converting people from trained to VCP and VCP to VCAP and then VCDX is a priority. A lot of our conversations were about how to help that along and how vBrownBag is helping people along the path.
© 2012, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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The second time round I found the exam less tainxg. Being properly prepared, well read and having done lots of labs made a big difference.I’m expecting my result in the next week or so.