The economy has been rough. Individuals and businesses have felt the impacts in various ways. Reduction of income or revenue. Increased operational expenses. Reduction in valuation of homes or assets. Downsizing of staff. The slashing of budgets, including training, conferences, and travel. Those who are in verticals which tail economic trends by a year or two will begin feeling the impacts soon.
As a reader of this blog, you already know VMworld 2010 in San Francisco is just a few months away. If you’re like me, you’re wondering “How am I going to get there this year?” Due to the reasons I’ve outlined above, details are sketchy on whether or not you’ll get to go. Management says “Ask again in August, we’ll let you know.” It doesn’t sound promising. Or maybe you’ve already been told “It’s just too expensive given the economy, sorry.”
boche.net would like to help. If you can get yourself to the door of the Moscone Center, boche.net will get you in. This is a $1,895 value if you were to purchase a conference pass at the door. There is no purchase necessary for this contest other than your own T&E (transportation, hotel, van down by the river, etc.) On Friday June 18th, 2010, one random and lucky winner who has followed the contest rules completely (detailed below) will be revealed.
The intent here is not to save a company money. Rather, to make the difference between someone going to VMworld versus not going. Therefore, I would appreciate it if entries would be limited to those who do not already have budget approval for the VMworld conference pass. At the same time, should you win, you owe it to yourself and the other contestants to follow through and attend the conference. It would be a shame for the pass to go to waste. Perhaps another blogger or vendor would like to co-sponsor airfare or hotel for the winner. Consider this an open invitation for co-sponsorship.
Be sure to read the VMworld 2010 FAQ so that you thoroughly understand the conference logistics, ensuring you are an eligible candidate to attend.
Update 6/6/10: I’m happy to announce that Gestalt IT has graciously offered to pay for the airfare. In addition to the VMworld conference pass, Gestalt IT will provide the winner with round trip airfare, up to $500. All we ask in return is that the recipient provide a post-VMworld write-up of what they learned from attending the conference. This could be a written document, a blog post, a video, you choose. Thank you Gestalt IT for your donation!
Contest Rules:
- Post one comment/reply and only one comment/reply to this blog article below.
- Include your first and last name.
- Provide a valid email address when completing the comment form.
- Include a short bio about yourself and how you use VMware currently or how you would like to leverage VMware products.
- Include three (3) things you are looking to gain from attending VMworld 2010 (ie. Why do you want to go?)
- Contest entry must be recieved by noon CST Thursday June 17th, 2010.
- One (1) random winner will be chosen Thursday evening June 17th, 2010.
- Winner will be contacted via email address provided above.
- Winner will recieve a VMworld 2010 San Francisco conference pass.
- Winner will receive airfare up to $500 from Gestalt IT.
- Winner will provide a post-VMworld write-up of what they learned from attending the conference to Gestalt IT.
- Contest results will posted Friday June 18th, 2010.
- The conference pass is non-transferrable and non-refundable.
- Hotel, meals, and other expenses are not covered by boche.net.
- No purchase necessary.
Good Luck!
Update 6/17/10:
WooHoo!
A name has been randomly drawn and we have a winner! Congratulations to contest winner Greg Stuart who will be receiving a VMworld 2010 conference pass and round trip airfare (up to $500). Greg’s winning entry and BIO is listed below:
I currently work for an organization that has begun to leverage VMware more and more. I’m new to virtualization and would like to gain a better knowledge of the VMware products, attend some hands on sessions and come back with solutions that I can employ in our environment. The ability to discuss scenarios and solutions with vendors in person would be awesome.
I’m pleased with the outcome of the contest. Greg is new to virtualization and I think there is a lot of valuable information he will be able to pick up at VMworld. Better yet, VMworld is a 4 day event this year – Monday thru Thursday instead of 3 days as it was prior years. This affords Greg the opportunity to take in a whole extra day of content.
Thank you to all who participated in the contest including Gestalt IT for contributed the round trip airfare. Although there could ultimately be only one grand prize contest winner, my hope is that you all will make the show this year somehow. There are nearly 90 comments/replies to this post explaining the values which VMworld can provide. Much of this content could be borrowed to write or improve your own compelling justification, hopefully earning you a trip to VMworld.
Everyone have a great weekend!
I’m a Systems Analyst for a small software company. We have a 4 host cluster that runs most of our internal infrastructure. I’m currently implementing 2 more clusters at remote sites to handle our hosted customer applications. All hosts are ESXi 4 and all storage is iSCSI.
VMworld would be an opportunity for me to talk directly with a lot of vendors about how they can work with a small iSCSI environment like mine. I would also like to make some contacts within VMware that might help me navigate the support and licensing structure at VMware. Finally, I’d love to be able to meet some of the people who write all of these great blogs that keep me informed about VMware.
I currently work for an organization that has begun to leverage VMware more and more. I’m new to virtualization and would like to gain a better knowledge of the VMware products, attend some hands on sessions and come back with solutions that I can employ in our environment. The ability to discuss scenarios and solutions with vendors in person would be awesome.
I am a systems administrator for a small manufacturing company in Wisconsin. Currently we are not running virtualization, but would like to start. My goal is to learn about the technology more from those who use it everyday and get a feel for how it can really help us moving forward.
The project I would like to begin with is Disaster Recovery. Sure we have tapes and flip them as best we are able, but building a live DR environment on a hyper-visor would be a great way to start working with better DR and to prove to management that virtualization really works and can save us money and headaches down the road.
I would love to attend VMWorld to get more involved in the Virtualization community and learn more about the possibilities for using virtualization for the DR project.
Thanks again for this chance. I work for an IT consulting company that works mostly with SMB customers. I would really like to sit down at some of the technical sessions, increase my knowledge of VMware technolgies and bring an increased knowledge to my customers. Because we are a smaller consulting firm they will not send me on their dollar so I would be extremely greatful for this.
I’m currently running an environment of nearly 2,000 VM’s and rely heavily on vCLI to help automate to build, support, and maintain the environment. Unfortunately I haven’t had an opportunity to attend VMworld’s in the past. If given the opportunity I’d love to attend some of the Lab Manager, View, and SRM labs, meet some of the expert bloggers that I’ve been following for years, and take my VCP exam while there. Thanks for putting the contest together!
Hi, I loved the tricks I could do with VMWare Workstation in 1999, like booting a virtual pc in full screen mode!
Since then, I have loved it more and more everyday.
These days I am managing ESX, ESXi, Server 1 and 2 and a few workstations. In total I have around 200 vms, 25 ESX/ESXi hosts and 1 vCentre.
I got vSphere4 training booked for the end of this month.
And I wan to see VMWare on ARM based products – yes on mobile phones, I want to see how the Nexus switch makes a difference and what is the future of having VCP4.
On top of these, I want to meet people from the VMWare community!
Thank you!
I have never been to a VMworld conference and thank you; Jason and Gestalt IT for the opportunity to attend one. Do to the economic times and my company’s dependencies on construction and new housing development we have had numerous cutbacks, but technology must stay current so when we emerge out of this economic down turn our company is still competitive. We have seven newly upgraded vSphere hosts and 70 vm’s. I would really like to take my company into Desktop Virtualization in the near future and think that VMworld would be a great place to learn about Desktop Virtualization and rolling out windows 7. We have branch locations that I would like to go virtual some day and think VMworld could give me some coast effective information.
I’ve been using VMware products for nearly a decade now in all sorts of circumstances. My current role as a Systems Administrator for a Health Care company has given me the opportunity to really delve deep into virtualization from servers to desktops. Back in 2007, I was able to attend VMworld in SF for the first (and unfortunately, last) time. While a coworker and I were promised that we would each be going every other year, after his visit in 2008 they pulled back on sending employees to conferences. It was a bit of a heartbreak because when I returned back from VMworld 2007, I had an amazing energy that I really put into developing our virtual environment. I hope to regain that excitement and energy and I really appreciate the opportunity you are offering here. I know that whoever gets this opportunity will know that amazing feeling of going to this event.
Anyway, I hope to get more info regarding Storage optimizations, Expanding our VDI deployment, and strengthening our DR options. I also hope to meet up with other professionals who share this passion. Thanks again!!!!
My company has gone from no virtualization to over 700 server VMs in less than 2 years, and we’ve now started expanding with View. I’ve earned my VCP3, VCP4, and have become the primary support engineer for the whole VMware farm in the last 6 months. My predecessor attended last year and had access to the wealth of information from the conference long after he returned. I’m hoping to get more information on automation, cloud options, and best practices for View deployments.
Hi there.
I’m currently a VMware, Linux and Network administrator at a hosting and outsourcing company in Sweden. Last few years we have been expanding rapidly, and I’ve been putting down a lot of work on designing, buying and setting up the infrastructure. I haven’t got much time to play but I’ve managed to get VCP4, and I read a lot of docs and blogs that interest me after work. I’ve never been to a conference at all, or the USA for that matter, so it would be really interesting to go.
Top things that would interest me is any news regarding whats next for ESX(i), like memory compression etc.
Another thing is VMware View, we’re currently using Citrix(although virtualized in vSphere) for our VDI deployments today, so it’d be cool to see if there’s any major benefit to switching(I haven’t been able to look into it much).
Of course it would be cool to see the people’s blogs I follow too. 🙂
I’m a Sysadmin at an IT shop and have been using virtualization for some time now.
My new employee has the immediate need of infra-structure virtualization of some 40+ servers and I’m trying to get the grips on how to tackle this efficiently.
Attending to VMWorld will benefit me in:
Learning about the last trends in virtualization.
Making contact with other virtualization and IT professionals.
Defining the best strategy for this ongoing virtualization job.
I am a 1-Man IT dept for a small municipality in central Alabama. I have about 150 network devices. I am looking to virtualize my entire datacenter, which is several servers, including a newly deployed Exchange 2007. I am very excited to be learning this amazing new technology. I just bought the VMware vSphere 4 Essentials bundle as my first official VMware purchase. I want to learn how to better utilize VMware in my enterprise and meet some of the great bloggers that I have been reading for the last year. My city has lost a lot of money this year in expected revenue. I had hoped that there would be enough for me to try to attend VMworld this year, but I know now that there is no chance of me attending because of our situation. Thanks for the opportunity, no matter how small it is for any one of us. This is why you are one of the true leaders in the virtualization blogger space!
Hi Jason,
I’m Didier Pironet, freelancer, passionate by the virtualization era, VMware aficionado and recently awarded vExpert2010!
I’m using VMware products every day, either at customer sites or in my own home lab. Cutting the link between the hardware and the OS is the best thing that happened to the IT world recently.
First of all I’ve never had the chance to attend a VMworld event, thus I guess the first thing I will enjoy is the ambiance and the atmosphere of such big event.
Then comes the sessions and vendors demoing their products, and more than anything all the labs. Apparently they are awesome! Perhaps I will be lucky enough to have a tour behind the stage to see all the kits running :p
And finally meeting my vExperts peers, some of the Wall of Fame aka VCDX guys, and some of the highly respected bloggers. I wish I could meet Chad Sakac in person too, or at least listen to him during a session. He is a very cool and uber smart guy!
Voila, this is it! Good luck to the winner whoever he is 🙂
Cheers,
Didier
My name is Jamie Mathy and I work for a small IT shop in central Illinois. We currently work mostly with non-profit organizations, churches, and the usual SMB client. We have been using VMware ESXi significantly due to the fact that most of them only have 1 piece or iron.
Recently our sales guys and CEO have been successful in getting us in front of larger clients, and what I would hope to get from vmworld is a much deeper understanding of how vSphere and vCenter work together to create high availability solutions for our customers. I’m hoping that the classes will show me how to bring those solutions cost effectively to our non-profits.
Thank you for this opportunity,
Jamie
Hi, I’m a systems admin for a local council in the UK. I have been working with ESX for 3 years currently have 200 VM’s on ESX4i. Looking to deploy SRM over the next couple of months.
I’d like to attend vmworld
1) To get some lab time and see some of the presentations around SRM.
2) Automating through powershell.
3) Networking with other virtualization professionals.
I currently work with a great team in a large environment of about 350 hosts and close to 6,000 vm’s. We use a couple flavors of ESX, Lab manager and View, and are constantly growing the pool of virtual machines with new builds and P2V’s.
I’ve never had the opportunity to attend the vmworld show in the past, and I know that a ton of great information always comes out it the shows.
For me:
– Looking to get more exposure and face time with the vendors who provide 3rd party tools for VMware products, and see how those tools may help streamline our daily management and processes.
– Chargeback! Spend time in the labs, sessions and talking with the experts about bringing this type of service into our environment.
– Be a part of the whole vmworld experience! With all of the topics being talked about you just never know what you might pick-up that you weren’t even thinking about.
Thank you to Gestalt IT and VMware for giving someone the opportunity they wouldn’t have had!
Hi,
Just beginning to learn about Vcenter before engaging in a project to migrate all of our physical servers to Vmware onto a SAN for a regional Registered Social Landlord.
Would be great to get the buzz from the conference to take into my role, to enjoy the sessions, labs and networking and return fresh and ready to get stuck into the project.
John
Hi Jason,
I work in an small ISV company that develop VOIP and CRM application. I currently manage our internal cluster (3 hosts, about 110 vm used for infrastructure server and for test and dev server) and our cluster used for a saas offer for customer (3 hosts, about 40 production vm),so I’m using vmware product every day.
From attending VMworld 2010 I expect:
1- to network with other virtualization professional, meet vExperts guys and some of the top bloggers: I wish I could meet Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Mike Laverick and you 🙂
2- to attend the session and the labs, so I can “touch” what new is coming and bring new ideas in my work
3- to see vendors demoing their product
…and last but not least, to enjoy the atmosphere of a vmworld event!
Thank you for this opportunity!
I am a VCP, MCSE self taught. I discovered VM ware during IT inspection of internal systems, our Development group was using it to save money, the internal Development “guru” team for technology disbanded, and I initiated an IT directive to learn it and integrate corporate wide.
Since then I have been the local expert for all things virtualization, and even been recommended by customers within our company to other customers virtualization direction. I am a LAN Administrator and part of a team that handles ALL of the internal Development support, and as such I am privy to much of the information for our company needs.
Whenever there is a need to virtualize, I am the one people call. I also get called on to do crucial, immediate tasks because I get things done. I have been diligent in my work ethic to be *THE* definitive technology guy for everything Microsoft, Virtualization, and i386 build outs.
If I can’t solve the problem, it can’t be solved. I don’t profess to know everything I know how to FIND the right answer, and I enjoy a challenge. More often than not, I accomplish my goal. My goal now is to become VM Ware technical specialist consultant. This can be external or internal. There isn’t a job I can’t do when it comes to OS solutions, integration, or management of systems.
I strive every day to learn more and become knowledgeable, and I push myself. I am good, because I work with GOOD people and learn from others on VM community site.
I hope to contribute as much as I have learned, but if you want keep up with me, you have to know what I know (tall order). I will help, but not at the expense of remedial questions. I believe people can research things themselves, it’s like the parable, teach a man to fish… if you are TRULY interested in learning this, it’s not hard, but at LEAST try to understand the product before you ask questions, research the answer, don’t just ask. That’s how I expect people to respect others. Do the work yourself, and you will ALWAYS be rewarded.
Forgot to include my VMW 2010
1) gain more information about roadmap to new technology
2) network with other experts (vExpert)
3) Offer guidance and leadership and hear what others that are new to VM to help give them a direction.
* I have been using VMWare products for over a decade. . .dating back to Workstation 1.0 for linux. I have long been a fan of virtualization in its many forms, from application virtualization with terminal services/citrix and server virtualization with VMWare Server and now ESXi 4.0 managed by vCenter Essentials. As the Information Systems Manager for a mission clinic in Guam, I have been able to virtualize most of our workloads in the last few years. Currently certified as VCP3 and VCP4, I test in VMWare Workstation 7.1 and we run our production systems on ESXi. 4.0. I would like to be able to use vSphere management beyond Essentials and possibly step into the world of VDI.
1.) I am very interested in what might be happening in the VDI space at VMWorld. It sounds like it will be mostly a VMCloud show.
2.) The labs are where I found the most benefit last time I attended VMWorld. I look forward to digging into and learning the products in a lab environment
3.) Networking with other admins is always beneficial. Sometimes you find answers to that annoying issue you are having just by discussing your implementation with another admin.
My name is Luigi and I am currently a student and new blogger. I find Virtualization very intriguing and would like to further my education, blog posts on this.
If I won I would have no problems blogging about my experiences during VMworld.
I believe I could give a different approach to the whole seminar from my new perspective.
I am trying to win this because I am not related to any 1 company & definitely don’t have a budget for it.
Currently I use the free esxi and attend my local VMUG meetings to gain experience. I plan on testing for VMware certification after I test for my EMC Proven ISM exam.
I appreciate you guys holding this conference and I wish all the entrants the best of luck!
Luigi
@nerdblurt
I am currently the virtualization guy for my company, not to mention Windows/Solaris/Storage/etc…. I work for a non-for-profit association that is virtualizing its primary datacenters. I’ve preached the virtualization mantra since 2002 when I started using Workstation to test new tools/apps/OSes. Now I’ve convinced the majority and am working on the minority to prove we can use ESX for Exchange & SQL. I just hope I’m right. 🙂
We are in the middle of migrating 200 servers to wirtual machines. We are using ESXi on locally booting existing HP systems to keep costs down. With several P2Vs a week, we should be done in the next couple of months. I think I’m in vcenter more than email or any other app these days. My local VMUG has been a great resource, but I’d like to see what VMWORLD has to offer.
I hope to make it to VMWORLD 2010 this year to:
1) Get access to the labs to explore things I don’t normally have resources to work
2) I’m looking for sessions about making the daily administrative tasks more automated. We only have 5 people in my team and any options I can find to save time will make the environment run more smoothly.
3) I’m looking for tips on performance tuning and troubleshooting issues with systems running slowly.
Whether I win or not, good luck to whoever makes it to VMWORLD this year and I hope you get everything you are looking for and more out of it.
My Name is Jeff, I have more experience with ESXi than anything else. We use Acronis Backup and recovery along with VMware sphere to meet our clients needs. I think virtualization of workstations is where we are going next. We would like to leverage VMware solutions for our small business customers, about 70% of our business to help them stay productive and limit down time.
I would like to explorer the labs for ideas on implementation and design and VM cloud for larger data center environment.
Learn the best practices according to the pros across all the product lines with application virtualization as well as host OS.
From the Private Cloud Management track – I hope to gain valuable insight to strategies and design, mostly vblock usage.
I am located directly in the middle of this BP oil situation and I know our clients well need the cost saving benefits that come with VMware products.
Hello: my name is Mike, and I currently work in higher education, helping to manage and maintain the care and feeding of around 50 ESX hosts. We are currently underway in trying to grow the virtual infrastructure even more in the hopes to get 70-80% of all systems to be virtualized in a few years. Virtual desktop will also be a driving force in the years to come so my group is trying to be ahead of the curve on that as well. Hoping to continue to grow my knowledge in learning how to leverage virtualization in ways I haven’t thought of before, update my VCP, and learn more in how to manage and control vm-sprawl.
Thank you
Hi guys,
My name is Steve Beaver and I have been working with VMware Virtualization since the ESX 1.5 days. I have written a few books on the subject as well as having the opportunity to be able to speak and present on my expereience at different virtualization conferences in the past. I am currently a sub-contractor working for IBM Global Services and this year I have no company support to be able to attend the conference this year and will need completely pay my own way and if the enconomy is I find myself worried I might have to miss VMworld this year. I have designed and deployed multiple virtualization environments in several different companies over the years and I have to be one of VMware’s biggest fans. So my fingers are crossed and hope to get to see you all in San Fran at VMworld this year.
At Utah State University I use the complete VMware suite to provide redundant, cost effective, virtualized services for our critical applications. At the VMware conference I am hoping to fill the training gap between the VMware introductory course and the advanced troubleshooting course through exposure to the real world implementation experiences of others. The tips and tricks learned at previous conferences have been invaluable when implementing advanced features and partner vendor integrations. Through 20 years of experience with IT booms and busts I have found that staying up with current technologies is absolutely essential to avoiding obsolescence and maintaining a viable career path.
What a great opportunity. I have been administrating a VMware environment for 5 years now and have never had the chance to attend VMworld. Our environment is hitting that critical stage where we need to come up with a sound strategy regarding monitoring, and capacity management. I hope to get to VMworld to investigate these strategies.
This is great! I have been working with VMware for about 8 years (workstation), Fusion for 3 years and 4 years (ESX/VSphere). Having migrated over 90% of my company to VM’s, I am looking for the next great challenge 🙂
Never been to VMWorld although I have been to so many VMUG sessions/days I feel like it is time to get going! Thanks for the opportunity and I am holding my breath!
A relative newbie to the group, I’ve only been using VMware products for three years now. As a PowerShell enthusiast I quickly leveraged PowerCLI and haven’t look back since. At my day job I serve as a VDCOS Admin where I administer 6 farms, 150 hosts, 1500 VM’s. This past month I was awarded vEXPERT (personal mile stone). I would love to attend VMworld again this year, to both get the Alum pin (have 2 years now this time a get a pin!), and to continue preaching and teaching PowerCLI.
With Carters betrayal moving to the Spring team I fear I will have to carry PowerCLI, in a backpack, on LucD’s back.
Seriously though the highlight of VMworld last year was clearly meeting and talking to the community. If I was able to attend this year I would make that my primary goal.
P.S. Calling my shot, VMworld this year will be all about Spring vs Azure… The next fight is for the cloud and it starts this Sept.
I am PoC engineer responsible for design and development of DC Virtualization/cloud POC. Implementation includes technology validation,Integration, workload development,and execution of use case scenarios by working closely with ecosystem partners and endusers.
Objective to attend VMworld:
1.i want to know abt the vCloud service director announcement.
2. Hands on with other upcoming tech.
3. to develop Cloud/virtualization network by meeting all wellknown bloggers/Techheads..
Hello, I’m a software developer and an avid VMware user and vmtn enthousiast. For running my business and answering the questions on vmtn I use ESX, Server as well as all desktop products. Pretty much all of my working environment is virtualised.
I would love to attend VMworld again to meet up with VMware friends and fellow vExperts.
Attend several sessions so that i can learn new tricks and hopefully also attend the developer days. Gain new ideas to write blog posts about. Umm.. and lots more I’m sure..
Good luck everyone and I hope the winner will enjoy his VMworld and stay in San Francisco!
Guten Morgen! Let me preface my comments by saying I have no life outside of virtualization and racing cars. My name is Mike and I love the thrill of the hunt. I have the privilege of developing proof of concepts, solutions, and witty repartee using VMware’s line of products. Specifically crafting disaster recovery plans, consolidation onto more expensive, very tiny hardware, and taking private fogs and making them private clouds. I have never been to VMworld, and would do almost anything to go! My top three reasons for going include seeing advancements in VDI, seeing all the new storage opportunities (I am a junkie for such) and to network and meet all sorts of folks! Possibly bribing some of those folks with a cold, tasty adult beverage into revealing some of the great hidden food places in San Fran would be the icing on the cake.
Got my fingers crossed that random fate slaps me on the backside and says “Good Hustle!”
– Mike
I’m looking for ways to better improve my utilization of VMware. My client already has 80%+ of it’s data center virtualized, but they still treat the VMs as if they were physical, not taking advantage of the automation offered by VMware in the lifecycle process. I believe that I could get the tools to help move my client further up the virtualization maturity model.
I’m looking to build my next startup in the Virtualization space. I currently use VMware Fusion 3.1 for my prototyping work and play with a remote ESX 3.5 Host. I have been using VMware since before ESX 1.0. The trip to VMworld 2010 would let me stay up/catch up on all of the latest new from VMware. Expecially there anticipated Cloud announcements at the show and perhaps VSphere 5 information?
I have been using VMware professionally and privately for the past 2 years. The first time I touched ESXi I fell in love. During this time, I have evangelized VMware to anyone and everyone and plan to continue my career fully-focused on leveraging the technology to make more reliable, highly available solutions for internal and external users of the companies I work for.
By attending VMworld I hope to:
1) Discover new technologies that are coming up that will give my company and myself an edge in research and development.
2) Network with other VMware-lovers and their companies.
3) Learn from breakout sessions to better equip myself to support and deploy VMware solutions.
Hello, my name is Dan. I’m looking forward to meeting a good VMware contacts and discussing the future of many aspects of vSphere. I’ve been working on virtualisation reference architecture for a number of months and generating proof of concepts evaluations of product features so as to document and approve such features for deployment into production. I’ve been using ESX since version 2.x and have various questions I’m still yet to gain answers to around some of the Technologies which form vSphere. Most of all I’m looking forward to the hands on labs and bringing back any new feature which will enhance our business way before there released to remain ahead of the curve. Thanks for the opportunity. P.S We Love Thermo Kyle!
Thanks for providing this great opportunity. I work for a University in the twin cites. I have been using vmware esx here at the University since July of 2005. The University plans to implement some sort of Desktop Virtualization this fall. I have never been to vmworld and would really like to increase my knowledge of VMware technolgies by getting some lab time, participating in technical sessions, meeting my peers and learning all that I can about Desktop Virtualization.
I have been operating a small IT support company for the last 10 years. Our clients are fairly small (5-50 workstations typical) and virtualization is becoming something used at this level as well as the enterprise level. I want to learn best practices for P2V, how to contend with Microsoft OEM license issues, and about implementing high availability since we live in a hurricane prone area. Can’t wait to see you all there!
I’m a System Engineer/Architect from Baton Rouge with a 40% virtualized environment. I have been using VMware products for about 10 years. About 5 years ago, I became the VMware lead for my previous employer.
My company was purchased in April, which appears to be a very good turn of events. With an environment that is 40% virtualized, over the past 5 years funds/equipment/resources were limited. Now, our new owners better see the value of VMware and current plans are to go to 100% virtual for production systems.
To do that, we are upgrading to the Enterprise+ and Cisco Nexus 1000v. If things go well, maybe we can migrate to UCS at some point.
The big reasons I would like to attend are:
1. Learn more about how vSphere & the Cisco Nexus configurations go together
2. Network with others for the purpose of sharing my knowledge and learning from theirs
I am a vExpert for 2010, which shows my desire to spread knowledge. Attendance to VMworld 2010 would be an excellent way to spread the word.
Good luck to everyone who submitted an entry to the contest.
Cheers,
Jase
I am a system administrator and we recently moved our datacenter and we went with VMware. We are currently running ~95% of our systems in VMware. We are also implementing Lab Manager for a dev staging environment.
Reasons:
I have never been there
Networking with others
Learning massive amounts of VMware information.
I have been working for a large enterprise for the last 6 months. We have about 375 ESX host currently and constantly growing. We leverage multiple VMware products such as View and Lab Manager. This could be the first VMworld that I’ve missed in the last three years, which could be heart breaking. I would love to attend VMworld this year so I could 1)learn more about cloud solutions, 2)learn more about the upcoming virtualization products and 3)network with other experts in the field. Thanks Boche.net and Gestalt IT for helping someone reach their dreams of attending VMworld 2010!
Hello, I’m a Technical Engineer working within the Technical Engineering function of a global top ten Information Technology services company. I have been using VMware ESX since version 2.5 and during my time working with VMware products I have obtained both VCP3 and VCP4 status.
At the moment most VMware ESX deployments I have been involved with, have focused on and around consolidation of server estates. Given more exposure to other products from VMware such as View and SRM I would like to change this.
VMworld is something that has come around and grabbed my attention for the last few years, but unfortunately I have never had the chance to attend. If given the chance this year, the top three things I would like to gain from attending are (in no particluar order):
1. Exposure to unfamiliar VMware products through the VMworld labs.
2. Meet and engage with industry knowledge experts to enhance and increase my existing knowledge.
3.Network with VMware partners and understand how complimentary products can enhance and simplify existing and new projects.
Congrats Greg! I’ll be seeing you at VMworld!
Jason – this contest was a really excellent idea and I really like how you did it! The kids were so cute choosing the winner (I watched the whole video). I’ll see you at VMworld too!
Great work,
David
Congratulations to the winner! Perhaps we will meet up in San Francisco 🙂
Cheers,
Didier
My name is James Jelinek. I’ve been in the IT field for over 10 years. My core competencies are in networking, infrastructure, and system administration.
I work for a non-profit EMS agency that houses 911 dispatch, Ambulance service, and logistical operations. So needless to say it’s crucial that we have a 24/7 operation that runs efficiently.
I currently use VMWare ESXi 4 in both a production and disaster recovery environment. For our production side I’ve eliminated the need to spend excess funds on hardware by virtualizing most of our key and ancillary services. There are some services that are not practical to virtualize due to heavy I/O etc but I’ve went ahead and set them up on the ESXi server in the event that the standalone server fails we can resume operations within minutes. This is critical when lives are on the line.
Because we reside in the gulf coast and hurricanes are a very real threat, we’ve implemented ESXi to mirror our infrastructure in multiple locations to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster. There are still some “switches to be thrown” when things occur but it’s better than nothing.
I’m really excited about going to VMWorld for the sheer fact that I want to interact with other users like myself and advanced alike. Learning more about the products, its capabilities, and coming up with creative ways to solve a lot of our painpoints.
While we are not 100% virtual I realize the need to go that route and after 6 months of running with VMWare I can say it has not only been a life saver, but it also contributes to saving lives!
Hi James. I’m sorry, the contest is over. The drawing was held last Thursday evening. Please visit http://run-virtual.com/ for more ideas on how to attend VMworld on the cheap.
Hi Jason,
Are you running anything similar for VMworld Europe in Copenhagen?
Enjoy,
Eiad