VMworld Day 1 Recap

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The first day of VMworld is closing down for me.  The best word I can use to describe the mood was grumpy.  There was grumpiness about the lines, the self-paced labs, the lines.  Did I mention the lines?  Still, everyone was actually in pretty good spirits. 

I lined up for the V13760 Overcoming the Hidden Challenges of Virtualization session 50 minutes ahead of time and there were already 30 people ahead of me.  We waited and met a lot of nice people in line.  Everyone agreed with the frustration of the session registration process, how everything seemed to be full, even for those registered VERY early.  I was still a little disturbed that once they let all the registered attendees in and started letting those of us in line in, the room was almost half empty.  How was registration full?

Still, I go into the session and it was a nice, high level overview of virtualization challenges by Scott Key of Citi.  There were two interesting observations that Mr. Key made that I wanted some responses to from those of you in the blogsphere. 

  1. His server management staff are primarily people with Linux/Unix experience, not Windows.  He said the Windows people had trouble managing VMware.  It was clearly called out as a separation of responsibility.
  2. His server management staff only dealt with the VMware servers and the VM configs.  They didn’t deal with the physical servers nor did they do anything with the VMs.  Thus, OS and applications are dealt with by one group, Virt servers and VMs by another, and physical maintenance by another.

I wonder, what are everyone’s experiences out there?  Is that the ideal setup or just what has evolved with Virtualization?  How does this impact the integration with non-virtualization related groups?  Let me know either with comments or tweets to my twitter account @edwinyuen.  Don't forget to sign up and follow me on twitter for a chance to win a ZuneHD.

If you are at the show, come up and say hi.  I’d love to meet everyone.  You can’t miss me!  I’ll be wearing the fluorescent green shirt with my twitter name on the front and Follow me! Twitter on the back.  On to day two!