I confess I am a conference junkie. Not any conference, but the conference that fertilizes the roots of my current IT thinking.

Back in the day this was VMware. I was a VMworld junkie. I think I may have done six in a row. I collected the t-shirts year after year and even blogged about it. I would stay up till 3am recording nightly video summaries of the days events.

Today Matt Wood (@mza) from AWS, a rock star, did a post on his personal blog on How to Rock re:Invent. He lists things like how to prepare, what gear to bring, what sessions to see. It was music to my ears. Of course you should go an read all of his post.

Matt asked for any other suggestions. Of course I responded with a career limiting move (CLM) and started tweet bombing him with my deep experience and insight, okay random ideas. Maybe not my finest moment but he was in my wheel house!

So here are my random and not as well thought out additions to Matt's list.

Get there 

First stop, just get a ticket and a hotel room booked. This is the hard part. One year I was between two jobs and had to take annual leave, pay for my own flights from Australia to the US, scrounge a conference ticket and beg a spare bed in a friends room. People do more to go and watch a Rugby game, so you can do this for something as amazing as re:Invent. 

When it comes to hotels try and stay close to the convention. I once stayed at the other end of the strip in Vegas and it was horrible having to walk back and forwards each day. Its so great being able to quickly visit your room to drop something off or pick something up on the way to something else. This means getting your booking in early.

Try and arrive the day before or even two days before. If you want to play tourist, don't do it after the event, you will be exhausted and just want to sleep. Being adjusted to the timezone and having a bit of R&R before the week of full days and little sleep gives you the best conference experience.

Also register the day before the event. Registration always opens the day before at these things and there is less crowds. Its madness the morning of the first day, no matter how well organized it is. 

Prepare 

There is lots you can do before hand. As Matt says go through the agenda, think about what equipment to bring. I would add to his list business cards (old skill but useful when you are in a hurry and want to pass details). I also don't recommend you bring two laptops!

Bring comfortable clothes and especially shoes, you will be walking a lot! Think about what bag you will carry. You may get a conference bag or you may not. I always prefer my own bag. Ensure you have enough spare room in your luggage for any swag, conference materials or shopping you pick up.

What evening activities will you go to? There is always the exhibition opening which is usually packed and full of people trying to grab swag. If you don't like big crowds and mayhem you may need to skip this one. The conference party is always awesome and not to be missed (I did one year and regretted it). But what other parties are on and can you get an invite? Who are the cool vendors that will be having an event? The more you get into the community the harder this is as there are often multiple on per night and you have to choose or jump from one to another. 

Shameless plug for Amazon.com, but this is also something I did before I was an employee. If you live overseas place an order on Amazon.com for all those things you want and get them shipped to the hotel to bring home. I bank up my wish list all year and empty it each trip. You save a lot on shipping and its a bit like Christmas when you arrive. However check with the hotel for extra package handling charges as they can sting you. If you want to bring gifts home for your kids this is a great method, as you are not going to find a lot of gift items around Vegas unless you go to the outlet malls and who wants to do that!

Extra activities

There are extra activities that people often miss. The day before the event starts there are Bootcamps. You pay extra for these but they are really worth it, IMHO. They are either half or a full day and are presented by the best subject matter experts from AWS. Bootcamps have a large hands on component. I ran one my first year at re:Invent and I know people who have run them or will be this year. The instructors put a huge amount into making these relevant and worth while, so check them out.

Certifications can be done onsite, what a great time to get your first or that extra AWS Certification. Go and book in and get one out of the way. Past years there has been a certification lounge where you get a private space, a bit of swag and some snacks and power outlets. So its worth being certified.

There are usually a number of Hackathons.  I have some friends who went to them last year and I dropped in and they were amazing. If you want to have fun with others and test your skills these and something to check out.

Hands on labs are fun to do.  These are run by training and certification and are a great way to quickly get some experience with an AWS Service or a Partner product. 

Engage 

Matt called it out as "The Corridor", meaning have those conversations with people that matter. To me this is one of the most valuable things to do. When you sit at a table for breakfast or lunch, talk to the people at the table. Introduce yourself, ask what people do. Ask why they came, ask what they have learnt. You will gather so many nuggets of information, tips and ideas from these conversations. Get out of your comfort zone and engage with people who are just as obsessed with this stuff as you are.

Sessions

People have different approaches to sessions and I have evolved mine over the years. One thing I am positive on is don't miss the keynotes. You want to get in early and get into the main room and not be 15m late and end up in the overflow. You want to experience the vibe, you want to sit with >10,000 other people. You want to live tweet it from in the room!

For the breakout sessions pick what is key to you. Yes they will be recorded and available later online, but you probably will not find the time to do it. Sitting in the sessions gives you time and permission to think about the topic, to digest, to ponder. So go to sessions rather than thinking this is something I can do later. When you are conflicted go to the one that is furthest from your comfort zone or that has a speaker you want to meet. If the session is something you are really familiar with or passionate about you are more likely to watch and digest the recoding afterwards. As Matt mentioned, keep an eye out for those secret ones for new services which may be announced in the keynotes.

Exhibition Hall  

This will be huge and take you a LONG time to get around. Plan to visit it each day and cover a portion. Go and see the small vendors, see the startups and not just the big guys. Engage with the vendors and find out how they help their customers and if they could help you. If there is no fit between you and them politely move on, but give them a chance. 

There should be a part of the AWS stand that has Solution Architects, Support and Training & Certification. Visit each of these. Ask the Solution Architects the hard questions that you have just not been able to figure out. Check in on a support case, or log one, or just say thanks to the support guys. Maybe ask the support people how best to utilize them or the types of cases you can log. Lastly discuss the training and certification options with the team, what should you consider doing?

Give Feedback

Amazon and AWS is a customer obsessed company. This is your chance to give feedback. If you see a staff member (check their badge and possibly lanyard color) give them feedback both good and bad. If they cover a particular speciality (training, sales, architecture, support etc) and you have interacted with that group tell them about your experience and how they can do better. If you are talking with someone from a service team or someone who knows something about a service (bootcamp instructor or assistant, lab assistant, breakout speaker) then give them feedback on that specific service. Approximately 95% of all those features that AWS releases are based on customer feedback. Staff will be super keen for this feedback and will really appreciate you taking the time. 

Hope that helps with some of your re:Invent preparation. If you have your own ideas you may want to leave a comment on this blog entry, hit me and Matt on Twitter or contact Matt (see his post).

AWS Re:Invent 2015 is taking place at The Venetian in Las Vegas from 6th to the 9th October. Registration is now open. If you go, see if you can bump into me and say hello, that would be awesome!

Rodos

Some of the best bits from VMworld are the keynotes. The first was by Paul Maritz, the CEO. Here are my notes from the presentation. You can view the video of it on the Internet. Paul is not the most dynamic speaker, he is no Chambers on that front. However is is recognised as one of, if not the, smartest.

Last year there was the tipping point of more new apps being deployed on Virtualisation over physical. This year its now more virtualized across the entire installed base! More than half of anything is import for an industry.
1 virtual machine is deployed every six seconds, more than 20 million VMs across the globe. There are more VMs in flight with vmotion than there are airplanes in flight. More than 800k admins, 68k vcps and done with the support of the application vendors.

Is the cloud just timesharing rediscovered? It's about three profound things. It's the next major interation in the consumerisation of IT.

It's the canonical applications that define the generation of computing. In the mainframe era it was book keeping. It the late 80s it moved to the consumer world. New users through personal computing, the GUI, Intel architecture and the relational db. This allowed a new set if applications, client server, the Internet. CRM and non real time analytics.

With the Cloud we will see a new set of applications and the industry will change. Billions of new users and devices coming into play. Three years ago most devices connected to the net were PCs. In three years it will be less than twenty percent will be PCs. HTML5 might have a big impact.
The Relational Database can't cope with this new world. We need customized information in real time, for the facebook consumer of today.

How do we go forward from here? Let's ring fence off the mainframe. But what do we do with the client server world and migrate it to the new Cloud era.

How do we make it more efficient to run those apps we can't walk away from. Then what do we do about the renewal of applications.

Apps were built around real paper or what was paper on the screen. We need application renewal.

Lastly users are expecting to see everything on a new set of devices that can't be controlled by IT, whatever device they have in their hand.

How do we allow infrastructure renewal for those client server apps. To get operational efficiency. Virt can do this in a non disruptive way which is why it has been so successful. We can't just make more operational tasks but rather create more automated efficiency.

They had to have overlapping development efforts to release a new release of vSphere each year. Twice as many man hours in Q&A than development. This is like building hardware and has the same importance. First time Paul has seen a major bit of software be released on time with all it's original function set.

The new version is starting to do with this operational automation. Storage load balancing and tiering, automated host provisioning. The new version results in great scale, resiliency and automation.

A new schedule of how releases will be done. Not just vSphere but all the elements to deliver functionality, such as security, disaster recovery and Cloud portals. New versions of SRM, Operations, vShield and Director.

There are many service providers one delivering Cloud with Director. Plus virtual clouds such as NYSE. The vCloud Data Center program has expanded. A subset is clubbing together to give a world wide available cloud, global connect.

New virtual storage appliance for the SMB to get advanced features.
VMware GO to be expanded with things like patch management.
Application renew is the big effort in front of us. The new apps will be done by those under 35. Last 5 to 8 years developers have resulted against complexity and have new environments and fabrics. Let's give them those on the same underlying fabric. They are not interested in the low level details, more of a PaaS. They are willing to give up some control.

VMware are putting these elements under vFabric. Keys off Spring and now starts to include data, with the acquisition of Gem. A scale out in memory database.

Now SQLfire which brings an easier programming model with the scalable nature of GemFire.

Data Director will manage the task of administration of these databases. It can do backup and all those things. It's vSphere aware. They have taken Postgress and optimized it's memory management for a virtual environment and it can get much better density.

Cloud Foundry is about how apps will be built in the future, those new modern programming frameworks. It's open source and the community has been extending it. It's designed to be portable across clouds. There is a danger of going back to the lack of application portability, the Cloud should not be like this. What will be the new cloaking layer between hardware and the cloud? This needs to run from the provider down to the developers desktop. Developing a version for a memory stick.

Lastly we need to give a way to give people access to the applications that they need, continuing to invest in VMware View and releasing View 5.0. There will be more clients available.

PCs are not the only device any more. The PC can't belong to just one person any more. Horizon is about association of functions to people and not a specific device. But you now need to map people's activities to a device. Such as giving a user a virtual phone.

The PC was about automating the white colar worker experience of 1975. Xerox PAC started it and apple and Microsoft took up. The new workers and not using documents, they are streaming, filtering, they are not from the folder and document world.

What about the 50 percent which are not virtualized? Got to tackle the mission critical applications. That's what vSphere5 was about. Then start to work on those new applications and new way of doing things.

End of presentation.

Rodos

I went to two sessions this morning on DR to the Cloud.

I think the first thing you could say about these sessions is that they were named a little wrong. They should have been about DR to "managed service provider" or "hosting company". There might have been a bit of Cloud washing going on here. There were certainly elements of clouds and this is a developing space of which we are at the start if the journey, but I think the topics may be a little "over sold" in their wording.

So what were my notes?

• SRM will evolve to be application or vApp aware rather than it's VM centric nature of today.
• Today SRM is all about protecting a machine in site A in another site B. In the future there will be more sites involved, protecting works in one site to multiple sites. For example you might protect a machine to your internal second site plus an external Cloud provider.
• VMware are working on creating layer two connectivity between multiple sites. This combined with VMotion across sites will allow some interesting DR scenarios. In my opinion this will be helpful for disaster avoidance.
• The goad is to be able to intermix vSphere and vCloud Director as either sources or destinations of DR.
• There is the use case of DR to the cloud as well as DR off the cloud.
• The plan is their would be a plugin for your vSphere Client that would do all the work of setting up DR to a Cloud provider. I imagine this would be like the vCloud Connector plugin.
• The attributes that are proposed for this future state of software are; VM level protection granularity, multi-tenancy, self serviceability, storage agnostic, vm portability, role based management, scalability, extensibility, simplified deployment and management, security and RAS (reliability, serviceability and availability).
• Hosting.com described their use of SRM 5 to provide Cloud DR. From what I could see this looked like an implementation of SRM on top of a vSphere implementation that had a Cloud front end. They have their portal for consuming virtual machines in a Cloud manner. By adding SRM underneath and then using the SRM APIs to control it from their portal they are able to give DR functions to users. This shows what can be done when you build your own world and don't use vCloud Director. The service is in Beta.
• A question was asked from the audience about when SRM and vCloud Director would be integrated or compatible. The answer was that thus was in the roadmap but no detail. I suspect this person was like a lot in the audience was wondering about this given the title of the session.
• In the service provider session a number of organizations got up and spoke about their DR solutions and how they were integrating in SRM. There was a lot of managed services wrapped around these. Lots of array based replication, customer specific ESX clusters and other such non-Cloud scenarios. There is certainly some great solutions out there and the providers are working hard with what they have.

What was my take away from two hours of presentation of SRM and Cloud. Essentially we are not there yet. Yes there are some DR solutions and some providers will even let you use SRM. The true cloud experience DR from your own infrastructure into a VMware based Cloud is there in parts but there is still portions of string and sticky tape holding all together. Actually that is probably not fair, it makes them sound unstable. What we don't have is the simplicity that we have with SRM today.

The question is, how long will it take for VMware and the providers to get there. I suspect 12 months, problem is we are greedy and want it all TODAY!

Rodos

P.S. Slowly getting used to Blogsy on the iPad to write this stuff up. Doing straight content is a lot easier than pulling things in from multiple places.

There were announcements out today about the new VMware Global Connect.
The announcement and blog detail out a relationship between a number of the vCloud Data Center providers.

VMware and its partners will accelerate the journey to the enterprise hybrid cloud with:

Global Connect – Multiple service providers, multiple geographies; a single global cloud
First introduced in August 2010, VMware vCloud Datacenter Services are enterprise-class public clouds built on VMware cloud infrastructure, including VMware vSphere®, VMware vShield™ and VMware vCloud Director™. Certified by VMware and offering globally consistent management and security, this network of service providers is expected to span 25 datacenters in 13 countries by the end of 2011. Today VMware and its partners are introducing Global Connect, an optional feature of the vCloud Datacenter service that will allow customers to use cloud services from multiple providers across geographies as if they are a single, virtual cloud. Bluelock, SingTel and Softbank Telecomare expected to be the first providers to offer Global Connect services.

For multinational customers that require high performance (low-latency), highly available cloud computing local to the countries where they operate, Global Connect will give them an easier way to address compliance with international regulations for data privacy, locality and confidentiality. Customers will work directly with their local vCloud Datacenter service provider, who orchestrates service delivery internationally with Global Connect, allowing customers to seamlessly leverage services from connected providers with a single contract and “single pane of glass” management across clouds using vCloud Connector.

You can see the reasoning behind this alliance. Amazon has their availability zones, but what if there is not one where you want it, how do VMware complete with this "feature" when it's something that is part of implementation and not the software so to speak. This expansion of the vCloud Data Center program gives customers the ability to access multiple clouds with assurance over comparability and service levels with the simplicity of a single entity.

You can see the service providers extending and becoming part of this. After all the telcos already do this on roaming and a lot of the organizations already have joint hosting agreements to cover regions where they do not have coverage. This maturity is collaboration can be brought to bear on Cloud services.

I think this is great for customers as well as being a good move by VMware and it's partners.

Rodos

P.S. Disclaimer, I work for a subsidiary of SingTel which is one of the member companies. Personal blog and views of course.

Hanging at the Alumni lounge at VMworld. After five years you would think that my status would be sorted but each year I always seam to have to queue to get the status applied. Not to worry, the registration people are very nice.

Cant see any food in here, just some water. I think last year there were some snacks. Their is quiet, power outlets and comfy chairs. A good place to hang to do some blogging before the solutions exchange opens later this afternoon.

Rodos

At VMworld yesterday Paul Maritz hosted a supper session after the keynote to explain more about the VMware vCloud Datacenter program.

Rodos

First session this morning at VMworld was by Howie Xu, R&D Director, Virtualisation and Cloud Platform at VMware. Howie is the networking futures guys. There was much expectation for this session with speculation around its content.

Want to get yourself to VMworld San Francisco but can't convince your boss or afford to drag yourself there under your own steam?

Well here is my video for VMworld 2009 Hello Freedom.

After a week of very little sleep due to the long video blogs I did (hey we all have to try new things) I thought I would end the week with something funny. Okay and attempt to be funny.

Unfortunatley you need to know the people to get the joke at the end but this is to say thinks to the VMware online community that were so welcoming, warm and kind with their words this week. You are a great bunch of people who are keen to share your knowledge and a friendly hello.

Also a great thanks to the VMware communities team, especially John Troyer, for their commitment and passion.

Guys, this one is for you! I hope you get a laugh.

Rodos

P.S. Thanks to all the participants for being good sports and contributing to something that sounded crazy at the time. Sorry to all those great people that I did not run into today and did not make it in as a result, I am thinking of you Dr Troyer!

P.P.S. If you are reading this through RSS the video may not appear, you might have to click through to see it.

Here is my summary video for Day 3.

VMworld 2009 Day 3 Video Summary from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

It is a shame that I was not able to post this until now. I stayed up till 3am to record it but the poor internet quality of my hotel meant I could not upload it until after lunch when I finally got access to some decent bandwidth (400K a sec rocked). Still for those who were not there hopefully its helpful.

I have learnt a lot of things not to do in recording these this year, so thats a great outcome in itself. Next time can be better!

Recorded a interview with Dr John Troyer from VMware in the recording booth at VMworld today.

Here is what the booth looks like. Its not me in there, its someone else, I am the one in the video lower.



For some reason there is some very loud audio of a VMware add over the top of the first 40 seconds or so. I think John must have had it running on his Mac and it got mixed in my mistake. We could not hear it on the headphones.

Here is the video below.



Rodos

Here is my day to summary. This will be the longest one of the week I suspect.

VMworld 2009 Day 1 Video Summary from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

Hopefully the lighting is better. There is some general video at the end of the goings on of the day.

Rodos

P.S. Thanks for the fantastic bandwidth available over at VMworld, 6 minute upload compared to the estimated 3.5 hours at my hotel! However its taken a while for Vimeo to process it. Hopefully tomorrow will be smoother.

Each day I hope do give a brief video summary giving my thoughts and experiences on the day. Here is todays.



Of course I have posted some separate videos you can see on the site as well.

Hopefully the lack of sleep will not get to me and I can actually throw one of these out a day. I don't have my Mac as I could not extract it from my kids at home so I am stuck with the features of the software on my Windows XP machine and the Flip Cemera software. So apologies in advance for the lack of interesting music, boring transitions and simplistic textual intros. Maybe one day I will get a Mac for my work machine.

Big day tomorrow, its now around 3am and I have to be up at 6:30am to make the keynotes. No rest for this blogger. If only my hotel had faster bandwidth!

Rodos

Here is a video from the VMworld show floor with Tyler 't-rex' Rohrer from Liquidware Labs talking briefly about their acquisition of Entrigue Systems and invites you to their booth.



Rodos

Why wait for the official book signing? Tonight at the communities lounge I ran into Scott and of course had to get my book "Mastering VMware vSphere 4" signed and record it on my new Flip.



Rodos

Okay, you are heading to VMworld and its your first time. You need to know how to behave in a crowd of over 10 thousand people and interact with the hoards.

Here are some of the possible questions/statements you might ask whilst you are there. There are also some things NOT to say.

The good ones are at the top, the fail ones are at the bottom, try to avoid the fail ones!

1. What does your product/service do for me in my role as [insert job title here]?
2. What customers have benefited from your product/service?
3. Why would my CIO/CFO/CEO and/or my end users like your product or service?
4. Do you have any ROI/TCO case studies I can review?
5. I last looked at your product service [insert time here], what has been change/updated/removed since then?
6. Can you give me a quick demonstration of your product/service?
7. Do you support all versions and forms of VMware and its related product set? Are there any limits or restrictions I should be aware of?
8. How do you service people in my city/state/region/country?
9. What is your support policy?
10. What is your pricing model?
11. How are you different from your competitors?
12. Here is my business card, could you send me some details after the show?
13. Have you seen Chad Sakac anywhere?
14. Do you have any free T-shirts?
15. I have no relationship with you or your company and don't want to but do you have a free party on and can I have a ticket?
16. Do you have anything thats free?
17. Twitter is for my little sister.
18. Can you send me something thats free?
19. That vExpert had no idea what he/she was talking about, I sucker punched them with a question on the 3rd command line option for a depreciated function from 2.5, looser!
20. Do I have to be here for the draw to win?
21. I follow the yellow brick road, do you?
22. Do you know where there is a booth that does have free stuff?
23. Oh, I am sorry, I thought you were Scott Lowe. Anyhoo, have you seen Chad Sakac anywhere?
24. No I did not bring business cards because I am not really interested in after show interaction and value, I am just here for the free stuff on the stands.
25. I am looking for Gabe, well I was actually hoping he would have Brenda with him.
26. Who is Foreigner?
27. Well you are wearing a T-Shirt, can I have that one?

Add any of your own to the comments.

Rodos