VMworld Europe 2012 - Day 0

I'm calling it Day 0 as the full conference started on Tuesday. Monday was Partner Day at VMworld and a chance for many to just turn up and register as well as take a few Hands-on-Lab sessions and do some networking.

I walked to the venue from my hotel and eventually managed to find my way into the Hands-on-Labs as I was keen to try out a few of the changes to elements of the vCloud suite (I haven't managed to update my home lab yet since 5.1 was released).

I've enjoyed using the labs in the past and I did so this time as well but I came away with a few observations / suggestions that I'd like to share:

The manuals for each accompanying lab were a little tricky to navigate at times. I know a few people accidentally missed parts of the labs out. Others, like me found that there wasn't quite enough screen real-estate available to show screenshots and their accompanying text.

Whilst the labs must of course be fairly prescriptive and cater to all ability levels, it might be nice in future years to have some options around the detail presented in the manuals so that it is possible for some to try and navigate the products themselves without being to exactly which button to press or value to enter.

As I said though, I enjoyed the labs that I did.

The remainder of the day was spent networking and in a blogger session organised by Nutanix. After that finished I attended the VMUG party at a restaurant a few miles away where I met a number of people who I've only ever conversed with via their own blogs or on twitter including Damian Karlson, Michael Webster, Josh Atwell, Jack McCleod and Luc Dekens – all great people to chat with.