VMworld Experience Day 1 #VMworld
August 29, 2011 
Sean Crookston 
This is my first VMworld and it has definitely been an enjoyable experience so far.For those not in attendance I thought I ‘d share some quick thoughts daily.
Labs, Labs Labs
I focused the day on vCloud Director for labs as this is something I have not yet had a chance to fully delve into. Not having the infrastructure in place to just play with the feature set, it was great to run through a few labs on the topic. Pretty cool post on setting up vCloud for your home lab here.
One of the most exciting things I heard was that the VMworld Labs will be available to paid attendees after VMworld. Really great news as these labs are very detailed, and a review after the fact would be great. Not to mention there is never enough time in the day to do nearly half of everything at VMworld. Additionally there are a ton of labs to choose from and a ton of sessions, events, and everything else going on.
vSphere Clustering Q&A
Hosted by the authors of the vSphere 5 Technical Deep Dive was this session by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. This was the first session I attended and felt it was a great session. The Q&A format allowed a lot of questions that made me start thinking about a lot of different things I hadn’t before. For example, the mirror mode driver is something I definitely need to dive deeper into, and luckily this is also covered in their book. This is a feature that definitely has other potential use cases outside of storage vMotion.
Meeting People
Probably the coolest part of the day was seeing some familiar faces and meeting some new ones. I had two people I was planning on looking for during the week. One found me in the first session and I found the other one before lunch. Pretty crazy with the 20k plus people I heard were attending VMworld this year.
I also was able to spend some time in the VMware Community lounge and meet a lot of familiar avatars people that I could put a face to finally from the blog/twitter world.
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