So, the VMworld Europe schedule builder opened up today and some of the sessions are already full up. Scary. Almost every guided lab session was full up by lunchtime on day 1, I wonder if the same folks got in to all of them, quite likely! This is the list I am thinking of at the moment. I am sure this will get turned on it’s head when more info comes out about TAM Customer Central, additional sessions get announced after the releases announced at VMworld US and I’ll need time to take a look at the solutions exchange and talk toa ll the clever folks around the place.

An extra post about my favourite part of VMworld from the organised conference perspective… I thought that the TAM sessions were by far the best sessions I attended. None of them were presented by the most well known vRockstars (they were out in the normal breakout sessions, doing their thing - and from the ones I saw, doing it very well) the TAM sessions were all by the engineers and product managers who you don’t know as well, which was great.

The final day, an early start to the sessions with no keynote to overrun into the first session, so I went straight into a 9am breakout session. Session: INF2311 - vCenter Server Architecture & Deployment Deep Dive Some good tips here for the folks running (or planning to run) vCenter 5.5 specifically around the placement of vCenter components. Do not, do not, do NOT run your Inventory service on a different server to your vCenter server service!

I’m on a bit of a roll now! The ‘second’ day of VMworld Europe started with another keynote, just the same as San Fran (same general format, same general content). Fortunately for those of us wanting to blog/tweet during this, the doors that were closed yesterday were open by the time I got to the hangspace, so I was in and settled with a coffee and pain au chocolat before 9am.

Admittedly, I’d already been in Barcelona for a while after the TAM day (partner day for most people) on Monday, so we’d already had confusion amongst the bloggers as to what day it was., perhaps we should stick with ‘Tuesday’ and have done with it? Apologies for any tense changes here, this post was mostly written at VMworld, but not published then. Keynote This was my first opportunity to attend a European keynote, so I was hoping to be able to get ensconsed in the hangspace or the bloggers area and tweet or blog from there, whilst hoping it would be different from the US keynote.

I have to admit to being pretty excited to attend my first VMworld in 6 Years, this time with the additional perk of having the Monday lined up as well, as part of the TAM experience. Technical Account Manager, that is. Same day as Partner Day, but for those of us who warrant or buy this level of service, I guess. I work for a large American Company so this was something I get that I was not going to get so often, as my TAM is in the US, whereas I am not!

In a move that justifies (if that’s the right word) the developments made by Nutanix, Simplivity et al, VMware announced two releases of their Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA) products, which are called VMware EVO. This is the Project Marvin initiative which has been whispered about for a while since an internal VMware poster was seen up on a wall by someone who shouldn’t have seen it! The EVO part means Evolution and the product names RAIL and RACK are down to the amount of space they take up in the datacentre.

A personal snapshot of some of the big news from the show; The keynote from day 1 mentioned IT bravely delivering brave products by making brave decisions, bravely. There were also some new product numbers announced, which is what people really want to hear, I guess. I’m sure Pat Gelsinger broke the vSphere 6.0 Beta NDA by mentioning that it contained VVols, but who’s gonna tell him? There was also an update to the cloud stack, with vCloud Suite 5.