Not sure if this was day 0, day -1 or what, but this is where it all begins for a serious percentage of the VMworld attendees that I know. The normal approach for most people who are going to TAM or PEX things on Monday is to get in on Sunday and then head to the vRockstar party. This year I’d got an early flight out of Gatwick so was in BCN before the shuttle buses started running, but there’s lots of ways to get from the Airport to both the conference site (particularly via the new-for-this-year Fira metro station, which is on L9 Sud along with the airport terminals) and also in to town itself, usually by bus.

If you have a Homelab or if you are thinking of constructing a Homelab, if you need to plan on a budget or want to know what everyone else is using, if you’ve wondered if you’re better off with a Cloudlab, but are not sure of the TCO involved, if you are studying for certifications, have a thirst for knowledge or just money to burn, then today sees the launch of a site designed just for you.

I attended my third UK VMUG Conference on the 19th of November (again at the National Motorcycle Museum) an event which is put on by the London VMUG Committee. As planned, I spent the majority of the day in the Community Track, lending my support to all the folks from this amazing community who’d come from near and far to present sessions. What with the vCurry and the vQuiz the night before, which gives folks a chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones, the UK’s National VMUG conference is always a great event.

Rubrik The first thing I had on my agenda after the General Session was to take a look at Rubrik, one of the companies that have been getting a fair aount of buzz lately and so I took the opportunity to go and find out why. A hyperconverged type solution, a number of blocks (briks, obviously) a nice interface, dedupe, replication, all that seems to be the thing to do these days.

Setup Poised with the same team as yesterday in the Hang Space awaiting the General Session, plus a couple of extra faces. The raised desks and UK plug adapters are well set up for the blogger types. Cloud Stuff The cloud academy video from US VMworld opens up proceedings again, so I am expecting Carl, but it’s Sanjay Poonen, without people dressed as clouds or apps. He even slips in a Louis Suarez comment, but I didn’t bite.

TAM Session - ESXi Lifecycle I was straight off to the first of my TAM sessions after the general session, covering the ESXi lifecycle. The basic gist of this one is that VMware recognise that customers find it time consuming to maintain hosts and possibly difficult to spin up hosts. There’s one tool to provision (auto deploy), another place to go for initial configuration (host profiles) and then another to manage going forward (VUM).

Setup A better start than last year since we were able to set up in the Hang Space before anyone started speaking. I managed to get a seat along with @julian_wood, @scott_lowe and @vcdxnz001 and had a go at the minimal setup, iPad for blogging, iPhone for twitter and a bluetooth keyboard. That wasn’t as “corridor warrior” as I had hoped, it doesn’t really cut it as a practical solution, is’s simply too slow to keep up and I struggled to blog and watch the twitter feed at the same time.

Dell EMC Yeah, I know, Dell buys EMC for a proper Doctor Evil amount of money, on top of the billions it already owed the banks and VC guys who helped it to go private last year, but like I say, a debt is just a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper until someone actually calls it in. So whatever. VMware is still independent, just as it was last week, so we all have to wait to see just how this shakes out.

Ok, so first things first, I don’t know what day this is, day 1, day 0 or day -1, so it will have to stay as Sunday. That means flying to VMworld Europe day, a number of hours spent in transit, by now the normal Airbnb approach to staying in Barcelona, considering that basically all I will do in this apartment is sleep and shower. OK, and blog. It’s only a couple of hours from Gatwick to Barcelona, but today’s transport involved car, train, plane, taxi, taxi, feet, which would have been a lot worse had I not been able to sponge lifts off of unnamed people’s expenses :-) You have to love this community.

Ask people what their fears are and with the overwhelming majority, you’ll get to public speaking sooner rather than later. Most people would rather do almost anything else, so to go and present to a room full of technical experts and be judged by them all, when you could just sit back and listen to someone else, in blissful anonymity? Well, surely there’s no decision to be made? As a consequence, it’s no surprise that the erstwhile LonVMUG ctte.