Current mood:	amused
Entry tags:	geeky, life, vmware

VMworld 2007
VMworld was this week and I had a pass for Thursday. Although only attendees from Wednesday were supposed to attend the VMworld party that night, I was able to masquerade as somebody else and go anyway. I'm glad I went because the party was incredible; I've never seen anything like it in my life; it was as though they'd brought Vegas to us. Outside there were several free carnival games with little prizes and Smash Mouth was playing. Inside they had several different rooms that had been turned into representatives of various colourful SF neighbourhoods and they each had different forms of food and entertainment. The entertainment included stand-up comedy, karaoke, a mariachi band, 80's arcade games, costumed dancers, a jazz band, etc. And everywhere there was an open bar with a variety of beers and wines.

On Thursday morning I was on duty at the "genius bar" to answer questions about Workstation, although most people were, unsurprisingly, interested in Virtual Infrastructure. I also went to a bunch of breakout sessions. The most amusing of these was the panel discussion at the end where technical heads of several competing companies made snarky comments at each other for an hour; final verdict: Infiniband is kicking 10gigE's ass.

Altogether I was impressed by how well the conference was organized; we even had a booth for attendees to check into their flights! And a professional cartoonist had been hired to produce humorous illustrations of various virtualization-related terms, which were hung all over the place as decorations.