Some VMworld 2015 US awesomeness

It’s been a busy month so far and I have not been able to write down all the good things about VMworld 2015. I got to attend the VMworld US this year and it was a wonderful experience. Since it was my first VMworld I was a little occupied with all the sessions, meetings and lot of other things and could not write blogs live during the event like all the pros did ;)

So here I am, talking about all the fun and awesome things I experienced during the event. This is not a blog post that will talk about the technology updates, it’s entirely about my first VMworld experience.

This year, I was one of the lucky vExperts to receive a blogger pass to the event. A blogger pass is a full conference pass which is handed out to selected virtualization bloggers. I would like to thank Corey Romero and the entire team at VMTN for this wonderful opportunity. These passes are available for both the US and the Europe events and have to be applied for, a while before the conference starts.

To start with, this was my first trip to the US. San Francisco is definitely one of the best cities I have visited so far. I was really excited about this trip as I was going to one of the best conferences in the tech industry. I landed in SF on Friday, the 28th of August and visited most of the must-see places before the conference started. Thanks to some of my friends who came all the way from Folsom and Santa Clara to show me around the city.

I spent the first day of the conference exploring Moscone Center. I had seen the locations during the breakout sessions registrations but never imagined it to be so big and spread across a big real estate space. I had to literally cross streets to get to multiple locations (Moscone south, north and west). But it was all good fun. Also as it was a Sunday, the activity was limited to just exploring the place ;) along with some brilliant breakout sessions, of course.

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The second day was even better as it was a Monday, a lot more people came in and a lot of the spectacular events kicked off on the second day. The General Keynote session was incredible as we got to listen to where VMware is heading and what their strategy is for the upcoming year. Here’s a pic of Carl Eschenbach delivering the keynote in his funky blue jacket ;)
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Also got to listen to Yanbing Li announce about EVO SDDC manger and the roadmap of where the SDDC is heading.

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Here’s another picture of me posing after the keynote ;)
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The Third day was far from disappointing. The Keynote was phenomenonal and involved lot of announcements around NSX and Airwatch. Got to see Sanjay poonen deliver a Keynote about the updates on EUC and Airwatch. Also, got some time to visit the booths to meet lot of vendors and friends from the community. It was great to meet folks with whom I had only connected via Twitter and VMTN before this. Then it was time for Pat’s keynote where he spoke about the 5 imperatives for digital business.
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The best place to be at, during VMworld, was at the blogger hang space. This is where I got to see a lot of bloggers and community evangelists. Here is the tech evangelist Chris Wahl (from Wahl Network) and I.

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The fourth day was mostly about more booth visits and some blogger briefings. Attended a spectacular session hosted by vExpert bloggers. Met community evangelists like William Lam, Duncan and Scott Lowe.

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The last day of the conference was just mostly about saying goodbye to everyone as I had an afternoon flight to catch back to India. I went in to  attended a couple of sessions that I had registered for, for the day and bid adieu to SFO.

All in all it was a wonderful experience. Everyone must attend the VMworld at least once to know what a spectacular event it is. The kind of people you meet here, the energy they carry around is phenomenal. The innovation, community engagement and abundance of knowledge is what makes it most awe inspiring.

Looking forward to many such VMworld visits in the future.

2 comments Add yours
  1. Glad to read about your VMWorld experience. I could sense the happiness it brought into a vExpert geek’s life :)

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