As an existing VMware customer, I recently attended the VMware Forum 2011 in Oslo, Norway. Although the venue was beautiful at DogA – the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture, I left feeling underwhelmed and disappointed with the content provided. The event was targeted towards CIO, CFO, and General Managers of Infrastructure and Datacenters, IT managers, systems administrators, desktop SOE managers, application managers, and application developers. However, I fail to see how this event would benefit existing VMware customers, especially those who are already running the product in their production environments.
The event consisted of three tracks: one led by VMware employees, and two sponsor-driven tracks that focused mainly on marketing rather than technical content. Even the VMware-led presentations were mostly geared towards marketing, with a heavy emphasis on VMware’s cloud vision and customers’ “journey to the cloud.” While I understand VMware’s desire to evangelize their cloud message, as an attendee, I found it repetitive and insulting to see the same slide deck explaining their three steps to the Holy Grail of Cloudification in every session.
The presentations did not provide any significant new information or real-world use cases that would have been valuable to existing customers like myself. Instead, the content felt more geared towards potential new customers who haven’t yet adopted virtualization technology. I was hoping for a more technical track that would provide practical insights and solutions for existing vAdmins, but unfortunately, this was not the case.
One positive aspect of the event was learning about Fusion IO and HP’s integration in their blades, as presented by Lars Trøen (blog) and Vegard Sagbakken. This integration sounds like a promising solution for VDI environments, and I look forward to reading more about it on Lars’ new site Core four.
In conclusion, while the venue was beautiful and I enjoyed catching up with some colleagues, VMware Forum 2011 in Oslo did not meet my expectations as an existing customer. I hope that next year’s event will include a more technical track with real-world use cases and practical solutions for existing vAdmins. As admins, we want the real deal, not just cloudspeak.