If you haven't been to VMworld before, let me sum it up in one word: BIG.
On Tuesday, VMware's President and COO Carl Eschenbach announced that attendance at VMworld 2013 was over 22.5K, making it the largest VMworld conference to date! On top of the sheer number of attendees, the Moscone Center is enormous - its 3 massive buildings cover approximately 900,000 sq ft of space.
Also huge at VMworld: the number of activities you could be doing at any given moment. Between the sessions, meetings, theater presentations, meetups, meals, hundreds of booth in the solutions exchange and after parties, there's never a dull moment (not recommended for those with FOMO, fear of missing out).
Speaking of big sessions, one of my favorites this year was the Mythbusting Goes Virtual session, which took place in front of a packed full house of around 500 attendees. Dell's own Mattias Sundling, Dell Software Evangelist, and David M Davis examined 6 commonly held beliefs in the VMware community and examined whether or not these assertions are still valid.
Among the busted myths: Distributed vSwitch offers better performance than standard vSwitch, VAAI enabled arrays can run unlimited number of VMs per LUN, iSCSI offers better perforance than NFS (it's the same), reservations always increase performance, and multiple CPUs are always better than single.
Also of big interest at VMworld was a large kiosk display showing off Dell's upcoming Project Ophelia cloud client computing device, which is small - the size of a large USB stick. Jeff and I had a chance to chat with Ken Foley about exciting use cases for Project Ophelia, what makes the device Enterprise ready and more versatile than the recently announced Chromecast device.
(Please visit the site to view this video)
Later, we had the opportunity to chat with Dell's Damon Earley about another of Dell's big VMworld announcements - Fault Resilient Memory, a Dell patented technology that works with VMware vSphere 5.5 to maximize available server memory while increasing protection for the hypervisor against memory faults.
(Please visit the site to view this video)
The good news with Fault Resilient Memory is that the feature gets enabled for free on many Dell 12th Generation servers through a BIOS update expected to come later this year.
One last way we went big at VMworld 2013 these first couple of days: by eating big, juicy burgers at the Burger Bar 6 floors above Union Square with the Dell TechCenter Rockstars. The Rockstars meetup was an awesome experience because despite the tens of thousands of people you could be hanging out with and the dozens of other things you could be doing - the biggest value I've found at VMworld is building quality relationships and friendships with good people like the Rockstars. It's been a pleasure to see and chat with the DTC Rockstars out and about at the conference wearing Dell Rockstar shirts, sporting the backpacks, and spreading the good word about DellTechCenter.com - thank you Rockstars!
Thanks for reading, and for all of the other BIG Dell news at VMworld 2013, keep checking our Dell at VMworld 2013 wiki page and read Jeff's VMworld blog about huge announcements from Monday.