Calling all bloggers going to VMworld Europe 2009. We really appreciate folks blogging from our conferences.

• It helps to spread news and announcements.
• It gets a lot of technical detail up on the public web so Google can find it.
• It helps people who aren’t on site feel more like they are there — and hopefully come next time! It really is a very good tech conference for both beginners and experienced virtualizers.
• It helps others create successful strategies for navigating the event, and it gives feedback to the conference team.
• It helps continue to cement this global community of virtualization enthusiasts and VMware experts we are building.

Check out the coverage of VMworld 2008 if you weren’t there, and you can see some past sessions on vmworld.com as well.

If you’re going to show up in Cannes on February 24, please drop me a line (jtroyer @ vmware). Although we’re going to reach out to folks we know in Europe, if you’re outside of Europe but planning on coming or if you don’t blog primarily in English, we might not know to ask, so please speak up.

I’m not making any promises, but last year the folks who were regularly blogging were treated very well by Richard, including custom shirts, a nice place with power and connectivity and refreshments to blog, press passes, and room to shoot video or do interviews. I highly recommend getting on Richard’s list.

And if you aren’t a current blogger, I don’t think we can get you a press pass, but it’s a fine time to start a blog. Remember you can always start a free one at vmworld.com/blogs or communities.vmware.com/blogs.

Alessandro at virtualization.info notes that he’s seeing a lot of "cautionary tales" about virtualization following this year’s VMworld, despite the crowds and energy of IT managers with budget at VMworld. My perception is that these kinds of articles have been on the rise for the last six months or so, and are simply

1. a reflection of greater interest and widespread adoption in virtualization — the bell curve means that some folks are going in unprepared, so with more column-inches devoted to virtualization there are certain to be more stories of projects gone off the rails, which for the journalist are a nice change of pace to writing the 1000th "100% ROI in 5 months" story; and that
2. virtualization is complex, being infrastructure that works with your whole data center and forms the foundation for the next generation of IT. It’s deep stuff — even if you can dip your toes in with an 86-page book and skip the weighty tomes, the essentials are still pretty deep. There’s a reason that there were over 200 vendors at VMworld selling you tools to help with deployment and management, a vast network of professional services and training from VMware and its partners, and the best online community and forums I’ve ever seen — this is deep stuff. (Have you asked for a raise yet?)

Still, though, we have more happy customers than anyone else — too many to even write about. That’s the best part about working at VMware. It seems like we’re in for an economic stormy ride, but real-world evidence around virtualization ROI, TCO, and agility resonate even more strongly when times are tight.

What are you seeing in your workplace? Do tough times call for more virtualization?

Mike @ RTFM Education ran out of bandwidth over VMworld, but he’s back on the air. A few recent highlights, and I especially want to point out Mike’s VMworld session notes, since he went off the air before I had a chance to point to them.

• Why Virtualize? [Mike comments on a note from Dave @ VMblog about a virtualization survey. Biggest driver? Still consolidation. Desktop virtualization? You’re still the early adopters as seen through the global IT population, although VDI was very mainstream indeed at VMworld — all the desktop sessions and BoFs I saw at VMworld were heavily attended. -jt]
• VMworld 2008 PowerShell Session Videos
• Leverge your Microsoft skills, erm really?
• VMotion Warnings
• VMware VDC-OS
  

  Clearly, the last couple of years have questioned what we mean by the
  term “Operating System”. It is a kernel that handles memory, cpu,
  storage and network or is envolving into merely a “space” within which
  developers can write useful bits of code called programs.

• VD2345: Going Deep on Capturing Applications using ThinApp
• SRM: Lessons learned in the First 90-days
• VMworld Keynote: Automating DR with VMware SRM
• VMworld 2008: Distributed vSwitches
• VMworld 2008: VD2422: Offline VDI
• VMworld 2008: BC2783: Virtual Business Continuity Site

This is the kind of lazy man’s blogging I like: Eric Siebert has
just painted my fence with this comprehensive list of VMworld 2008
links. I still have a few bookmarks in my back pocket, but Eric’s page
will be a great clearinghouse for the year ahead. He’s got sections on all the keynotes, session blogging, audio/video, VDC-OS and other vWords, vendors, and more.

Note that Eric spends a great deal of time curating these links, so
please don’t grab them wholesale and reprint them without attribution.
You’ll often see Eric with ready-made collections of resources that he
uses to answer FAQs on the VMware Communties and you’d increase your
karma by either dropping him a note of appreciation at esiebert7625@yahoo.com or clicking on the big donate button over at vmware-land.com.

So now I present to you the official VMware-land.com VMworld 2008 Links page.

Eating lunch at your desk again and wishing there was just a few more videos coming out of VMworld 2008? Well then, settle in and get another bag of chips, because it’s time for the VMworld Video Roundup:

SearchServerVirtualization and/or SearchVMware

• SearchServerVirtualization’s VMworld coverage

• SearchServerVirtualization Video Library There are many interesting videos there — notice the tabs on the top of the video player. Check out this year’s Bag of Schwag video. (SSV, your articles and videos are great, but not being able to link to individual videos is lame. I can come by and give you my "everything on the web must be a social media object" tutorial, but the short version is "if you don’t give it a url, I can’t point people to it or embed it here on the blog.")

Virtual Strategy Magazine

• Virtual Strategy Magazine’s VMworld coverage

• VMworld Book Signing with the authors of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center (VMblog/InfoWorld/Hyper9’s Dave Marshall, and our own community guys Jase McCarty and Steve Beaver)
• virtualstrategy channel on YouTube – 11 videos from the VMworld 2008

The prolific Eric Sloof:

• Interview with LucD the VI Toolkit Scripting contest winner (audio only)
• VMworld 2008 | Interview with Carter Shanklin (audio only)
• VMworld 2008 | Interview with Dmitry Sotnikov (audio only)
• VMworld 2008 | VMware PowerShell session video
• Designing the Next Generation Data Center – Cisco and VMware (keynote where they introduced the new virtual switch)
• VMworld 2008 | Question and Answer Session with Paul Maritz
• VMworld 2008 | VMware Fault Tolerance Video
• Interview with Edward Haletky about Securing Virtualization Servers (audio only)
• VMTN Community Experts Video
• VMworld Party Las Vegas Motor Speedway Video
• VMworld 2008 | VMware Site Recovery Manager Video
• Brian Madden | VDI versus Terminal Services Video (this session got high marks)
• Andrew Kutz | VMware Infrastructure Plugins Video
• VMworld 2008 | Interview with Scott Herold (just audio)
• Eric Sloof is signing off

Toon Vanagt from virtualization.com was omnipresent at the conference with his tripod, but is still uploading. He did publish this great interview with Winston Bumpus about Open Virtualization Format 1.0 and the virtualization Management Initiative (vMAN).  I can’t get the video there to load right now, so you can also go straight to the source at Vimeo.

VMworld at YouTube

VMworld at vimeo (note a lot of keynote video this year)

I hear we’ll be getting some of the professionally-shot video as well, and everyone can contribute over at vmworld.com’s Video Spot and Photo Wall.

Lunch all done? Wipe off those crumbs and get back to work.

I’ve been watching the tweets and blog posts as folks arrive home from VMworld. This weekend or Monday I’ll pull together the links as the last of the session notes come online and the show wrap-ups and big picture summaries come out. But in the meantime my garden needs some attention.

So here’s what I’m going to be doing to grab the next set of interesting links. Feel free to do it yourself and add in the comments any articles that look exceptionally good.

• Visit Planet V12n. Sloof & Brambley have pushed out a lot of content. Chris Wolf has a great sum-up.
• Do a Google Blog Search on vmworld. Follow up with a Technorati search that sometimes turns up a few missing posts. Check Google News for more straight journalistic coverage.
• Twitter search is mostly about arriving home, but I’ll look for people announcng new content. Michael Keen has already put a keynote video of the scaling out to the cloud demo.
• Search on Flickr and YouTube and blip.tv to add some multimedia. I’ve uploaded a few of the "VMworld Live" podcasts we made, but have one or two more coming, and I’ll need to write summaries of those.

And that should do it. I also want to gather together (1) all the news I can find around the Cisco announcement, because that’s perhaps the biggest product-oriented development at the show; (2) a wrap-up of our new vClient Initiative, including the parts that are still unfamiliar to me (the new protocol) and perhaps to you (the new Client Virtualization layer); and (3) a wrap-up of the analyst and journalist reaction to the VDC-OS, which most are recognizing as a big-picture vision backed up with an evolution of today’s solid technology. Don’t get too hung up on the vCloud — if you’re running DRS, you’re already seen the silver lining.

photo by Todd Muirhead at Dell via twitpic

From Ryan.  VMworld 2008 Attendee Party a Racing Good Time | VMHero. Check out his pic with the speedometer at 132mph.

One of the marks of these types of conferences is the attendee party.
VMware truly went over the top on their attendee party this year. held
at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.  The event was what I like to call a
“3-ring circus” event with about 600 things going on at once.  However,
it provided something for everyone, from video games, to classic cars,
to live music, to 140 MPH car rides around the track (definitely the
highlight).

Eric has the video proof, as usual.

VMworld Party Las Vegas Motor Speedway Video from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

And JMWolf has this one on YouTube:

Link: VMworld.com: VMworld.com Community Team Blog: Submit your "Best of VMworld 2008".

Before you wrap up your VMworld experience for 2008, post your favorite
items or encounters so the community can share and rate these items.

Examples could be vmworld.com web site features, onsite sessions, labs,
demos, exhibitors booths, virtual plaza, gatherings, parties, vegas
sites or anything that left an impression.

http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/community/conference/bestofvmworld

1) click on the "Add Show Favorites" button to add your entries (if you
don’t see the submission form after clicking on the button, scroll to
the bottom of the list)

2) place your vote on any of the items listed (your account gets 1 vote)

Courtesy of the prolific Marnix Vrambout and posted on vmworld.com.  Check out the whole collection — good stuff.

  You can also have a look at this set at Flickr.com, or have a look at the complete VMworld2008 collection Flickr.com

And while we’re here, pictures from Marnix, Viktor, and 24 other camera-toting photogs are available at the VMworld 2008 Las Vegas Flickr Pool.