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Observations from Cisco Networkers Live in Orlando

Apart from my Outlook email files being completely cactus for the week, Cisco Networkers in Orlando was an outstanding success. We saw an enormous amount of traffic through the VMware booth with many stopping to ask questions of our engineering staff and look at remote demonstrations of VDI, ThinApp, HA and VMotion. VMotion never fails to raise some oohs, aahs, and wows as it migrates live VMs between physical machines without dropping sessions!

A few miscellaneous observations:
– The network folks are showing way more interest and expertise wrt virtualization compared with the last Networkers event I attended just five months ago.
– Only one person asked me, "What does VMware do?"
– Many attendees were interested in the joint Cisco/VMware paper just published (and mentioned in the previous post). In fact, I could have answered most questions by just pointing folks at that paper. Cisco has also now published the paper on their website and announced via a blog post.
– Network management, monitoring and troubleshooting companies seemed to account for most of the booths

A few unrelated observations:
Guitar Hero 3 seemed the most popular gimmick in drawing a crowd. It was featured in a number of booths and also at the Kiwanis Club convention operating in another part of the convention center (go figure)
Segways seem to be standard issue for security guards in Orlando