I think the greatest way to learn at any show is to visit the solutions exchange or whatever name it goes by. At VMWorld vendors have a high technical level of content at their booths and good demos. Nowhere can you learn so much on such a small space (‘small’ is relative here my feet tell me).

Monday night and Tuesday morning I visited. Surprised at the amount of swag being given away, I hope US Airways will understand I had to gather stuff for my unfortunate colleagues at home…. Some observations:

• PuppetLabs are just a great bunch. They are very enthusiastic, I went to their session this morning and very impressed. This warrants a separate post. They must have bought a t-shirt factory….
• I was impressed by a demo from Simplivity. As I understand it, they make appliances that run vSphere virtual machines of course and integrate into vCenter. But they have backup software integrated that seems very fast. Connect two and you can backup or migrate to the other machine and with more machines you can buid a federation. You can also backup to a cloud provider like Amazon and encrypt your data on the fly. Deduplication of data is done inline. And aparently they already have some big client names, also in Europe. Very impressive.
• Of course you need to go over to the VMware booth, even if it is to share the extremely painful carpet experience on your feet, and have a look at new things coming, especially vCAC 6.

Meanwhile I am runing around with my self-printed stickers, The QR code links to this blog…