In addition to attending sessions and hearing from vendors, VMworld offers attendees a unique opportunity to experience the technology first hand. The Hands-On Labs at VMworld 2011 accommodate up to 480 attendees at once, and offers 27 different timed labs covering all aspects of the cloud, end-use computing and collaboration and are built on top of the just-released VMware vSphere 5 and vCloud Director 1.5.
The lab infrastructure itself is built in the cloud and distributed between Colt in Amsterdam and Terremark in Miami in addition to the Switch SuperNAP in Las Vegas. Interested attendees can even schedule a trip to the SuperNAP facility to see the hardware.
You get to set on a WYSE thin client appliance that has two monitors connected. All instructions are posted on the right side, while you have a virtual desktop on the left where you apply the steps required. This is no simulation, it is an actual environment that consists of servers in the cloud. Some labs needs up to 10 minutes to be automatically prepared for you.
It slipped my mind to see if we can organize a 1st-person-shooter LAN party to “experience” the 3D graphical capabilities of the PCoIP Protocol 
The PCoIP is a replacement to RDP that provides rich graphical experience to users who access their desktops remotely. It is capable of real-time video, but whether it also is capable of real-time high frame-per-second 3D graphics is something worth knowing.
During the registration day, the labs were performing well, I guess everybody was just arriving or waiting for the registration before they can get into the labs. I was among the 1st to register, so I enjoyed the time afterwards to do some labs. When I attempted the labs the following day it was not performing very well, actually I got disconnected after 15 minutes of waiting for my lab to get setup, as the organizers were tweaking the environment to handle the uneven demand on some of the labs.
On my last day in the labs, all was going perfectly well and I noticed many cool things like a simulation in the cloud of every user that logs in or out of the Cloud. Also a new phase of waiting was introduced where attendees set monitoring displays waiting for names to turn from wait to green.
I’ve built my own hybrid cloud, experienced Datacenter Migration and Disaster Recovery Protection and done a few labs on end-user computing as we are thinking of deploying virtual desktops and/or adopting application virtualization in the near future. However, I missed doing the vSphere Automation with PowerCLI Lab which was on the most popular labs list and a very useful skill to master.
While registering for the conference, I noticed that the 1st sessions to be filled were the “Lab Architecture Sessions.” The environment is indeed impressive and I imagine many would be interested to know how it was set. New this year, using “Auto Deploy with Stateless ESXi” to setup the hosts needed for the lab in all 3 data centers.
As if all of this were not enough, there was a competition to complete the most labs during the event. The winner(s) will get a full pass to VMworld 2012, which should take place in San Francisco next year.
My advice to all future VMworld attendees is to set aside a good amount of time to do as many labs as you can. There is no better way to learn than to do it yourself.
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