The VMguy

Don’t you hate how you feel when you forget someone’s birthday?  It’s really depressing when you forget your own website’s birthday.  My first article was published November 9th, 2008, one year ago yesterday.  I knew it was right around now but finally remembered to check tonight.  I want to give a special thanks to all my readers and I promise to continue writing as much as I can.  There’s a lot going on right now which I’ll report on in the coming weeks.

For those thinking of starting a blog, here’s what vmguy.com has grown to in one year’s time:

6,500 unique visitors per month

250,000 hits per month

1,152 newsfeed subscribers

153 posts

179 comments

That’s only a post every other day, I’ll need to work on that.

Thanks again for all your support,

-Dave “the vmguy” Lawrence

A special thanks to Eric Siebert who nominated me for the top 20 bloggers and the top 100 VMware & virtualization people to follow on twitter.  If you use twitter, you’ll definitely want to check out these lists.

ok, now I’ll have to write more to keep my status!  New post coming tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks Eric.

I was very sorry to see it go but what a week it was!  Here’s some amazing stats from VMworld 2009:

• Over 12,500 attendees (still awaiting the final tally)
• Over 300 attendees at VMware’s first Technology Exchange – Developer Day
• Over 200 sponsors and exhibitor companies
• 300 break out sessions across 6 tracks
• 12 Instructor led labs and 9 Self Paced lab courses
• 920 new VMUG members recruited on site
• VMworld 2009 generated a strong volume of coverage with a total of 315 articles. 90 original US articles, 11 ANZ articles, 51 APAC articles, and 163 EMEA articles.
• Strong social media activity with:
  • 4,305 tweets on the event, 1205 contributors and 2,350 followers
  • New VMworld YouTube views: 5,714
• VMware produced 14 VMworld videos on site and released these on VMware TV with 13,509 total views
• 4,459 Self Paced labs taken with 41,043 VMs deployed. This has broken all previous self paced lab records.
• 6,149 Instructor led labs taken across 12 labs on offer during VMworld 2009.

And just for fun (yes these are real and not made up):

• Quantity of sodas purchased     54,742
• Quantity of bananas      14,813
• Quantity of apples         14,813
• Gallons of coffee          1,895
• Quantity of cookies       5,647
• Quantity of brownies     9,188
• # of beers consumed at the welcome reception monday night: 10,200

We’ll have to work on that beer number next year!!!

Every time I come to VMworld, I’m always facinated by the booths.  It’s only at the largest industry events that the vendors pull out all the stops and build these gigantic advertisements.  For you’re enjoyment, I’ve photographed a few for you.  I’ll apologize now to my RSS readers.  I post my entire articles in my RSS feed so those of you on it will get all these as well. I also want to mention that I only photographed a few of them, there were far too many booths to get them all in.  I tried to get the most noteworthy and those that were very creative. We’ll start with the VMware Booth.  It took 5 days to fully assemble and it was very difficult to get all in one shot due to the size.  It had 4 corners, each with demos on the related products (you can see Cloud Services and datacenter in the pic).  It also included a theater with scheduled sessions/presentations and a fully staffed genius bar where customers could ask just about anything. Next up was Red Hat.  They had a cool booth that was very tall.  It also had a theater and pods for demos and information. Read the rest of this entry »

Got over to the Moscone Center early this morning.  Looking pretty good, cool setup in the foyer:

The lines were not too long yet and moving quickly at the registration counter….

The longest lines I would find were in the VMware Store in Moscone South.  Make sure to head over there soon if you want the “big guy” shirts like me…..