What a day.  Since I arrived yesterday afternoon the amount of work that has been done behind-the-scenes is incredible.  I wish there was someone making a video/documentary about the work involved in pulling something this big, this massive, off just so that everyone could appreciate the dedication that EMC and their partners put into this event.  Having been to EMC World before as a customer, I’m almost embarrassed at how oblivious I was to the effort being made on my behalf.

First, the setup of the vLabs has been…interesting.  As Chad Sakac and Nick Weaver mentioned in their recent podcast with cloudcast.net, trying to pull something that large off without a net is a crazy process, and something always goes wrong.  When multiple things go wrong at once, it leads to some late nights.  As of Sunday night, I believe Chris Horn, the EMC vSpecialist leading the vLabs effort, has been awake for more than 48 hours straight trying to make sure everything is perfect for the people who are attending.  He and his team don’t know how to fail, and I can’t wait to see everyone’s reaction to the labs!  The rest of the venue looks awesome as well. I can’t wait see how everyone likes it! I’ll be at the two keynote speeches tomorrow, and I bet there will be exciting news!

In other news, the voting for VMworld 2011 sessions has opened, and I need your vote!  I’ve put together a session on real-world VMware vCloud Director Provider vCD design, and it would be awesome to get to present it to all of the companies looking for something better suited to their businesses than gold, silver and bronze.  Between my work with Service Providers who are putting vCloud Director into production, my work with vCD.next and my work with VCE and VMware in putting together a vCloud on Vblock reference design, I’ve gotten to see a lot of things that work well in the real world, and more importantly I’ve seen what doesn’t!  If you’d be interested in a session like that, please log into the VMworld.com site and vote for my session!