After a quick flight over from the rainy UK, I arrived in Barcelona along with fellow Xtravirt colleagues traveling from Gatwick airport, Darren Woollard and Michael Poore.
With very little time before the Sunday night vRockstar party commenced, we reformed and took a taxi down to central Barcelona to meet up with others at the Hard Rock cafe. It was great to meet some new faces (if you exclude Twitter profiles) for me – Fred Hofer, Lars Troen, Damian Davis, Patrick Redknap, Juan, et al as well as catching up with old – Jonathan Medd, and others.
Drinks and snacks were provided free, and the team that put everything together for the community did a really good job of keeping things running smoothly. Many thanks go out to them, as well as all the sponsors! Here are a few snaps I took at the event.
Early Monday morning meant Partner day had soon arrived, so after catching a taxi down to the conference center, registration was soon complete.
Walkways were fairly empty at this stage, which was great for mobility and exploring the venue layout.
I took the time to complete a few Hands on Lab sessions – targeting down Puppet Labs, VMware vCO and vCAC, as I really do enjoy my automation topics. The hands on labs were predictably fairly quiet on partner day, so this was a good time to get them done. The sign up process was smooth and the staff handled things well – guiding people in to the BYOD or traditional HOL sections and getting everyone setup. Soon the VM counter had risen from around 7, to 1000 virtual machines deployed.
An interesting wall mural/interactive VMware Timeline seen – I can place myself as really starting off with learning VMware technologies around 2007-2008 when VI3 was the “in thing” 🙂
The day ended after speaking with/meeting some new faces at the Bloggers lounge and us heading off to the PernixData party at the El Boo beach club in Barcelona. Many thanks to the guys at PernixData for putting this event together. The atmosphere and location were awesome, and so was the selection of food and drinks.