My second day at Partner Exchange started in the EMC Bootcamp session.  There were many cool topics covered, a couple of which were “turn off the cameras” cool.  One of EMC’s long term goals is to reduce both price and complexity of their products.  This has manifested in the creation of Unisphere and the VNXe line.  The approach they are taking to target the smaller array market, which has traditionally not been a strong market for EMC, is to prioritize simplicity and cost.  On the other hand, the higher end arrays are focused on providing performance and availability.  Seems like a great approach, so I expect to see EMC make a good run at the SMB market. 

Another cool offering EMC will be providing to partners soon will be a cloud based demo lab with self service provisioning.  This is a really cool offer from EMC and will make the lives of us partners a lot nicer.

In the afternoon, I attended the first ever Partner Support Day, put on by the Global Support Services team.  It was a very interesting look into VMware’s support organization along with a lot of good troubleshooting information and best practices.  Did you know VMware has 650 people in their support organization and they answer over 300,000 questions every year?  They are distributed across the globe in Palo Alto, California; Burlington, Canada; Broomfield, Colorado; Cork, Ireland; Bangalore, India; and Tokyo, Japan and operate as a “follow the sun” call center.  The troubleshooting, best practices and storage settings deep dive are way beyond the scope of this post.

The evening was spent doing what I enjoy most at Partner Exchange, hanging out with other partners and sharing stories and strategies.  This included dinner and a little shopping at Downtown Disney and the PEX tweet-up.

I passed my second VCAP exam! 

I found myself writing this post while taking the exam, so I figured I should probably go ahead and put it down in bits.

The exam has been well described by several others, so I won't duplicate that.  What I will add is my preparations and own thoughts.

1. The exam was difficult to study for.  I set aside quite a bit of time to study, but towards the end I felt like I wasn't getting much out of it.  Looking at the Blueprint, it was pretty obvious that it wasn't a bunch of facts that were need as much as it was knowing how to design.  In the end, there were some questions directly related to core facts, but not many that wouldn't have turned up on the VCP.  Only a couple of times did I think "I would just look this up while creating a design!"

2. Watch the demonstration video for the exam.  It was spot on and made the first visio-like question much less intimidating then it would've been.

3. I approached the exam a bit different than I normally do.  There is question flagging and the ability to go backwards, so I decided to start with the visual questions first, since they would take the most time.  I then went backwards and did all the short multiple choice questions.  Finally, I went forward again to cover the longer multiple choice questions and any other big questions I wanted to review.  I didn't have time to review all the flagged questions, but I did finish all the questions with 4 minutes to spare (much better than I did with the VCAP-DCA).

4. You need to know the entire stack.  If you only deal with the VMware part of the environment, you'll have a difficult time.  You definitely will need to be familiar with network and storage terminology and design.  To me, this makes sense since no virtual infrastructure (and especially a cloud infrastructure) is designed in a technology vacuum.

I definitely feel this exam is exactly what it thought it should be.  It was challenging, but there were no major curveballs or questions that I felt were there as landminds.

Anyone interested in a Warm-up Party before Partner Exchange this year?  If so, we might have you covered.

We had pretty much decided not to do a VMUnderground party at PEX, but one innocent tweet about beer at Epcot by Theron led us into a mad rush of planning and has resulted in this:

Date: Monday, Feb 7

Time: 6-9 (when Epcot closes)

Place to meet: Meet in main lobby of Coronado Springs at 6pm – watch the #PEX2011BEER hashtag on Twitter for more details

What we are doing: Epcot beer tour – drink up!

It's a very informal get-together where we'll be heading over to Epcot's World Showcase to do a quick tour of beers (or whatever your drink of choice is) from around the world.

We were lucky enough to work quick deals with three sponsors:

What they'll cover is entrance into Epcot for the first 25 people who register here:

PEX 2011 Beer Registration

If you don't happen to be one of the first 25, you're still welcome to join us, but you will have to pay your own way into Epcot ($50/person for an after 4p pass if you're with the conference).  Everyone will be on their own purchasing drinks once we're in the park, but hey, you're getting into EPCOT!!  How cool is that!  All the sponsors ask for in return is one of your business cards.  So come equiped with 3 of your business cards, your PEX badge (you don't need to wear it the whole nite) and a little bit of scatch for your drinks. 

Thanks again to our sponsors @TrainSignal, @LiquidwareLabs and @XangatiPress for helping us arrange this last minute.  An extra big thanks to @davidmdavis for going the extra mile in helping us slap it all together.