Today I started with a meeting with LiquidWare Labs.  It was a great conversation and hopefully the beginning of a great partnership.  This unfortunately prevented me from attending the Steve Herrod keynote, which I have always looked forward to.  Based on what I’ve heard about his presentation it went as well as his previous keynotes.

After lunch I attended the Advanced View 4 Lab, which ended up actually being a Tech Preview of the next version of View.  This next version introduces many new features and some considerable changes to the interface and scalability of the product.  According to the lab instructors, they didn’t even get their hands on the code until three days before the conference and had to learn it while building the lab.  I have to say that I was very impressed with the product, the improvements they made and the stability of a product still in the Alpha stage.  This release has more features than View 4.0 had and is everything that View 4.0 should have been.  It will truly be a game changer.

After the lab I attended a presentation and demo of vCenter AppSpeed.  It is a very promising application that can help to pinpoint where latencies exist within a multi-tier application.  Check this one out.  It is implemented as a single OVF that clones itself to have a single collector on each host in the cluster along with a single vApp to coordinate all the collectors and provide the intelligence.

Meetings prevented me from attending the Partner Appreciation Party at the House of Blues.  From what I could see through the door and the stories from those who did attend, I don’t think I would’ve been able to enjoy it anyways.  28,000 people crammed into a restaurant didn’t seem too appealing to me to begin with.