If you’ve never been to VMworld, imagine a room similar in size to a football field.  That room is divided up with a couple of hundred companies with massive customer booths, hundreds of demos, more vendor swag than you can transport in an 18-wheeler and some of the greatest minds in IT.
 
… And that’s just the vendor showcase.
 
It’s only the second full day here at VMworld and already I’m exhausted.  Usually at these types of conferences there’s some downtime between breakout session times that allows you to catch your breath.  That has not been the case at this show and it’s been awesome.  We haven’t had a point in time yet when the exhibition floor is open where we haven’t had a crowd at the booth with lots of people asking questions.
 
The most popular demo we’ve been running has been one where we fire up IOmeter and SQL simulations at the same time against a 3-node INVICTA cluster.  Then, once those jobs kick off and start generating a good deal of load against the storage array, we kick off a 600-desktop boot storm and see how long it takes for desktop #1, #301, and #601 to come up.  Because half our booth is folks from Engineering, including our CTO, we’ve been continuously making tweaks and optimizations.  We started off at around three minutes and have run through a couple of scenarios that get that down below two minutes.
 
Aside from the technology we’re demonstrating, we’ve also been having a blast with Brent Spiner at our booth daily.  He’s attracted so many people every day he’s here that we’ve had to bend the line around the back of our two closest neighboring booths!  Brent has been extremely gracious with all of his fans and he is an absolute riot to talk to.  If you’re at the show, feel free to swing by to chat, get a picture and his signature!  In fact, he’s attracted so much attention that one of our competitors was kind enough to cut all of the attendees in line to interrupt Brent with one of his fans to ask him if they could hire him for a show.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I’m glad to be working with the wonderfully creative minds we have in our marketing department.  [Competitor name redacted], you’ve now opened the floodgates.  I hope you’re ready.  :-)
 
But above all, the biggest compliment we’ve gotten from dozens of people so far is a visit to our booth because one of their friends or colleagues has talked to us and said our booth has a product and possibilities that can’t be missed.  It’s extremely rewarding to know our products and performance have that much of an impact on people that are trying to solve a huge array of business problems.
 
Like I said, this is only the second full day.  The next two days will be incredible!