One of the many cool things that is going on in the community area of VMworld next week is Randy Keener’s Unsupported sessions. These are a forum to advance the community’s knowledge of how do do things that VMware never thought you’d want to do with their products.
The sessions run 1pm until 3pm each day, surrounded by the vBownBag Tech Talks sessions, the schedule is on the Tech Talks schedule page
The TechTalks are brief sessions of community generated wisdom and excitement, they will be live streamed and available recorded at http://www.vmworld.com/community/videos It’s not too late to get your session in, but you will need to email or tweet to one of the vBrownBag team as the signup form has closed.
I’m taking part in the Tuesday session where we will spend the whole two hours looking at AutoLab and nested ESXi. If you want to get started on AutoLab or if you’ve gotten started but then got stuck this is your chance. Bring your laptop and do some lab time in the community lounge.
The VMware Workstation and Fusion product teams will be joining us for the sessions and there is a rumour that they will be giving away product!
Bring your lunch, your Laptop and your Windows and vSphere ISOs. Veterans of past VMworld will tell you not to expect reliable Internet access while you’re on the show floor, so you need to bring these with you rather than try to download while you’re there. We can get you the AutoLab bits but you will need to bring your own Microsoft and VMware software. The good news is you probably already have these, here’s the list of software to bring:
- vCenter 5.0 Install DVD
- ESXi 5.0 Install CDROM
- VMware PowerCLI installer
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 ISO
- Microsoft Windows 2003 Server 32bit CDROM ISO
We will be doing demos and building real labs, it should be a lot of fun. One thing we might try to do is a Microsoft free nested ESXi lab. How much can we do without the Windows vSphere client?
To be clear this is not access to the VMworld Hand on Labs, it is your own lab that you build on your own laptop.