Yesterday i attended my first VMware TechXpress event in Auckland. For those of you who haven’t heard of these events before, here is what VMware says about them;

We created these groups in mid 2007 specifically for pre-sales and post-sales consultants from within our reseller, system integrator and technology alliance partner community. By attending your local TechXpress, you hear about the latest developments from VMware and our vendor partners. Furthermore, the venues have been selected to provide a relaxed, fun and informal environment to facilitate open conversation and provide you with an opportunity to network with your peers.

Well I’m not a pre-sales or post-sales consultant and I’m not a reseller, but i thought i would register my name and see if they would allow me to attend. They Did!

The main Deep-dive topic of the event was VMware View 3 which i have seen demo’s of before but thought it never hurts to brush up the latest products and it would also be a great opportunity to network with other VMware Engineers/Consultants in the Auckland area.

Based in a Conference room which is part of a busy Auckland bar called The Bluestone Room the atmosphere was really relaxed (Helped by the free bar tab), which made it really easy to getting chatting other people in between presentations. The main host of the afternoon was a guy named Rogan Mallon who is a Partner Systems Engineer for VMware in New Zealand.

Rogan first took us through a few slides explaining a little more about the main components of VMWare View for people who hadn’t seen the product before. We then moved swiftly onto a live demo of provisioning desktops and then changing the Master Image of a linked-clone desktop from an XP image to a Vista image.

The next TechXpress – Auckland is in April and will be focusing on Virtualising Exchange and SQL, I’m looking forward to that.