While the first "real" day of VMworld 2006 officially starts today for most people, yesterday wrapped up a fairly eventful day for me.  Monday was Partner Day at VMworld, and if you thought there were a lot of VMware Partners out there in the world, you'd be right!  I was amazed at how many people were running around from one event to the next.  If yesterday was only VMware Partners... I'm afraid of how many people are going to be travelling the halls of the convention center today. 

Things went smoothly for day 1.  Registration, much like last year, was fairly simple.  No problems encountered there.  I almost lost my hotel room, and with every hotel in the area booked, I would have been quite disturbed to say the least!  Transportation doesn't appear to be an issue... but I'll reserve judgement until the rest of the 6000+ people show up and start using them along with me and the other early birds that arrived yesterday.

Last year's VMworld was focused on the announcement and comings of VMware's VI3 solution.  While still a very much anticipated topic (now that people are actually implementing it), it seems like VDI and Lab Manager were getting a lot of attention. 

VMware's Lab Manager, the Slingshot product that VMware acquired from Akimbi, seemed to be a big draw yesterday as Partners were invited to find out more about the product, how it works and how to sell it.  With the snapshots and large testing and development matrix that people will go through, EMC should love this product as it will "allow" customers to consume large amounts of data - just what a storage company wants to hear.  I've been working in this space for years now.  Lab automation and provisioning is nothing new to me.  I wrote about this topic in my book, Advanced Server Virtualization (shameless plug) - I went into some specific details on what I envisioning the market to migrate towards... and I've been involved in my company's implementation on this for something like the last 5 years in one form or another, through the ProTier days and then into the Surgient solution.

VDI was also talked about heavily.  It seems like a great idea, but I'm waiting to see what people have in store for it today in the exhbition center.  While helping to setup my company's booth, I couldn't help notice how many new vendors there were participating in this year's event.  And I noticed quite a few booths with the "VDI" name plastered all over it.  VDI still has a few issues to work out, but I'm wondering if any of these vendors have figured out the magic bullet to get people to sign on and start using it in droves.  I'll be checking them out today, hopefully, to find out.

I'm looking forward to an eventful day today.  Hope to meet a few more of you at the event today and the days ahead.