The Monday kickoff of VMworld Europe 2011 started with the partner day.

After an early wake up call and a decent breakfast I arrived at the Bella Center with the Subway. The first sessions were two hours away, so I had just enough time to do one Hands On Lab (#HOL20).

HOL20
This lab focused on Endpoint Security and Compliance Within Your Environment: Detect, Resolve and Monitor. It takes you through the process of configuring and managing the vShield Endpoint setup in combination with the Trend Micro antivirus and -malware solution. A great lab to get some insight of how the product works with altering rules for detection and alerting. You get a good view and understanding of how the interfaces of both vShield Endpoint and Trend Micro work.

The sessions I attended :

• Partner track Super Session (#SUP1022)
  This super session was the Partner keynote, nice but nothing special. 
  
• What’s new with VMware vSphere 5.0 Licensing and Pricing (#PAR2368)
  This session was a bit disappointing because it focused on how to setup your licensing within the product, which to my understanding is more a user point of view instead of a partner point of view. I have two take aways from this session. The first key take away from this session for me was the change in the way the essential bundles now can be upgraded to standard or enterprise licensing using an accelerator kit, previous versions of vSphere did not allow upgrading. The second takeaway was the restrictions mechanisms that reside in some editions. The vSphere Essentials and the vSphere Essentials Plus bundle have a mechanism that will prohibit the memory usage to reach a level that lies above the entitled amount according to the affected license, the other editions (standard, enterprise and enterprise plus) do not have an active restriction on memory according to the memory entitlements.
  
• Management Overview Part 2 of 2: White boarding the Customer Value (#PAR3245)After two more or less disappointing sessions, this session was a relief and by all means great! I always liked the approach of white boarding. The presenter used a special device connected to his MacBook to demonstrate the technique. While the presenter was demoing, I tried to do the same on my iPad using a whiteboard app “Jot for iPad”. It was my first time using the program (I’m even a pristine user regarding the iPad, but that on the side), I was pleased with my result:

  

After these sessions I decided to do another lab, this time Hands On Lab number 19 (#HOL19). HOL19 covered vShield “zones”, with vShield Edge, vShield App & vShield Manager. The official title of this lab is: “Building Your Agile, Secure and Compliant Mixed Trust Environment”. In this lab lot of time went lost due to problems in the setup of the lab environment, I spend almost half an hour trying to get it right (together with the LAB-assistants), but gave up in the end and skipped that specific part. I did not even finish it because lack of time and the closing of the Hands On Labs at that point. A positive point here is that because of the issues I encountered, I met Rob Mennen from VMware and had a chance to chat with him, thanks Rob!

The partner day in the Bella Center ended with a welcome reception with meeting with peers, food, drinks and live music.