The journey began with a 9pm flight from Manchester to Cork, I was then picked up by a chauffeur in an S Class Mercedes along with Jan-Peter courtesy of VMware 🙂

We arrived at the posh The Kingsley Hotel at 11:00pm, where Carl Dudley, Ron Ekins, Frits Hoogland and Tim Hall were still in the reception lounge having discussions about Cloud, Storage amongst other topics.  So Jan-Peter and myself joined in until midnight.

The next morning was an early start with a 7am private shuttle ride to VMware Campus in Ballincollig.

It was a very intense day, with lots of presentations, technical deep dives and labs:

• Mike Corey recapped ‘The Basics of vSphere’
• Karen Egan VP Support, gave an overview of Global Support Center (GSC) EMEA
• Then a few presentations from the sponsor Pure Storage regarding their Flash offerings from Carl McQuillan, Somu Rajarathinam and Alejandro Infanzon 🙂
• Valentin Bondzio gave a deep dive of VMware vSphere Core in particular vMotion, which really impressed me 🙂
• My OCM buddy Yvonne Murphy, talked about Oracle on VMware “One Woman’s Journey”, which was about her true experience of real life customer problems working within Global Support Center EMEA.  It was reassuring to know VMware has 1,000 support engineers in GSC EMEA in Cork alone and most Support Requests are resolved in 24-58 hours.  We then got the privilege of having a tour of the GSC 🙂
• We then finished the day with labs session with Sudhir Bala and Mohan Potheri, where we got to for example:
  • Create a Template from a VM guest
  • Create a VM guest from a Template
  • Move a VM guest whilst powered on from one physical host to another using vMotion
  • Increase CPUs and Memory of a VM guest on the fly
  • And more…

It was a great 1st day of a 3 days workshop, in which I got to gain new knowledge in regards to VMware, which I can see help in particular circumstances and requirements 🙂

The day ended with a meal and drinks at SoHo Rooftop Bar & Restaurant, where I got the opportunity to catch up with my OCM buddy Yvonne Murphy, network with new people including: Dean Bolton from VLSS, Valentin Bondzio and Don Sullivan, both from VMware.

It was then the short journey back to the hotel, where I caught up with Tim Hall.  It was then a gather in the hotel reception where conversations continued until late 🙂

Many thanks to VMware and Pure Storage, I’m looking forward to the rest of the workshop 🙂

My tweets for the day can be seen here.

The VMware Expert Database Workshop Program hashtag is #VMWORA

My related Blog Posts

VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition

Other related Blog Posts

Tim Hall (Oracle Base) – VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition
Tim Hall (Oracle Base) – VMware Workshop – The Journey Begins
Tim Hall (Oracle Base) – VMware Workshop – Day 1
Michael Corey (Columnist) – VMware Experts Program Oracle Edition
Michael Corey (Columnist) – Day 1 VMware Experts Program Oracle Edition

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Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)