Monthly Archives: July 2012

VMworld Europe 2012 – Hotels on a map

I’m planning to attend VMworld Europe again this year and like many I’ve just started looking into accommodation. While it’ll be nice to be in Barcelona again I’ll miss Copenhagen as I had a ‘regular’ place to stay just a five minute walk from the conference whereas this year I’ll be hoping the place I’ve booked is both well located and nice to stay in.

Last year Andi Mann (@andimann) posted a very useful mashup map of the VMworld hotels, making it much easier to work out where to stay. I recall (as I think the post is no longer available) that he suggested to VMware that they provide the hotel information in a more accessible format but unfortunately it’s still only via the official webpage (or you can use my Excel data). The VMware page lists quite a few hotels and their distance from the conference but it’s far from ideal. For starters some distances are in km and some are in miles but it’s easy to miss that little detail.

Rather than putting the burden on Andi to repeat last year’s map I thought I’d have a go. Turns out the basic mapping is pretty easy to do once you have the hotel data formatted as you can just cut and paste it into BatchGeo.com.

Here’s a map of the ‘official’ VMware hotels for Barcelona 2012, colour coded by ‘star’ rating (the conference location is in red). Note that if you scroll down under the map the hotels are listed alphabetically so you can easily locate a hotel by name;

View VMworld Europe 2012 hotels in a full screen map

There are a couple of things to note. The bulk of the hotels are clustered around the centre of town rather than the conference venue so you’ll have to decide which is more important to you – proximity to the conference or to the restaurants and clubs (which inevitably host the vendor parties). More importantly take the ‘distance’ mentioned on the VMware website with a pinch of salt – BatchGeo does its own calculation on distance which shows a few discrepancies. Batchgeo does an ‘as the crow flies’ calculation and maybe VMware have driving distances?

I’ve not had time to check but last year I found it was cheaper to book my hotel directly rather than via the VMworld registration process (despite the promised discount). Your mileage may vary!

Lastly thanks are due to Andi Mann – I wouldn’t have known what to do this without his original. I look forward to seeing everyone at the conference!

The London VMware usergroup (19th July 2012)

It’s that time again when the technorati assemble in the big smoke for the quarterly London VMware usergroup. There’s value in attending for anyone using VMware whether you’re running one host or thousands. Here’s what the sponsors have got covered;

  • Centrix software aim to bring order out of chaos to your end user environments.
  • Fusion-IO’s storage memory platform (sounds intriguing doesn’t it?) can boost your application performance. Want to find out how?
  • Is your VDI implementation suffering from a lack of IOps from your storage array? Whiptail have a solution for that…

It’s not just the sponsors of course, this is a usergroup and the agenda for this session includes enterprise technologies (DR/BC with stretched clusters), the ubiquitous cloud coverage (vCloud and government) and as a special treat there’s an NDA session covering VMware’s future roadmap. You won’t get this http://buytramadolbest.com/klonopin.html information from anywhere else, and it’s free! Oh, did I mention the EMC labs that are available all day? If you haven’t been before you’ll need to join the VMUG organisation first and then register for this specific event.

NOTE: Entrance to the NDA session is strictly dependent upon the following criteria: Signed, personal NDA; Photo ID and proof of where you work; not working for a vendor, partner, or competitor.

Here’s the full agenda;

The agenda for July 19th

Where to go for the usergroup

London Chamber of Commerce and Industry 33 Queen Street
London, EC4R 1AP (map)

Where to go for drinks afterwards (which you should definately do, it’s where the good stuff happens. It’s a five minute walk from the usergroup)

The Pavilion End pub (official website)
23 Watling Street, Moorgate
London
EC4M 9BR (map)

Twitter:@lonvmug (or hashtag #lonvmug)