I’m a little behind on this one so I’ll give the high levels of what I saw.

The keynote was the official handing off ceremony from Paul Maritz to Pat Gelsinger. Paul has done some great things in his past 4 years at the helm of the company with one exception, vRam. On his way out, they made sure to clean that up as well. It was a debate who would get the bigger applause, Paul for his leadership, or vRam going away.

I call this Day 0 as it was simply supposed to be a travel day and the infamous VMunderground party. Unfortunately due to mechanical issues my first flight out, we didn’t make it. Not be a long shot. Instead of getting in at 4:30 we got in at 11:30. Sure I got more time with the family, but was really looking forward to kicking off the conference correctly and catching up with some old friends.

VMworld is just around the corner and for those in the server / virtualization space, its a pretty exciting time to see what the market leader is doing next. The market is getting more crowded with other hypervisors and some of them are challenging VMware more than others. Yes, even I will admit that Hyper-V is making some noise. A lot of talk within companies about Microsoft’s licensing advantage and features that are “good enough” for most workloads, its a conversation that many shops will be having when that VMware contract comes up for renewal.

Well, the 4th 5K is in the books and I’m quite pleased with the result. Last year I had seen the Ankeny Sunset Run 5K but due to a scheduling conflict, I just couldn’t make it work. This year however, no conflicts and the race was on one of the free weekends I have in August.

The official count of participants was 49 so by no means is this thing a large race. And I think that it is mainly due to a lack of advertising and information on the race. As an example, it was hard to find the route information on the city of Ankeny web site. I had to go off a brochure that was a couple of years old. It was the same as before, but still, left a feeling that this wasn’t the most organized of events.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak at Puppet Camp in Chicago. The goal of the event was to basically share, energize and evangelize puppet to a group of “locals” who will hopefully then use it and also spread the word to others.

I got involved in the event basically by accident. Last year at VMworld, I met Jose who is one of the community guys at Puppet. He helped sponsor a local LUG meeting where I spoke about puppet and it was a pretty good success. For the puppet camp chicago, they were a little short on presenters so I threw something together in the past week and away I went.