May
15thEMC World 2011 : AKA the last 3 months of my life


This post will cover so much of the last few months of my life that I don’t even know where to start. I am sitting here in the Las Vegas airport trying to remember all the details of how I got to this spot. It really started at the beginning of March when I moved to the vSpecialist Technical Enablement team. The TE team is tasked with arming the front-line vSpec with information, tools, messaging, and more to do their jobs more effectively. Another aspect of the TE team is they usually provide many of the keynote and session demos for the conference and partner events like EMC World or VMworld. Also, the TE guys have been running the EMC Hands On Labs for over a year now at events across the US. Within a week after joining I had a discussion with my boss, Chris Horn, about the how the existing Hands On Labs (which he pioneered and maintained) could be improved and expanded for EMC World. The goal was to do something much more like the experience the VMworld labs provide. Chris had been talking with the EMC Demo Cloud team about using cloud-hosted labs they could provide to the users in Las Vegas at EMC World. After a few long conversations I committed to write the lab automation that would take a session in the Demo Cloud and automate it straight to a user at a desk across the country. Not a small feat and honestly I [...]