Yesterday, after weeks of preparation, it was finally time to treat our clients to a day of VMware delight.

The last days especially were very very hard, I must agree with AJ, everyone who claims IT is a 9-to-5 job is insane.

Thanks to Marc we received a HP C3000 blade enclosure with a 480c and a 685c blade on Monday which we will use to build a VDI demo/hands-on lab. After a last meeting with the guys from VMware we also had to contact some of our personal clients to attend the seminar.

Tuesday we continued with the build of the VDI demo lab which didn’t go without problems due to the burden of Windows product activation without an Internet connection. Calling MS clearing house to activate 4 Windows servers by hand is a pain in the … Once that was finished VMware setup was easy! MS could learn a lot from them, reminds me of the Hyper-V lab I build a week ago, grrr. (More on that later)

Wednesday, the last day before the seminar! X minus 1. Time to dot the i’s and complete the task other omitted to do. A lesson learned for  the next seminar. AJ configured all Cranberry smartclients for the VDI demo and at 21:00 we finally went home. Tomorrow the big day, D-day!

D-day, Thursday November 27th 2008. We agreed to meet at the seminar location at 8 AM. As I was responsible for transporting all hardware I had to load up at 7:30. Because Alex (Froos) overslept I had to transport all hardware in my own car so I had monitors on every seat except my own, a 80kg blade enclosure in the back and boxes full of cabling, booklets, pens up to the roof. At 8:10 I arrived at the seminar location and we started to unload and build the VDI demo lab. As HP has never heard of silent computing with HP blades we had to hide the blades so we could still hear each other talk. So we had to get 80kg’s of HP up the stairs :-(, a day later and I can still feel my back.
When we started up the demo we discovered it did not work for some strange reason and as we were in the process of fixing this our CEO found out we had some technical issues. He repeatedly came over to ask us if this could be fixed in time, the PRESSURE!! ;-) During the first presentations AJ and Alex fixed some DNS errors and redeployed the VDI desktops and the demo worked fine. Great job guys!!

After the opening by our CEO there were 4 presentations during the morning:

  • ‘The power of visualization‘ by Ton Hermes (VMware)
  • ‘How Centric can implement VMware in your organization‘ by Edwin Weijdema (Centric)
  • ‘Saxion,customer case, experience with Centric‘ by Peter Goossens (Saxion)
  • ‘Intelligent Provisioning Infrastructure‘ by Marcel Timmermans (Centric)

After a great lunch we continued in the afternoon with 2 presentations:

  • ‘VMware Business Continuity solutions‘ by Ton Hermes (VMware)
  • ‘VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure‘ by Ton Hermes (VMware)

After these presentations clients were very enthusiastic and most of them left the room with a lot of new ideas and ammunition to target their colleagues and CEO’s. So it was tough, long days, late hours but at the end it was all worth it. A lot of happy clients/customers and I hope the schedules of our sales force will be overbooked for the coming months.

Special thanks to:

Wim and Jeremy for the overall organization, Egbert who arranged the HP hardware, Maurice/Ton/Willem for the VMware input, Andre/CDG who provided the Cranberry smartclients.