As the only VFD2 participant who does not have to go through TSA security in the next week, I got delegated to take the open bottles of adult beverages home. So while I haven’t had all that much to drink these past few days, the final toasts have been raised and downed, hands have been shaken, and in the morning I’ll head all nine miles home and go back to my day job on  Monday. I think by then, the other delegates will all have left the west coast.

I still have a couple of sessions to write about, and I’m planning to do so next week if not before. PureStorage brought back memories of my days early on at 3PARdata, before they dropped the “data” so to speak. Xangati is an impressive solution for tracking performance and patterns in a virtualization environment. And despite my inaccurate guess at the Dell model of server used by Pivot3, they had an interesting product for distributed ESXi/VDI that I’m pondering a bit further.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank my colleages at Virtual Field Day 2 for making it an impressive experience for me… to Matt Simmons for a great job running the show in Stephen’s absence, and Stephen Foskett and all of the past delegates who decided to invite me to participate.  It was a bit overwhelming at times, when I stopped to think about how intensely involved in virtualization these guys are. I’ve been a deep/broad generalist for most of my career, and while I’ve done virtualization of multiple flavors and degrees, it’s not my living. But I think maybe that balanced out some of the crowd and brought a different perspective into the mix, which is a valuable element for a gathering such as this.

So here are the folks you should go check out. As they blog about the sessions we shared, I’ll add links to my posts about them, but they’re all interesting and involved and interactive, so I can’t over-recommend giving their respective sites a look.

• Edward Haletky The Virtualization Practice — @Texiwill
• Rodney Haywood Musings of Rodos — @Rodos
• Bill Hill Virtual Bill — @Virtual_Bill
• Mike Laverick RTFM Education — @Mike_Laverick
• Dwayne Lessner IT Blood Pressure — @Dlink7
• Scott Lowe TechRepublic / Virtualization Admin — @OtherScottLowe
• Roger Lund vRoger / vBrainstorm — @RogerLund
• David Owen VMackem — @VMackem
• Brandon Riley Virtual Insanity — @BrandonJRiley
• Todd Scalzott Don’t Call Me Scott — @TScalzott
• Rick Schlander Virtualization with VMware Technology — @VMRick
• Chris Wahl Wahl Network — @ChrisWahl

Yeah, that copy and paste didn’t come through so well, but it should work.

So I hope to be invited back for a future event, and I’m pleased with the experience I had over the last 50ish hours. I don’t think this more-than-one-blog-entry-a-week thing will last too much longer, but I still have a draft on my Shuttle VMware box and some other stuff to share soon.

Thanks all… see you virtually, and physically soon.