The flight from Memphis to Orlando took just over and hour and a half, and was as near to perfect as any flight I've ever been on. Which was a good thing, given that the day started out with me leaving my cell phone at home. I discovered this when going through security at the airport, which of course meant that it was way too late to go back and get it. Rather than wasting money on getting our pet sitter to ship it to me, I went ahead and upgraded to a new phone from Verizon. I've already got the shipment notice, so hopefully I'll have it here tomorrow. Gayle will get the Droid I left at home, and hopefully I can switch the data plan from the USB modem I got her when she was first going to Kentucky.
(pause 6 days )
And, welcome back to Memphis!
I kept looking at the first paragraph, thinking that I really needed to finish the post. However, I'd said that I'd detail a single host/single san ESX to ESXi upgrade, and frankly I just didn't want to. Strangely enough, I still don't, but I'll do it tomorrow regardless of "want to" status. For now, I'm going to talk about the forum.
If you ever want a huge ego boost, be a presenter at a large technical forum. I was the "token customer experience" portion of a combo Dell/VMware "the future today" type presentation. I evidently did well, as right after the presentation and several times in the next few days I was told just that, from both customers like myself and from channel partners. The next day the clinic and I were mentioned by name again in a different presentation, and so of course I had to put in my 2 cents worth in that one, too. All in all, I had a wornderful time, and learned a good bit to help enhance our current setup. I met a lot of interesting people, including some of the product directors at Dell. While a lot of forums like this are more marketing efforts, with salespeople everywhere, Dell's storage forum was officially a "no sales" zone, where the sessions actually taught you something, with most of the things discussed have already been released, and not merely vaporware, to maybe be released at some date in the far future. They had a hands-on lab, which while slow was very well implemented, and easy to use. But mainly, there were Dell staffers everywhere, all willing and for the most part able to answer any question you might have.
So, bottom line: if you're a Dell storage customer, or if you're thinking about becoming one, you owe it to yourself to go to next years forum. You'll not be disappointed.
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