I started my first full day at Partner Exchange in the HP Partner Bootcamp.  I’ll save you some of the more salesy/marketing information.  They started by covering some details of the infrastructure they helped build for the new Cowboys stadium.  It involves a multisite 100TB EVA, 16 BL480 blades supporting 747 POS terminals and is actually used to run over 30 businesses in more than 90 locations.  Pretty impressive.

The big message was HP’s Converged Infrastructure and cloud computing.  HP has five pillars they build their cloud offerings on: virtualization, resiliency, openness, orchestration, and modularization.  There is also a heavy dose of Virtual Connect, which you’ll see some pretty interesting moves with this year.  They also showed us their vCenter plugin, which can graphically represent the network connectivity of a VM, through the physical NICs, to the Virtual Connect networks, and finally out to the physical switch.

VMware revealed a new series of certifications based specifically around desktops.  They also announced that a beta version of the entry level exam (VCA411-DT would be offered at Partner Exchange.  Being a big vDesktop guy, I decided to go ahead and take a swing at it.  Since it’s in beta, I didn’t receive a final score, but I expect the results to be in my favor.  I didn’t find it terribly difficult (it is entry level after all).  It was all multiple choice questions that were geared to test your knowledge of managing and troubleshooting View.

The evening brought a world tour at Epcot.  We had about 15 people attend the VMUnderground beer tour around the world.  After a slow start (old guys who hunt and peck at one word a minute shouldn’t have jobs involving customer service and computers), we had a great time.  Thanks to everyone who came out.