Virtualization Field Day 6

Read­ing Time: 2 min­utes

I’m sit­ting here watch­ing an episode of Top Gear as I write this, and wax­ing con­tem­pla­tive on my recent invi­ta­tion to both a Tech Field Day one-day event and Vir­tu­al Field Day 6 . Both are being held in the same week, lat­er in Novem­ber, and both are in the San Jose area, as per usu­al.

I am always flat­tered when I’m invit­ed to these events, and I take the oppor­tu­ni­ty seri­ous­ly. Not only to I get the priv­i­lege of hear­ing from some inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies doing excit­ing things (usu­al­ly before they are announced to the pub­lic), but I also get to be around a group of folks much smarter than I am. Many are friends, and the ones who aren’t prob­a­bly soon will be.

The Tech Field Day events are focused into some­what stan­dard break­downs of tech­nol­o­gy spe­cial­ties, with Net­work, Vir­tu­al, Stor­age, Wire­less, and oth­er tech­nolo­gies each hav­ing their own events under the gen­er­al umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion Steven Fos­kett has cre­at­ed. Being invit­ed to the one day Data Field Day Round­table made sense to me when I got the call, as it’s being host­ed by Cis­co along with some of their part­ners. Being invit­ed to Vir­tu­al Field Day 6 ini­tial­ly did not make as much sense to me.

I am pre­dom­i­nant­ly a net­work engi­neer. While I have cer­tain­ly worn many hats over the years-from Sys­tems Admin­is­tra­tor, to Unix Admin, to con­sul­tant and even­tu­al­ly IT Direc­tor- and I play with Open­Stack and many oth­er tech­nolo­gies, that’s large­ly it. I play. In one of my roles I did install and man­age a siz­able vmware instal­la­tion, but I am far from an expert, espe­cial­ly with the tech­nol­o­gy hav­ing moved far beyond where it was when I last used it.

I gra­cious­ly accept­ed the invi­ta­tion, but was admit­ted­ly bemused. Until, that is, Steven wrote to explain that he likes to “cross the streams ” as he puts it, using a clas­sic ref­er­ence to one of the great movies of the 80’s. Ghost Busters ref­er­ences aside, his point is this: he believes very strong­ly that a more intrigu­ing dia­logue is cre­at­ed when he includes peo­ple with spe­cial­ties large­ly out­side the are­na of the event he’s invit­ing them to. So, each event he throws now he invites a cou­ple of folks from oth­er dis­ci­plines to par­tic­i­pate, antic­i­pat­ing that they will see things from a dif­fer­ent, unex­pect­ed angle, and fos­ter bet­ter con­ver­sa­tion.

Putting aside my trep­i­da­tion at attend­ing an event that I feel a bit under qual­i­fied to be at, and more than slight­ly wor­ried I’ll say some­thing stu­pid, or worse yet say noth­ing, I think this will be a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for me to step out­side of my day-to-day world and learn from some peo­ple and pre­sen­ters that I oth­er­wise might not be exposed to.

The event will be, as always, live streamed on the Tech Field Day web page (look for Vir­tu­al Field Day 6 ) as well as live-tweet­ed, blogged, and gen­er­al­ly pushed out through a wide vari­ety of chan­nels. I hope you’ll tune in to see the pre­sen­ta­tions, inter­act with the del­e­gates by tweet­ing using the #VFD6 hash tag, and to gen­er­al­ly learn from some qual­i­ty ven­dors about their lat­est and great­est advances.

Note: I will be fol­low­ing up this post in the next few days with a more detailed break­down of each event, includ­ing the com­pa­nies and pre­sen­ters at each.