Aside from touring the expo floor, I attended a few more sessions Thursday and then again this morning, gravitating toward the virtualization sessions. As we’re now implementing virtual servers in our machine rooms, a lot of the material was review, but not all. I learned that Microsoft has a free hypervisor offering called Hyper-V. It doesn’t have feature parity yet with VMware but since they’re offering it for free, I would expect VMware to respond by lowering their prices on their infrastructure components. This would be very helpful for us. Having been psyched up by these virtualization sessions, I’m really looking forward to our group getting the first few servers moved to VM and machines turned off.

On the show floor I spent a little extra time talking to network monitoring/management companies and a DNS/DHCP/IP address management company. The latter gave me a blue hat with a cat logo. Guess who? We have honed our DNS and DHCP processes over the years with scripts and mastery of vi but there are better approaches.

I appreciated the breadth of the conference and being able to sample training in various areas. It was an exercise for my brain to be continually switching gears (going from session to session or booth to booth).