Three Dell vExperts- Jason Boche, Mark Trimble and myself, attended the vExpert at VMworld 2011 meeting hosted by the VMware Community team – John Troyer (pictured below), Tony Dunn and Alex Maier. A fourth Dell vExpert - Nicolai Sandager will be in attendance at VMworld 2011 Europe. While what it means to be awarded a VMware vExpert designation has been covered by Gina Rosenthal in her “Congrats to Dell vExperts” blog post, more insights into the vExpert award designation were provided at the meeting. It was great to learn about the thought process around the vExpert program.

The award represents an individual’s contributions to the community and moving the conversation forward during the past year. vExperts are expected to bring more people to VMware virtualization by sharing real world implementations, influencing the virtualization decision-making process, establishing trusted advisor status with the community and ensuring successful customer engagements & experience. The process strives to expand the one to many evangelism model, avoids exclusionary clicks that tend to plague the growth of other award programs and welcome new people with not only a starting platform but one that they could find themselves standing on eventually. All in all, a great honor and a great responsibility to continue to evangelize Dell | VMware solution stacks to the community and to future virtualization techies.

The next third of the meeting was dedicated to a discussion around Cloud Infrastructure and Management. The conversation was intended to cover future directions for the virtual datacenter but turned into a lively discussion around security and service level agreement (SLA) with a hint of Small & Medium business versus Large Enterprises mixed in.

The last third of the meeting focused on the experiences of two vExperts with one talking about how they balanced work-life & being a vExpert and the other discussing not undervaluing your worth as a vExpert. I would have liked to have stayed and listened to their talks but I still had preparations to make for #v0dgeball and the great cause that it supported – the Wounded Warriors Project. 

Now for the AwesomeSauce, Dell just announced that we have joined the VMware vCloud Datacenter program. This means that Dell has invested resources in building out vCloud datacenter services globally in conjunction with prescriptive architectures developed with VMware to deliver consistent SLAs globally to our customers. This announcement coincides with Dell’s VMworld Super Session (#SUP1012) – Evolutionary Move to the Cloud, a Customer’s Perspective on August 30th at 1PM PT in Palazzo Ballroom D. If you could not attend VMworld, you can follow the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #SUP1012.