Jase's Place

HP announced that they would be discontinuing the Touchpad sometime in Q4 of 2011.

There was a flurry of tweets on Twitter about the price dropping to $99.  What a great deal.  Especially if the rumor of someone porting Android to the HP Touchpad was true.

I thought to myself… It would be good to get one of these as a Christmas present for the kids to use.

I then looked at my calendar, and remembered I’m scheduled to play vOdgeball at VMworld 2011.  I’m looking forward to it, and even wrote a blog post about it on August 10th.

It really only took me about 5 seconds to see how $99 would benefit my kids, versus $99 benefiting many of my brothers & sisters in the U.S. Military that have made huge sacrifices and have been wounded, losing limbs & and having other disabling injuries.  My kids would have probably used it until the next big thing came out.  But a contribution to the Wounded Warrior Project can help change the rest of a disabled veteran’s life.

So rather than spending money on my kids, I decided to spend $100 to help the Wounded Warrior Project help my brothers & sisters.

Don’t get me wrong, a $99 HP Touchpad is a good deal.  I just figured I (my kids) could do without it.

I am not asking anyone to make a contribution like I did, but if we just had a huge number of people contribute $5, as our organizers have asked, to the Wounded Warrior Project, we could meet (or beat) our $15K goal.

Have a heart and contribute $5 (less than the price of a Starbucks Venti Cafe Latte) to help those that have put themselves in harm’s way and suffered from it.

About a year and a half ago, I was talking with a buddy of mine, Marcus, who was thinking of getting into virtualization.  In the many times a year that we work together, we always have conversations about technology.

In the past few years more of our conversations revolve around leveraging VMware. We pretty much talk about everything VMware from the technical perspective, the VMTN Community perspective, and even VMworld.  Having been to VMworld several times, I’ve shared quite a few things I learned, things I did, and my experiences.

Roughly a year ago, Marcus had mentioned that he had ordered some equipment, purchased a VMware package, and was in the process of getting things up and running.  He had a few questions for me regarding setting up his new environment, we discussed some of them high level, but didn’t really have the time to go deep into best practices/reference architectures/etc.

He asked me if I thought he should ask his boss to go to VMworld.  As someone who has been several times, and know the value, I immediately told him “Absolutely!”

I’ve spoken to this a couple times on my blog, but in this case, I’m going to refer to Marcus for that.  Marcus has a very good perspective from a “new to virtualization” & SMB guy’s point of view.

In reading his post, you’ll find that it far surpasses what one might expect. Check out his post on his experience here: VMworld – The Most Valuable Experience of My IT Career.

Glad you are getting to go again Marcus, here’s to more learning, networking, & good times! I look forward to seeing you there.

This is a quick little post about the open voting that is currently going on for VMworld 2011 Sessions.

I submitted 3 sessions during the call for papers for VMworld 2011.

They are:

Session Candidate 1603: How VMware’s Products Are Like a Military Unit – (Jase McCarty) Vote for this session if you would like to see some similarities between a military unit and VMware’s product portfolio, and how they are used to accomplish your mission.

Session Candidate 2771: Using Analogies to Explain the Value of VMware Tools to the Non-Virtualization-Fluent – (Jase McCarty/Dave Henry) Vote for this session if you are:

• An IT person trying to explain why you need VMware’s products to help you do your job to those that don’t quite understand the benefits
• A sales person that wants to put the what, why, and how in better terms for executives that aren’t up to speed with what VMware offers

Session Candidate 2912: vCloud Director, VMware View, and Site Recovery Manger – Use Cases for Accelerating Internal IT Efficiency – (Josef Adams, Rich Barlow, Jim Sanzone, Jeramiah Dooley, & Jase McCarty) Vote for this session if you are interested in becoming familiar with these products, see some uses cases, and see how they can help your business take self-service, virtual desktops, and availability to the next level.

Alright, shameless plug over.

Good luck to everyone that has submitted sessions.  From what I have seen, there are some really good ones.

To vote, head over to VMworld.com.

Thanks,

Jase

The VMworld 2010 Keynote is almost underway.

What exciting announcements are in store for the future of virtualization?

I got a sneak peek today in the VMworld 2010 Solutions Exchange.

Chad Sakac took the time to talk to me about some of what EMC is doing this year.

From everything that I saw, a lot of hard work has gone into the EMC booth(s).  Everyone that has been a part of the task should be proud of their work.

Thanks Chad for the quick look and looks like EMC is going to have a great show!