VMworld EMEA 2015 – Day Zero

I got up early on Sunday to get my flight to Barcelona for VMworld. At the Airport I caught up with the Austrian #vMafia to plan the next days.
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We arrived in Barcelona at 1pm and waited again about an hour to get our luggage, maybe because of airport staff siesta. We arrived at the hotel at 3pm and compared to the last VMworld hotel we have an 100% improvement in stars. We’re staying at Hotel Marvi which has 2 stars instead of 1 from star last year and to be honest it is a really good hotel and I need it only for a bed. Really good price/quality ratio.
We met with John Nicholson (@lost_signal) who joined VMware recently as Technical Marketing Manager VSAN for “lunch” and it was great catching up with him. I didn’t know him before but he is a cool guy with a lot of knowledge.
At 4pm I went to the registration to collect my badge and the VMworld backpack. This years edition of the backpack is really cool and I think I will keep it and not giving it away.
Have you ever saw a bitcoin ATM? In barcelona you can see one at Placa Espanya metro station. That’s so weird.
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A sunday without a #vRockstar party before VMworld won’t be a great sunday so we joined all the awesome guys for the pre-conference get together. #vRockstar party is the unofficial pre-conference party organized by some really great people (Patrick Redknap (@PatrickRedknap), Marco Broeken (@mbroeken). Like last year it took place at the Hardrock Café, Plaça de Catalunya, 21 and was sponsored by Cisco, EMC Elect, Brocade, Simplivity, VMUG, HyTrust, Atlantis and Zerto. So a big warm Thank you to all the sponsors making this event happen. I finally meet a lot of people in real life like Adam Eckerle (@eck79), Julian Wood (@julian_wood), Tony Foster (@wonder_nerd) to name a few. One of the best part at the event was when some of my followers/blog readers came by and said hello. Had also a really great talk with them. At the end of the show I had a really great conversation with Adam Eckerle (@eck79) about a lot of things. I love it when I meet people with the same open mind and interests like me.
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But there was not always fun during day zero. Starting at 3 or 4pm a lot of tweets going around about William Lam not being permitted to entry to Europe.


You can read the whole story about #LamGate at The Register.

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