I had the opportunity to attend Partner Exchange, PEX for short, this past week.  Overall, I have to say I was quite pleased with the sessions this year.  Normally, I tend to find most sessions a bit light on the technical part and far to heavy on the marketing fluff.  To my surprise, I was shocked that virtually every session was very technical and the speakers could go very deep.

Being that I dabble a lot in programming, and I work for an ISV, I have to say Carter Shanklin’s session “Getting Stoned with Project Onyx” was simple amazing.  I’d heard about Onyx when it came out late in 2009, but after seeing the product in action I am still trying to grasp how awesome it really is.  In short, Onyx is a code generator for VMware.  It sits between your VI Client and vCenter/ESX and when you perform tasks, it will show you in PowerShell what commands are equivalent to what you performed!  For those that don’t want to learn lots of PowerCLI or you want to follow VMware best practice on coding, it’s an invaluable tool.  You can read more about it here.

Many of the other sessions around Best Practices for Performance APIs, PowerCLI and vOrchestrator were also very good.  While PEX is clearly for partners, I hope VMware continues this high level of presentations this year for VMworld.  I’ll be writing up some thoughts on VMware strategy later this weekend, so stay tuned for a bit more.