How big is this hotel? It's more like a small city...

The MMS event is being held at The Venetian hotel in the heart of the Las Vegas strip, and is quite simply immense. I had thought that Treasure Island, the hotel where Mat & I are staying was huge, but I think it would fit 3 times over in The Venetian. Anywhere that takes 10 minutes from the front entrance just to the start of the conference area is big in my books. The conference centre is pretty huge too, comprising of several ballrooms, ante rooms and chambers on two floors, and is easily accommodating the 3500 or so attendees.

Mat and I arrived bright and early for registration, and I was amazed to see several hundred people already queuing up. I have to say though, the MS conferencing staff are pretty organised, and we got through registration in less than 20 minutes, which was a relief as I'd had visions of standing around for a couple of hours when I initially saw the queues.

One of the very best things about the MS events are the labs, either instructor led, or self paced. They give you the opportunity to properly play with the software in a virtual production environment which include everything you could possibly need: multiple servers and clients, and several disparate environments mixing Windows, Unix, Linux (sadly no Macs yet, can't think why...), and they provide this setup individually for up to 100 users at a time, in no less than 10 separate labs - simultaneously! Lets put that into perspective...at any one time, 1000 users can be individually rocking two or three servers, 2 workstations of multiple flavours, doing heavy duty system admin tasks and if anything goes bad for a user or you simply want to start from scratch, the whole setup can be re-provisioned in around 2 minutes. This is a real testament to how impressive virtual environments are these days, and I can't say just how impressed I am with it. I wonder how long it will be before Mars starts taking full advantage of what this technology could offer us? Dev' team, let me know, 'cause it'd make the ops and site teams jobs sooooo much easier!