SCALE 5x day 1

The first day of SCALE was pretty great. The turnout was awesome and there were some great exhibitors. Manning the Red Hat booth all day I didn't get much of a chance to look around, and I was not able to attend any sessions (which was a bummer). My talk on Virtualization in RHEL 5 and FC6 was extremely well attended (people sitting in the aisles and standing all over the place - some people couldn't get in). I think the talk went well and I got a lot of good feedback. Slides here.

A couple of questions people asked me that I have since found the answers to:

* Per a limitation in Xen, Xen guests have no support for USB at all. Many people wondered how guest domains would handle a USB thumbdrive. Short answer: they wont.
* Many people asked about a bug in SUSE's Xen implementation that involves installs of Windows guests freezing halfway through. We had some great hardware and the Dell booth and tested this out - we were able to install a Windows Server 2003 guest with no problems. There is a trick that involves pressing F5 during the initial phase of the windows installer... will post details later.

It was a lot of fun hanging out at the booth. Tons of people came by, most with technical questions. Several people also had questions about pricing, which I couldn't really answer. I did find a bit of confusion about RHEL vs. Fedora and some ignorance about Red Hat's attitude about open source. Hopefully I was able to clear some of that up and thanks to everyone who asked tough questions.

My only wish is that we were closer to the Fedora booth. Thomas Chung was manning that one on the furthest other side of the exhibition hall. I think this gave the impression that Red Hat didn't really care much about Fedora, which couldn't be further from the truth. Hopefully next year we can have one big booth rather than two separate booths. I think it was more of a mix up than anything else.

Another day of manning the booth today...