VMworld 2018 US Day Three

September 1, 2018 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

Today there was no General Session so it was straight to the VMVillage to catch up with all the people from the vCommunity. It is such a great please to meet the real people behind a twitter picture or other social media and have chat.

Especially the VMTN Community area in VMvillage is a hot spot and buzzing with activities like for example the vBrownBag TechTalk. If you’re not familiar with the vBrownBag TechTalks:

vBrownBag is about community education, created by the community to help others in the community. The TechTalks allow community members and community-minded sponsors, to present content at VMworld that would not (or did not) get accepted to the main conference track.

And believe me, all the sessions where jam-packed! All vBrownBag TechTalk the sessions are recorded as well and published on Youtube in this playlist: 2018 VMworld TechTalks.

VMworld Party Fest!

The well know VMworld Party was rebranded this year as the VMworld Fest, it was held at the Pavillions at World Market. The venue looked great but there were some issues with long lines at the food trucks and they even ran out of beer!?! Luckily we already enjoyed an awesome dinner and somehow @vHojan managed to find a waiter with a tray full of beer at the venue?!? So we could just watch the show while enjoying a beer.

The headliner at the VMworld Fest was Royal Machines, the group is fronted by Mark McGrath (of Sugar Ray), Dave Navarro (of Jane’s Addiction), and Billy Morrison (of Billy Idol as well as The Cult). And they even brought some friends in the form of Robin Zander (of Cheap Trick), Sebastian Bach, Macy Gray, Fred Durst (of Limp Bizkit). For a bunch of old-timers, they still know how to throw a party!

Some cool VMworld 2018 US numbers:

21,000 Registrants
86 Countries
5,280 Companies Represented
215 Exhibitors and Sponsors
~200 Customers stories
50K+ VMworld Mentions on Social Media
~10k Hands On Labs

Next year the VMworld 2019 US will move back to San Francisco! So mark your calendars for August 25-29 2019.

Tomorrow is the last day of VMworld 2018 US, it will be the day where everyone is leaving for home and the venue will be so much quieter. So, for now, have a safe trip home for everyone who attended VMworld 2018 US and I hope to see you all again in Barcelona for VMworld 2018 EU!

As I did for the last couple of days, I’ve gathered some announcements made on the third day which you can find below (only there were not that many…)! I’ll update the page as more and more information will be released.

VMworld 2018 US Day Three Announcements

VMworld 2018 US Day Two

August 30, 2018 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

Can’t believe I’m still alive after such an amazing day one at VMworld 2018… We closed off day one with an epic party from AWS and Rubrik at Hakkasan with performances by RUN-DMC and The Roots! Rubrik and AWS have again raised the bar for VMworld parties and I’m already looking forward to next year!

But back to business, VMworld Day Two!

The General Session on Tuesday was led by Sanjay Poonen and he had an interesting guest namely Malala Yousafza. She is the youngest Nobel Prize winner and her story and message to support education for girls and women is inspiring. You can watch the replay of the General Session here, I’m not 100% sure if the whole interview with Malala was recorded.

After the General Session, I was able to attend some breakout sessions I had scheduled. When all the recordings are online I’ll update this post with the links to the recordings of the sessions.

Unfortunately, in the evening I was not able to attend the vExpert party due to some other engagements which was a shame because I heard some good stories!

Again I’ve gathered some announcements made on the second day which you can find below! I’ll update the page as more and more information will be released.

VMworld 2018 US Day Two Announcements

VMworld 2018 US Day One

August 28, 2018August 29, 2018 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

Oh yes, the time has come for the first official day of VMworld 2018 US!

Yesterday we’ve already kicked off with a VCDX Town Hall session where even Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell made a guest appearance! During this VCDX Town Hall session the latest announcements to the VCDX program where discussed. Unfortunately, I’m not able to share these announcements yet but they will be soon made public so stay tuned.

The first day started as usual with the General Session Keynote where CEO Pat Gelsinger took the stage, he started talking about 20 years of VMware and showed how far VMware has come. The keynote featured a number of previews and demonstrations like:

RDS on VMware: VMware demonstrated how Amazon Web Service’s RDS service will run on VMware in a private data center, thus offering developers a familiar RDS functionality available on VMware in a private data center or at the Edge.
Project Dimension: A VMware technology preview that will extend VMware Cloud to the data center, branch offices and the edge. Project Dimension will combine VMware Cloud Foundation, in a hyperconverged form factor, with VMware Cloud managed service to deliver an SDDC infrastructure as an end-to-end service, operated by VMware. Project Dimension will dramatically simplify operational complexity and cost and offers built-in security and isolation, allowing customers to focus on innovating and differentiating their businesses.
Project Magna: Project Magna will make possible a self-driving data center based on machine learning. It is focused on applying reinforcement learning to a data center environment to drive greater performance and efficiencies. The demonstration illustrated how Project Magna can learn and understand application behavior to the point that it can model, test, and then reconfigure the network to a make it more optimal to improve performance. Project Magna relies on artificial intelligence algorithms to help connect the dots across huge data sets and gain deep insights across applications and the stack from application code, to software to hardware infrastructure, to public cloud and the edge.
Virtualization on 64-bit ARM for Edge: VMware demonstrated ESXi on 64-bit ARM running on a windmill farm at the Edge. VMware sees an opportunity to work with selected embedded OEMs to scope and explore opportunities for focused, ARM-enabled offering at the edge.
Project Concord: VMware demonstrated a highly scalable, energy-efficient decentralized trust infrastructure for digital consensus and smart contract execution. Project Concord may be used to power distributed trust infrastructures, including blockchains. As a leader in enterprise-grade distributed management and security products, VMware is poised to help enterprises harness blockchain technology in a dramatically efficient manner to advance their business goals. Project Concord is available immediately as an open source project.

I’ve gathered most of the major announcements made on the first day which you can find below! I’ll update the page as more and more information will be released.

VMworld 2018 US Day One Announcements

VMworld 2018 Las Vegas

August 24, 2018August 24, 2018 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

Here we go again! VMworld 2018 Las Vegas is starting in just a few days! Vegas Baby!

VMworld is the tech conference everyone from customers to partners dealing with VMware technology. Team ITQ has a presence at VMworld in the form of Johan van Amersfoort, Laurens van Duijn and Wesley Geelhoed and yours truly. And we are bringing a bunch of cool stickers with us as well!

Just find us lingering around at the VM Village or Bloggers Area or hit us up on twitter to collect yours!

VMworld 2018 Las Vegas Sessions

Here is a selection from the session I’m really looking forward to:

[VIN2410BU] Nerds with Appliances: vCenter Server Migration

William Lam & Emad Younis

The VMware vCenter Server deprecation for Windows has been announced, and the vCenter Server Appliance is the future. Don’t fear: Migrating your management from a vCenter Server on Windows to a vCenter Server Appliance does not have be complicated. This session will cover native tools provided by VMware to help guide you toward a successful migration from a vCenter Server on Windows to a vCenter Server Appliance. You will learn about the migration process, get best practices, learn tips and tricks, and see some automation magic to guide you through your transition from Windows to the appliance.

[VIN2256BU] Tech Preview: The Road to a Declarative Compute Control Plane

Maarten Wiggers & Frank Denneman

Declarative control planes are becoming increasingly popular in the industry. Instead of explicitly defining configurations, declarative control planes tell the architecture what the desired state should be. The desired state could be high priority, or keep particular VMs or containers separate. Within the software-defined data center (SDDC), VMware vSphere offers two declarative control planes: one for networking and one for storage. However, there is no declarative control plane for compute yet. Compute policy provides a framework to allow our customers the flexibility and control of VM placement and resourcing decisions based on the user’s encompassing application needs. In this session, you will learn about the capabilities introduced in the VMware Cloud SDDC as a path to achieve that goal.

[CNA2755BU] Architecting PKS for Production: Lessons Learned from PKS Deployments

Romain Decker & Suman Sharma

Are you curious about how customers are leveraging Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and VMware NSX-T to design and deploy a Kubernetes solution on VMware vSphere? In this session, you will get a deep dive into PKS within the context of real-world customer deployment scenarios. The speakers will share the lessons learned from their successful PKS and NSX-T deployments, and show you how to architect PKS for a production environment. Come and learn about the do’s, don’ts, and best practices. After this session, you will be better equipped to deploy and manage enterprise-grade Kubernetes in your infrastructure and use NSX-T to bridge the gap in network and security for container workloads.

[VIN2650BU] Designing for the Unexpected: Delivering IT on a Boat with VMware Horizon

Mark Brookfield & Katarina Wagnerova

This session will discuss some of the key requirements of delivering an IT infrastructure on a boat for a maritime expedition.
You will find out how using VMware’s end-user computing solution enabled the science team to deliver complex applications that map the archeology of the Black Sea.
Find out about the requirements, constraints, and risks, plus the decisions taken to overcome them, making it possible to conduct one of the largest multidisciplinary maritime archaeology projects ever attempted.

[VIN1738BU] vSphere Host Resources Deep Dive: Part 3

Frank Denneman & Niels Hagoort

While this session focuses on upper levels/overlay services (software-defined data center, VMware NSX), proper host design and management still remain the foundation of success. With these new overlay services, we are presented with a new consumer of host resources. Ironically, it’s the attention to these abstraction layers that returns us to focusing on individual host components. This talk goes into details of CPU and memory configuration. It also zooms in on how virtual networking influences VM configuration and host design. Learn about a collection of forgotten or unknown command line tools that provide you unparalleled insight of the behavior of resource consumers (VMs) and providers (hosts). This info contributes to optimal scaling decisions and allows you to right-size your virtual data center to achieve consistent performance.

VMworld 2018 Las Vegas Links

Some must read blog posts about VMworld 2018:

Johan van Amersfoort

Looking forward to VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas

Richard Kasius

VMworld 2018 US: Bucket List Achievement Unlocked!

Going to #VMworld for the first time? Check out my hints and tricks by @lenzker

And finally some other handy links for VMworld 2018 Las Vegas:

I hope to see you in Vegas to chat about whatever (even non-VMware related stuff 😉 ), just say hi if you see me or hit me up on twitter @vMBaggum.

VMworld 2017 EU Day Two

September 14, 2017September 14, 2017 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

*BEEP BEEP BEEP*… That moment your alarm goes off at 7am while it feels you just went to bed… But never mind, it’s time for VMworld 2017 EU Day Two! Let’s go!

Queue the “General Session” for day two and again we (Johan van Amersfoort, Sam McGeown, Matthew Bunce, Niels Hagoort and Giuliano Bertello) were doing our thing on the CrowdChat which you can read here: #VMworldDayTwo

If you missed the “General Session” you can find the replay here: General Sessions – VMworld Europe

The rest of the day for me was filled with meetings, round tables and whisperer sessions so the day flew by before I knew it.

In the evening my employers from ITQ organised an awesome trip to Mara Nostrum Supercomputer. So you would think OK supercomputer nice but not special… Well actually this is one of most cool supercomputers you will see, because it is located in a church!

And it has some impressive numbers:

Speed 13,7 PFlops

Storage 14 PB

Power 1,3 Kw

OS SUSE Linux

Unfortunately, there were not a lot of new announcements made on day two. But I found the following articles interesting, so I would like to share them with you.

Security in the Age of Internet Separation

VMware Continues to Drive Momentum for NFV in 2017

VMworld 2017 EU Day One

September 13, 2017 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

No time to recover from VMworld US because it’s time for VMworld EU Day one again!

I flew in on Sunday afternoon which gave me some time to get settled and enjoy some proper tapas before the Partner Exchange began on Monday. Like every year my employers from ITQ organizes a good diner for all 30(!!!) employees that are attending VMworld EU. It’s amazing to work for a company that puts so much time and effort in getting people at VMworld, because they simply see the benefit of people attending this event. For example where else do you have the opportunity to meet up with peers from the IT industry and share knowledge. Or attend sessions led by the experts in their field.

On Monday there was one meeting in my agenda that I was really looking forward to, a meeting with Pat Gelsinger. It was arranged by the NSBU as part of the NSX Partner Summit and it was something special, we could ask him anything we wanted! It was really interesting to listen him talk about all kind of topics and boy he know his stuff, in depth? No problem, High Level? No problem. Eirik Vada perfectly describes it in tweet:

Impressive how much knowledge one guy can have. How many other CIO's brings up VI editor in a round table discussion? 🙂 #vExpert https://t.co/dnLOCTMSIr

— Eirik Vada (@vVadster) September 11, 2017

So now I’ll Fast forward to Tuesday morning and the general session. I’ve been asked to be one of the hosts on a VMworld 2017 EU Day One Crowdchat for VMware EMEA together with Matthew Bunce, Rebecca Fitzhugh and Sam McGeown which was pretty fun to do. You can find it here: #VMworldDayOne

If you missed the keynote you can watch it here: General Sessions – VMworld Europe

As I did in VMworld US, I’ve gathered some of the interesting announcements made on the first day, which you can find below.

VMware Speeds Customer Time to Value for SDDC and Multi-Cloud Management with New vRealize Suite 2017

VMware Unveils New Innovations to Cloud Provider Program

GDPR and Addressing Data Security Gaps with VMware

VMware Offers Communications Service Providers the Fastest Path to OpenStack for Network Functions Virtualization

VMworld 2017 Day Four

September 1, 2017 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

Yay I made it! VMworld 2017 Day Four! While the dust starts to settle at Mandelay Bay and a big chunk of the attendees are slowly returning home, there are still a lot of cool things to do like the Hand on Labs. It will give you the opportunity to play with the newest addition to the VMware family VMware Appdefense.

Today I attended another VMware Design Studio session, this time the topic was “vSphere: Next Generation Lifecycle“. It was a Deep dive into ESXi lifecycle challenges like: VMware Update Manager (VUM), Host Profile, Auto Deploy, HCL, firmware and other co-create solutions. It was an interactive small group session with the VMware User Experience team. The goal is to provide the VMware User Experience team information about your stuggles and issues with your day-2-day work, and to help them understand your needs as a customer, consultant and / or architect. These sessions are also held in Barcelona in 2 weeks, if you would like to attend these sessions look for the link in my other post VMworld 2017 Day Two.

My ITQ colleague Johan van Amersfoort aka “The Bearded VDI Junkie” has created a really cool video blog with some of the highlight of VMworld 2017 US. Enjoy!

Some cool VMworld 2017 US numbers:

11024 Labs Completed

109991 VMs Completed

500+ breakout sessions offered

4,910,976 pixels in the VMware booth LED wall

375 exams completed

200+ sponsors and exhibitors

500+ sessions replays watched at the re-run bar

VMworld 2017 US you were fantastic! Met a lot of new people, met up with old friends, learned a whole lot and walked more than what was good for me! Now I must get ready for VMworld 2017 EU in Barcelona which starts little over a week from now, looking forward to see you all there!

VMworld 2017 Day Three

August 31, 2017August 31, 2017 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

Pfew VMworld 2017 Day Three… The best way to describe VMworld is a triathlon, you easily walk more than 10K+, you try to soak up all the knowledge and finally you party hard at all the available appreciation parties! But it’s all worth it! Meeting up with all the community people from all over the world and sharing knowledge is something really cool. If you haven’t attended VMworld before, it would be definitely something that I would advise you to put on your “To Do” list for 2018.

VMware also announced plans to deprecate vCenter Server for Windows and the Flash based vSphere Web Client with the next major release (not update release) of vSphere. I can’t say that I’m sad to see the Flash based vSphere Web Client go… Mind you that is completely my personal opinion but I don’t think I’m the only one happy with this news 😉 .

Finally, I’ve gathered the announcements made on the third day, which you can find below.

Introducing VMware Skyline

How VMware AppDefense Enhances Security Across Clouds

Harnessing the Benefits of Network Virtualization With VMware NSX

VMware Delivers Industry-First Unified End User Experience, Management and Security Solution for All Endpoint Platforms

VMworld 2017 Day Two

August 30, 2017August 30, 2017 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

While VMworld 2017 Day Two continues at full speed and I’m trying to go to as much of the outstanding sessions as I can. But unfortunately there are only 24hrs in a day. I can’t wait for all the sessions to come online and watch them all!

Somehow it’s always the Tuesdays that is the bussiest day and funny enough also the day with the best parties. I was able to attend the Rubik party at the Marquee Nightclub and it was a good party. My props to the Rubrik party planner.

Another thing what I did today was participating on a VMware Cloud on AWS design session. Which was an awesome thing to do! If you are going to VMworld Barcelona and you didn’t sign up for it yet do it here: Become Design Partner VMware Cloud on AWS. It will give you the opportunity to provide feedback on advanced topics to the VMware Cloud on AWS Design Team.

Finally I’ve gathered some of the announcements made on the second day, which you can find below.

General Sessions Day Two – VMworld US

VMware AppDefense: Transforming Security in Virtualized and Cloud Environments

VMware, Pivotal and Google Cloud Collaborate to Unveil New Kubernetes-based Container Service – Pivotal Container Service (PKS)

Introducing New Digital Workspace Innovations

VMworld 2017 Day One

August 29, 2017August 30, 2017 Marco van Baggum Leave a comment

What a day… The amount of information that has been released on day one of VMworld 2017 is just insane.

I’ve gathered most of the major announcements made on the first day which you can find below! I’ll update the page as more and more information will be released.

General Sessions Day One – VMworld US

Introducing VMware AppDefense – Expanding beyond micro-segmentation to threat detection and response

NSX-T 2.0 is here!

Announcing the VMware Cloud Provider Program (not new, just improved!)

VMware Announces New vCloud Director 9.0

vRealize Network Insight 3.5 enhances SDDC visibility, simplifies VMware NSX deployment and scaling

Simplified Management of VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Operations

Introducing VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0