VMworld 2018 post-summary
Wow, so there was a ton of activity that happened last week. VMworld 2018 US edition has now passed and was amazing. This particular one was pretty sweet for me as this marked a number of firsts for me. While I’ve been before, this is the first time I’ve played a role other than just visiting sessions and HOL’s. While that was enjoyable and a great learning experience, being able to experience the setup, breakdown and behind the scenes of what goes on for a company’s booth, was completely eye-opening. The sheer amount of work involved was completely exhausting. Not to mention the work continued after hours as well. There were parties, customer dinners, and planning sessions non-stop. I can’t even begin to say how much I enjoyed working with the Rubrik marketing team and also being able to socialize with all the great community that is always there at these events. But what actually went on? I will describe some of the activities I was able to be part of, but also some of the highlights that happened.
Saturday – I arrived mid-morning and was able to get to my hotel, through check-in, and back to the expo around 10:30-11am. This is where some of the work began for our team. I helped setup the servers and environment for the booth that would be used for demos. Other members of our team were already there and working hard before I even got there. The expo floor looks really weird at this point as there is not much put together and just lots of equipment and building blocks lying around. While the construction crew worked on the booth itself, we continued working on the demo environment until about 6ish (with the 2hr time change for me, ended up being a long day having started around 5am CST). We were well taken care of as most nights we had dinners already planned for us.
Sunday – We continued working on finishing the demo environment and worked on setting up the demo stations. The construction on the booth was nearing completion and things were really starting to take shape. As a side note, the team that worked on our booth did really considering I think our booth was one of the best-looking and ambitious ones there – no bias of course . Everything was ready to go when the expo floor opened up at 5pm for the Welcome Reception. The welcome reception went well and I was able to mill around a bit finding friends I haven’t seen for a while. After dinner I pretty much passed out.
Monday – This was another great day, lots of check in’s through the day back at the booth and seeing great friends and getting ready for that night. I had my first ever booth presentation at the Pure booth as well. Been a while since I’ve spoke in front of strangers in this capacity so it was a bit unnerving. In full disclosure, even when I was an Instructor at Dell, I still was a bundle of nerves. Always been a bit of an introvert but constantly working on trying to change that. What made it even more exciting was that I was allowed to raffle a couple of VIP passes to bypass the line getting into our party later that night. The presentation went well and was able to present Rubrik’s tech and how we integrate with Pure to about 50 attendees.
Moving on from there we had the big party that night. Run DMC and The Roots were the main attraction. Even the DJ music leading up to it was good. Everyone had a lot of fun and we ended up with about 1500+ attendees for the party. There were large lines waiting to get in so the employee bands came in handy.
Tuesday – Recovering from the night before was a little difficult but was able to get up and checked on demo machines to make sure everything was running smooth for the demos. Then I went to see more people I haven’t seen in forever. Evening was taken up with team meetings and other fun stuff.
Wednesday – Brought an end to the solutions expo. That meant we could start packing everything up. Which we did. We ended up needing to run over some to the next day, but we were able to get the majority of equipment turned off and organized for packing. Later that night I went to what started as a LAN party but ended up as a Cards Against Humanity. There may have been a few incidents that involved security being called .
Thursday – We finished up and then I was able to grab a flight out at 1.50pm and made it home around 9pm-ish. Ended up inside for the weekend as I caught some sort of flu or cold bug (yay planes and conferences) and still trying to get over it as I’m writing this. Some of the things I enjoyed as far as announcements:
Announcements:
20TH Anniversary for VMware!
Tattoos on Pat G./Sanjay P./Yanbing Li. – Though the permanence of some of them is questioned
vSphere 6.7 Update 1 – This is bringing a bunch of updates most notable Full Featured HTML5 client and vMotion and snapshot capabilities for vGPUs.
vSphere Platinum Edition – This new licensing includes AppDefense
New versions of vRealize Operations (7.0) and Automation (7.5)
Amazon RDS on vSphere – Relational DBs on VMware AWS. This will allow companies to run RDS and not have to worry about the management of it. Management can be done through a single, simple interface. You can also use it to create a hybrid setup between on-site and cloud enabling all sorts of use cases. SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB will all be supported.
Amazon AWS expansion to Asia Pacific Region and Sydney – This marks that VMware’s presence extends to all major geographies.
Lower price of Entry for VMC on AWS – 3 Host min, license optimization for MS/Oracle apps. There is also a single host SDDC to test with and play around with. (This was intro’d a bit before VMworld.) You can specify host affinity for VMs and number of cores that an application requires.
VSAN on EBS – Scale from 15-35TB per host in increments of 5TB.
Accelerated live migration – VMware HCX now allows you to migrate just about any VM from on-premises to VMC
Project Dimension – Combines VMware Cloud Foundation (in HCI) with a Cloud Control Plane. So far this is looking like something like Azure Dev Stack, where VMware will take care of the hardware and software patching for the SDDC and the customer worries about apps at the customer site.
ESXi on 64-Bit ARM – details are still light.
These are not every single one of the announcements but the ones I most relate to.
My info was sourced from the following places and …. Being there.