Hi all,
This blog was my attempt to keep track of all interesting things that happened during my visit to VMworld 2019 in Barcelona. It was my first attempt to create a live blog which I updated multiple times a day so I hope to hear what you think of this format.
Day 0
Day 0 was filled with the flight from Amsterdam to the beautiful city of Barcelona. After bringing the bags to the hotel room we enjoyed the relaxed Catalan way of life with hamburgués, cervezas and tapas! Great way to start the week.
Day 1
As my first session started at 13:00 I took time to have a relaxed breakfast and a stroll to the beach with my coworkers. I think it would be the last time this week to have some relaxing time. After the great walk it’s time to register at VMworld and dive into a great week full of information about VMware and partners.
Operating the Ultimate Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation [HBI1519TE]
The first session I followed was Operating the Ultimate Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation. This session is a 4 hour demo-packed workshop about Cloud Foundation. A true deep dive into the daily operation within the ultimate hybrid cloud.
Partner General Session
As a VMware partner we also got the chance to be updated by the VMware leader on the latest partner programs. Pat Gelsinger started the session with a reminder on his trip up the Kilimanjaro. This trip was only possible thanks to the help and support of their porters. In this time of digital transformations we as partner need to be the porters for our customers. The possibilities in this multi cloud world are immense and customers need our help to advice and prepare the paths to innovate in their business goals. With the new Partner Connect program we will be enabled and supported by VMware to do this by rewarding partners which will dedicate time and energy within the VMware portfolio.
Day 2
Day two is the real start of VMworld. After a short night after a drink with some of the best vCommunity guys the day starts with the General Session. Coffeed up and ready for the day which is packed with sessions till 18:00.
Tuesday General session
Pat starts the session with the reason why VMware is building their portfolio to support our customers. One of the additions on the portfolio is the path to cloud native applications with containers. With the announcement of project Tanzu VMware will offer an enterprise level multi cloud environment with a management layer over different clouds. Thanks to Project Pacific vSphere will be leveling up by adding the possibility to run Kubernetes containers aside with normal virtual machine workloads. With project Galleon VMware enables their Bitnami acquisition with a enterprise App marketplace with increased security and operation possibilities.
The multi cloud is being built with an addition on the different hyper-scale cloud providers. Beside new features on AWS the partnership with Microsoft is expanding as well.
For the on-premise side of the cloud VMware also announced the VMware Cloud on DellEMC portfolio to deliver the cloud possibilities from your down Datacenter with the multi cloud possibilities with the push of a button.
As the Software defined networking has scaled up with NSX-T over the last years up to a non-vmware-only solution it’s still not over. VMware announces their new NSX feature adding software-defined intrusion detection. This will add an extra layer of security to the already zero-trust possibilities.
With the acquisition of Carbon Black VMware will become a key player on endpoint security. It will add agent-less opportunities to protect VM and VDI workloads over the multi cloud.
VMware Inner Circle Luncheon
After the General session that took 20 minutes longer as expected I joined a VMware Inner Circle Luncheon is was invited for. This advocacy program was launched in 2016 to get a voice for the customers and partners to the VMware leadership and I joined directly back than. This led in 2016 for a similar session at VMworld US I intended which almost escalated to a VP slaughter with a lot of critics on the VMware portfolio, development, licensing and support. The way the leaders took the feedback showed they were happy with our honesty. During the last year I kept participating in the program with answering polls and working with the design teams for VMware Skyline. I was curious how the program had evolved in the last years and how the feeling of the group would be. The Luncheon started with a panel Q&A with the VP’s of the most important pillars for customers.
The panel answered a lot of questions on support, quality assurance, cloud strategy and the partner program. Although there were still some questions and suggestions from the group there was way more positive reactions on the changes made the last years. When working with VMware this was already noticeable for me as partner.
Best practices guide for running vCenter on VSAN [HCI1206BE]
Back in the days around 2015 when VSAN 6.0 was released the manual stated no support for running vCenter on the cluster. As VSAN is likely to replace the current primary storage solution this creates a problem for lot of designs. Now in 2019 the support is added but there are a few choices which can be made to insure an optimal design. To be honest the session was full of useful information but I could write a complete blog with all possibility. If interested let me know or check the session recording.
Evening program
After a couple of technical interesting sessions about VMware Cloud Foundation to automate and lifecycle a hybrid datacenter the evening program started. We started with a quick drink at the Veeam Benelux party to mingle with the Veeam guys present at VMworld. As the evening was packed I left for the vExpert party. As a 2 year vExpert it was my first time so was pretty excited. It was great to talk to peer vExperts from all over the world. Even scored a Japan VMUG sticker. It was also pretty cool Pat Gelsinger dropped by and took quite some time to talk al lot of us in person. For the vCommunity it’s really important to notice our presence is really appreciated by the VMware executive level. After that we had the opportunity to network with our local vCommunity on the VMware Benelux party. Although my favorite football team Ajax didn’t win, we had a great time seeing the game and discussing the referees decisions.
Day 3
At Wednesday morning the day starts with a General Session. The session starts with a series of demos the show the possibilities within the VMware platform. It was constructed around the following pillars:
- Build and Run: running containers as 1st class citizens with possibilities for a enterprise App Store provided by Bitnami
- Connect and Protect: VMware NSX Intelligence with project Tanzu to offer software defined connectivity and security for VM and container workloads with machine learning. Also Carbon Black was shown for creating intrusion detection and protection within the SDDC layer.
- Manage: Wavefront delivers insight in microservices created with Tanzu mission control to troubleshoot cloud native app issues. Project Magna delivers an AI based automatic optimization of workloads. Cloud Health makes it possible to manage and reduce cloud costs.
- Experience: Workspace One offers a multi cloud solution to provide desktops from different cloud providers within one dashboard. This is even possible in Azure. Workspace One intelligence uses Carbon Black to provide an automatic remediation against unwanted behavior to secure endpoints.
New CTO Greg Lavender show a couple of emerging technologies. He introduced a recent acquisition of Bitfusion to enable machine learning on VMware platforms by efficiently share GPUs for between remote ML services. Not only it increases utilization but also reduces the cost for local GPUs.
Bear Grylls known from many tv shows enters stage to talk to the VMworld audience.
Bear describes himself as a guy with trouble of being famous and sometimes in doubt about himself. He learned with his first unsuccessful selection with the SAS he learned life is full of failures but it’s how you learn from them. Comfort is only comfort when it’s earned. The story of his life delivers me goosebumps when he is talking about his failed parachute jump.
The only difference between ordinary and extraordinary is only a bit extra.
After this amazing story it’s time to go to the sessions.
Building VMware Private Cloud on NetApp HCI [HBI5806BES]
I will start the day with one of my other technical lovers, NetApp. I’ve seen sessions of Andy Banta, the Storage janitor at NetApp Insight before and it’s always a recommendation. Combining VMware Products like vSphere, NSX and vRealize with the Element OS for the storage layer creates an automated SDDC solution with great scalability. Thanks to the Data fabric strategy by NetApp it als enables Data mobility, efficiency and flexibility within the NetApp portfolio. With great demos the power of NetApp HCI is shown in addition to the VMware features.
Backups are just the start. Enhanced data mobility with Veeam [HBI3537BES]
Wow, again a technology lover on stage. As I stated in my previous blog I only have a short relationship with Veeam but it really grew fast. During the presentation Michael Cade shows the main features Veeam had for years and the ones introduced in the last year. Too be honest I looked more forward to the v10 preview and luckily that is part of the presentation too. One of the highlight is the Demo done by Niels Engelen on the capacity tier of the Scale out Backup repository. For AWS S3 the data can also be secured against ransomware and deletion with an immutability feature. Expectation is that this will be added soon for Azure blob and on-prem S3 solutions.
The Virtually Speaking Podcast live: Future of IT
This was a session I was really looking forward to this VMworld. For a little over 1 year I listen the Virtual Speaking podcast in the car. It gives a lot of insight in the various topics around VMware. I heard the podcast which was recorded in San Francisco a few weeks ago which was about the shifting of job with in the changing IT landscape. The subject matter experts on stage discussed what they see changing and answering questions from the audience. When I noticed the session on the schedule I knew I had to attend. During this session Pete Flecha and John Nicholson hosted a discussion on the future of IT. With the SME panel formed by Duncan Epping. Frank Denneman, William Lam and Ken Werneburg, the topic was in good hands. I was really baffled when I saw Pete do the intro and ending by heart. I really thought it was a recording. The key take away from the session was that the IT landscape changes and this means IT people should too. As technology becomes more complex as the business cases are evolving, the technical implementation of the solutions will become easier with automation and appliances. This means the role for most IT guys will shift mostly from technical to functional. From specialist to generalist as all solutions will be combination of fields. Does this mean specialists aren’t necessary? No of course they will stay necessary as there is no one size fits all solution in IT nor will everything run perfectly over time.
Day 4
NSX-T design for VVD and VCF [CNET1908BE]
Today this session was pretty interesting. It was good seeing how the VMware Validating Designs and Cloud Foundation have evolved over the last years. For the ones not knowing the difference between VVD and VCF the following slide shows the difference.
The analogy with a 1000 piece puzzle comes close. With creating a BOM you need to get the right pieces from all sources. With VVD the pieces are pre-packed but it’s still a lot of work to fulfill the puzzle. With VCF the creation, updating and life-cycling of the puzzle is automated.
Unfortunately the last day I didn’t had a good choice in sessions. Although there was lots of cool technology it wasn’t really exciting enough for this blog.
Wrapping up
After 4 days of information gathering, discussions with peers and 1 or 2 beers VMworld 2019 is over. It has been an experience as always and I look back to an amazing week. The shift in IT is in full motion to accommodate the need for a Multi cloud strategy. With the change of workloads from VMs to VMs, Containers, Functions and what ever will follow, the infrastructure needed is changing. As the IT landscapes at our customers will shift in different speeds there will stay a need for a “legacy” infrastructure but we should avoid creating new silos for the new world. With projects like Project Pacific a path is created to combine new and current workloads within the same infrastructure to keep using all solutions to maintain and life cycle the IT landscape. As the cloud native world is rising fast the complete shift will probably take at least 5 years as the software developers will need to change their business too. It takes time for the current applications to fade out as the new application will fade in. At least is sure that the world in which we deliver the role will stay exciting. Let wrap it up with a quote from Pat Gelsinger.
Today is the fastest day of tech evolution of your life. It’s the slowest day of tech evolution of the rest of your life
Pat Gelsinger
Enough of this jibber jabber. Thanks for reading and till next time!
Dive Virtual 
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