Vegas

VMworld 2017 US – VMware Strategy & My Thoughts

Chan 2 Comments

This is a quick post to summerise all the key announcements from VMworld 2017 US event and share my thoughts and insights of the strategy and the direction of VMware, the way I see it.

Key Announcements

A number of announcements were made during the week on products and solutions and below is a high level list of those to recap.

  • Announced the launch of the VMware Cloud Services which consists of 2 main components
    • VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC)
      • Consist of VMware vSphere + vSAN + NSX
      • Running on AWS data centers (bare metal)
      • A complete Public Cloud platform consisting of VMware Software Defined Data Center components
      • Available as a
    • A complete Hybrid-Cloud infrastructure security, management & monitoring & Automation solution made available through a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform
      • Work natively with VMware Cloud on AWS
      • Also work with legacy, on-premises VMware data center
      • Also work with native AWS, Azure and Google public cloud platforms
  • Next generation of network virtualisation solution based NSX-T (aka NSX Multi hypervisor)
    • Version 2.0 announced
    • Supports vSphere & KVM
    • Likely going to be strategically more important to VMware than the NSX-v (vSphere specific NSX that is commongly used today by vSphere customers). Think What ESXi was for VMware when ESX was still around, during early days!

 

 

  • Next version of vRealize Network Insight (version 3.5) released
    • Various cloud platform integrations
    • Additional on-premises 3rd party integrations (Check Point FW, HP OneView, Brocade MLX)
    • Support for additional NSX component integration (IPFIX, Edge dashboard, NSX-v DFW PCI dashboard)

 

  • VMware AppDefense
    • A brand new application security solution that is available via VMware Cloud Services subscription

 

  • VMware Pivotal Container Services (PKS) as a joint collaboration between VMware, Pivotal & Google (Kubernetes)
    • Kubernetes support across the full VMware stack including NSX & vSAN
    • Support for Sever-Less solution capabilities using Functions as a Service (Similar to AWS Lambda or Azure Functions)
    • Enabling persistent storage for stateful applications via the vSphere Cloud Provider, which provides access to vSphere storage powered by vSAN or traditional SAN and NAS storage,
    • Automation and governance via vRealize Automation and provisioning of service provider clouds with vCloud Director,
    • Monitoring and troubleshooting of virtual infrastructure via VMware vRealize Operations
    • Metrics monitoring of containerized applications via Wavefront.

 

  • Workspace One enhancements and updates
    • Single UEM platform for Windows, MacOS, Chrome OS, IOS and Android
    • Integration with unique 3rd party endpoint platform API’s
    • Offer cloud based peer-to-peer SW distribution to deploy large apps at scale
    • Support for managing Chrome devices
    • Provides customers the ability to enforce & manage O365 security policies and DLP alongside all of their applications and devices
    • Workspace One intelligence to provide Insights and automation to enhance user experience (GA Q4 FY18)
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0 announced
    • OpenStack Ocata integration
    • Additional features include
      • Containerized apps alongside traditional apps in production on OpenStack
      • vRealize Automation integration to enable OpenStack users to use vRealize Automation-based policies and to consume OpenStack components within vRealize Automation blueprints
      • Increased scale and isolation for OpenStack clouds enabled through new multi-VMware vCenter support
    • New pricing & Packaging tier (not free anymore)
  • VMware Skyline
    • A new proactive support offering aligned to global support services
    • Available to Premier support customers (North America initially)
    • Requires an appliance deployment on premise
    • Quicker time to incident resolution

Cross Cloud Architecture Strategy & My Thoughts

VMware announced the Cross Cloud Architecture (CCA) back in VMworld 2016 where they set the vision for VMware to provide the capability to customers to run & manage any application, on any cloud using any device. This was ambitious and was seen as the first step towards VMware recognising that running vSphere on premise should no longer be VMware’s main focus and they want to provide customers with choice.

This choice of platform options were to be,

  • Continue to run vSphere on premise if that is what you want to do
  • OR, let customers run the same vSphere based SDDC stack on the cloud which can be spun up in minutes in a fully automated way (IaaS)
  • OR, run the same workload that used to run on a VMware SDDC platform on a native public cloud platform such as AWS or Azure or Google cloud or IBM Cloud

During that VMworld, VMware also demoed the capability of NSX to bridge all these various private and public cloud platforms through the clever use of NSX to extend networks across all of those platforms. Well, VMworld 2017 has shown additional steps VMware have taken to make this cross cloud architecture even more of a reality. VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) now lets you spin up a complete VMware based Software Defined Data Center running vSphere on vSAN connected by NSX through a simple web page, much similar to how Azure and AWS native infrastructure platforms allows you to provision VM based infrastructure on demand. Based on some initial articles, this could even be cheaper than running vSphere on-premise which is great news for customers. In addition to this price advantage, when you factor in the rest of Total Cost of Ownership factors such as maintaining on premise skill to set up and manage the infrastructure platforms that are no longer needed, the VMC platform is likely going to be extremely interesting to most customers. And most importantly, most customers will NOT need to go through costly re-architecting of their monolithic application estate to fit a native cloud IaaS platform which simplifies cloud migration of their monolithic application stack. And if that is not enough, you also can carry on managing & securing that workload using the same VMware management and security toolset, even on the cloud too.

When you then consider the announcement of VMware Cloud Services (VCS) offering as a SaaS solution, it now enables integrating a complete VMware hybrid cloud management toolset in to various platforms and workloads, irrespective of where they reside. VCS enables the discovery, monitoring, management and securing of those workloads across different platforms, all through a single pane of glass which is a pretty powerful message that no other public cloud provider can claim to provide in such a heterogeneous manner. This holistic management and security platform allows customers to provision, manage and secure any workload (Monolithic or Microservices based) on any platform (vSphere on premise, VMC on AWS, native AWS, native Azure, Native Google cloud) to be accessed on any device (workstation, laptop, Pad or a mobile). That to me is a true Cross Cloud vision becoming a reality and my guess is once the platform matures and capabilities increase, this is going to be very popular amongst almost all customers.

In addition to this CCA capabilities, VMware obviously appear to be shifting their focus from the infrastructure layer (read “virtual machine”) to the actual application layer, focusing more on enabling application transformation and application security which is great to see. As many have already, VMware too are embracing the concept of containers, not only as a better application architecture but also as the best way to decouple the application from the underlying infrastructure and using containers as a shipping mechanism to enable moving applications across to public cloud (& back). The announcement of various integrations within their infrastructure stack to Docker ecosystem such as Kubernetes testifies to this and would likely be welcomed by customers. I’d expect such integration to continue to improve across all of VMware’s SDDC infrastructure stack. With VMware solutions, you can now deploy container based applications on on-premise vSphere using VIC or Photon or even VMC or a native public cloud platform, store them on vSAN with volume plugins on premise or on cloud, extend the network to the container instance via NSX (on premise or on cloud), extend visibility in to container instance via vRNI and vROPS (on premise or cloud) and also automate provisioning or most importantly, migration of these container apps across on-premise or public cloud platforms as you see fit.

NSX cloud for example will let you extend all the unique capabilities of software defined networking such as micro-segmentation, security groups and overlay network extensions to not just within private data centers but also to native public cloud platforms such as AWS & Azure (roadmap) which enriches the capabilities of a public cloud platform and increases the security available within the network.

My Thoughts

All in all, it was a great VMworld where VMware have genuinely showcased their Hybrid Cloud and Cross Cloud Architecture strategy. As a technologist that have been working with VMware for a while, it was pretty obvious that a software centric organisation like VMware, similar to the likes of Microsoft was always gonna embrace changes, especially changes driven by software such as the public cloud. However most people, especially sales people in the industry I work in as well as some of the customers were starting to worry about the future of VMware and their relevance in the increasingly Cloudy world ahead. This VMworld has showcased to all of those how VMware has got a very good working strategy to embrace that software defined cloud adoption and empower customers by giving them the choice to do the same, without any tie in to a specific cloud platform. The soaring, all time high VMware share price is a testament that analysts and industry experts agree with this too.

If I was a customer, I would want nothing more!

Keen to get your thoughts, please submit via comments below

Other Minor VMworld 2017 (Vegas) Announcements

  • New VMware & HPe partnership for DaaS
    • Include Workspace ONE to HPe DaaS
    • Include Unified Endpoint Management through Airwatch
  • Dell EMC to offer data protection to VMC (VMware Cloud on AWS)
    • Include Data Domain & Data protection app suite
    • Self-service capability
  • VCF related announcements
    • CenturyLink, Fujitsu & Rackspace to offer VCF + Services
    • New HCI and CI platforms (VxRack SDDC, HDS UCP-RS, Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX, QCT QxStack
    • New VCF HW partners
      • Cisco
      • HDS
      • Fujitsu
      • Lenovo
  • vCloud Director v9 announced
    • GA Q3 FY18
  • New vSphere scale-out edition
    • Aimed at Big data and HPC workloads
    • Attractive price point
    • Big data specific features and resource optimisation within vSphere
    • Includes vDS
  • VMware Validated Design (VVD) 4.1 released
    • Include a new optional consolidated DC architecture for small deployments
  • New VMware and Fujitsu partnerships
    • Fujitsu Cloud Services to delivery VMware Cloud Services
  • DXC Technology partnership
    • Managed Cloud service with VMC
    • Workload portability between VMC, DXC DCs and customer’s own DCs
  • Re-announced VMware Pulse IoT Center  with further integration to VMware solutions stack to manage IoT components

 

Cheers

Chan

Heading to VMworld 2017 in Vegas

Chan Leave a comment

For the 2nd year running, I’ve been extremely lucky to be able to attend the VMware’s premier technology roadshow, VMworld in the city that never sleeps. This is my 6th consecutive VMworld where I’ve attended the 2012-2015 events at Barcelona and the 2016 event in Vegas. Similar to the last year, I’ve been extremely lucky to be selected and be invited by VMware as an official VMworld blogger due to my vExpert status to attend the event free of charge. (Also well done to my fellow Insight teammate & vExpert Kyle Jenner for being picked to attend VMworld 2017 Europe as an official blogger too). Obviously we are both very lucky to have an employer who value our attendance at such industry events and is happy to foot the bill for other expenses such as logistics which is also appreciated. So thanks VMware & Insight UK.

I attended the VMworld 2016 also in Vegas and to be honest, that was probably not the best event to attend that year in hindsight as all the new announcements were reserved for the European edition a month after. However this year, the word on the street is that VMworld US will carry majority of the new announcements so I am very excited to find out about them before anyone else.!

VMworld 2017 Itineraries

Most people attending VMworld or any similar tech conference overseas would typically travel few days earlier or stay behind few days after the event to explore things around. Unfortunately for me and my in-explicable dedication to playing league cricket between April-September, I am only able to travel out on Sunday the 27th after the game on Saturday. Similarly I have to get back immediately after the event in time for the following Saturday’s game. Silly you might think! I’d tend to agree too.

  • Travel out: Sunday the 27th of August from Manchester to Las Vegas (Thomas Cook – direct flight)
  • Accommodation: Delano Las Vegas (next door to event venue which is Mandalay Bay Hotel)
  • Travel back: Thursday the 31st of August from Las Vegas to Manchester (Thomas Cook – direct flight)

 

Session planning

one of the most important thing one planning on attending VMworld should do (if you wanna genuinely learn something at the event that is), to plan your break out sessions that you want to attend in advance using the schedule builder. This year, I was very luck to be able to get this booked in almost as soon as the schedule builder went live. However even then, some of the popular sessions were fully booked which shows how popular this event is.

Given below is a list of my planned sessions

  • Sunday the 27th of August
    • 4-4:30pm – How to Use CloudFormations in vRealize Automation to Build Hybrid Applications That Span and Reside On-Premises & on VMware Cloud on AWS and AWS Cloud [MMC1464QU]

 

  • Monday the 28th of August
    • 9am-10:30am – General session (you can find me at the specialist blogger seats right at the front of the hall)
    • 12:30-1:30pm – Accelerate the Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS [LHC3159SU]
    • 2:30-3:30pm – Addressing your General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Challenges with Security and Compliance Automation Based on VMware Cloud Foundation [GRC3386BUS]
    • 3:30-4:30pm – Big Data for the 99% (of Enterprises) [FUT2634PU]
    • 5:30-6:30pm – VMC Hybrid Cloud Architectural Deep Dive: Networking and Storage Best Practices [LHC3375BUS]

 

  • Tuesday the 29th of August
    • 9am-10:30am – General session (you can find me at the specialist blogger seats right at the front of the hall)
    • 1-2pm – A Two-Day VMware vRealize Operations Manager Customer Success Workshop in 60 Minutes [MGT2768GU]
    • 2-3pm – AWS Native Services Integration with VMware Cloud on AWS: Technical Deep Dive [LHC3376BUS]
    • 3-6:30pm – VMware NSX Community Leaders (vExperts) Summit at Luxor hotel
    • 7-10pm – vExpert Reception – VMworld U.S. 2017 at Pinball Hall of Fame
    • 10pm-12am – Rubrik VMworld Party (Featuring none other than Ice Cube) at Marquee @ Cosmopolitan

 

  • Wednesday the 30th of August
    • 10-11am – Automating vSAN Deployments at Any Scale [STO1119GU]
    • 11-12am – Creating Your VMware Cloud on AWS Data Center: VMware Cloud on AWS Fundamentals [LHC1547BU]
    • 12:30-1:30pm – 3 Ways to Use VMware’s New Cloud Services for Operations to Efficiently Run Workloads Across AWS, Azure and vSphere: VMware and Customer Technical Session [MMC3074BU]
    • 3:30-4:30pm – Intriguing Integrations with VMware Cloud on AWS, EC2, S3, Lambda, and More [LHC2281BU]
    • 7-10pm – VMworld Customer Appreciation Party

 

  • Thursday the 31st of August
    • 10:30-11:30am – NSX and VMware Cloud on AWS: Deep Dive [LHC2103BU]

 

I have left some time in between sessions for blogging activities, various meetings, networking sessions and hall crawl which are also equally important as attending breakout sessions (If anything those are more important as the breakout session content will always be available online afterwards)

Thoughts & Predictions

VMworld is always a good event to attend and going by past experience, its a great event for finding out about new VMware initiatives and announcements as well as all the related partner ecosystem solutions, from the established big boys as well as relatively new or up and coming start-up’s that work with VMware technologies to offer new ways to solve todays business problems. I don’t see this year’s event being any different and my guess would be a lot of focus would be given to VMware’s Cross cloud architecture (announced last year) and everything related to that this year. Such things could include the availability of VMware Cloud on AWS and potentially some NSX related announcements that can facilitate this cross cloud architecture for the customers. We will have to wait and see obviously.

I will be aiming to get a daily summary blog out summarising key announcements from the day and any new or exciting solutions I come across. You can follow me on Twitter also for some live commentary throughout the day.

If you are a VMware customer or a partner, I would highly encourage you to attend VMworld at least once. It is a great event for learning new things, but also most importantly, its a great place to meet and gain access to back end VMware engineering staff that average people never get to see or interact with. This is very valuable if you are a techie. Also if you are a business person, you can network with key VMware executives and product managers to understand the future strategy of their product lines and also, collectively that of VMware.

 

VMworld 2016 US – Key Announcements From Day 2

Chan Leave a comment

A quick summary of this morning’s key note speech at VMworld 2’016 US and few annoucements.

Opening Keynote Speech

The morning keynote speech was hosted by Sunjay Poonan (@Spoonan), who heads up the EUC BU within VMware. Sunjay’s speech was pretty much in line with the general VMware focus areas, mentioned yesterdays key note by Pat Gelsinger which is a complete solution that enable customers of todays enterprises & corporates the ability to use any device, any app & any cloud platform as they see fit without having to worry about workload mobility, cross platform management and monitoring.

While yesterdays session was more focused on the server side of things, Sunjay’s message today was focused on the End User Computing side of things, predictably to a bigger degree. The initial messaging was around the VMware Workspace One suite.

Workspace One suite with VMware identity manager appears to be focusing more and more on the following 3 key areas which are key to todays enterprise IT.

  • Apps and identity
  • Desktop & Mobile
  • Management & Security

Workspace one integration with mobile devices to push out corporate apps on mobile devices similar to Apple app store like interface was demoed which emphasize the slick capabilities of the solution which really appears to be ready for primetime now. He also demoed the conditional access capabilities wihtin the Horizon Workspace suite that prevents data sharing between managed and unmanaged apps. The conditional access can also be extended out to NSX to utilise micro segmentation hand in hand to provide even tighter security which is quite handy.

Stephanie Buscemi – EVP of Salesforce came on stage to talk about how they use VMware Wotrkspace suite to empower their sales people to work on the go which was pretty cool I thought, though there was a little marketing undertone to the whole pitch.

  • My take: Personally I dont cover EUC offerings that much myself though I have a good awareness of their Digital Workspace strategy and have also had hands on design and experience with the Horizon View from back in the days. However I can see the EUC offering from VMware getting better and better every day over the last 5 odd years and dare I say, right now, its one of the best solutions out there for most customers if not the best, given its feature set and the integration to other VMware and non VMware compoenents in the back end data center and Cloud. If you are looking at any EUC solutions, this should be on top of your list to investigate / evaluate.

Endpoint Security

VMware TrustPoint powered by Tanium was showcased and its integration with AirWatch to provide a mobile device management solution togewther with a comprehensive security solution that can track devices and their activities real time (no database-full of old device activity info) and apply security controls real time too. This looked a very attractive proposition given the security concerns of the todays enterprise and I can see where this would add value, provided that the costs stack up.

Free VMware Fusion and Workstation license annouicement

VMware also annouced today thye availability of VMware Fusion and Workstation free liceses to all VMworld attendees through the VMworld 2016 app (already claimed mine) – pretty cool huh?

Cloud Native Applications

Kit Colbert, Cloud Native CTO at VMware spoke about the challenges of using the containerised apps in the enterprise environments which currently lacks a comprehensive management solution. Having been looking at containerisation myself and its practical use for majority of ordinary customers, I can relate to that too myself, especially when you compare managing applications based on containers like Docker to legacy appications that run on a dedicated OSE (Windows, Linux…etc) which can be managed, tracked and monitored with session & data persistence that is lacking in a container instance to a level withouth 3rd party components.

Today, couple of new additional features have been annouced on VIC as folows (If you are new to VIC, refer to my intro blog post here)

  • New: Container registry
  • New: Container management portal

1

vSphere Integrated Containers beta programme is also now available if you want to have a look at http://learn.vmware.com/vicbeta

 

VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO)

Also, VIO 3.0 was oifficially annouced today by Kit. I was privy to this information beforehand due to a vExpert only briefing for the same but was not able to disclose anything due to embargo until now.

VIO is a VMware customised distro of OpenStack and the below slide should give you an intro for those of you who aren’t familer with VIO all that well.

VIO1

Running native OpenStack is a bit of a nightmare as it requires lots of skills and resources which restricts its proper production use to large scale organisations with plenty of technical expertise and resources. Based on my experience, lots of customers that I know who’ve initially started out with ambitious (vanila) OpenStack projects have decided to abandon half way through due to complexity…etc. to switch back to vSphere. VIO attempts to solve this somewhat to help customers run OpenStack with a VMware flavour to make things easier for mass customer adoptoin.

The annoucements for VIO was the release of the VIO 3.0 which has the following key features / improvements

  • Mitaka Based
    • VIO 3.0 distribution is now based on the latest OpenStack release (Mitaka)
    • Leverage the latest features and enhancement of the Mitaka Release
      • Improved day-to-day experience for cloud admins and administrators.
      • Simplified configuration for Nova compute service.
      • Streamlined Keystone identity service is now a one-step process for setting up the identity management features of a cloud network.
      • Keystone now supports multi-backend allowing local authentication and AD accounts simultaneously.
      • Heat’s convergence engine optimized to handle larger loads and more complex actions for horizontal scaling for improved performance for stateless mode.
      • Enhanced OpenStack Client provides a consistent set of calls for creating resources no longer requiring the need to learn the intricacies of each service API.
      • Support for software development kits (SDKs) in various languages.
        –New “give me a network,” feature capable of creating a network, attaching a server to it, assigning an IP to that server, and making the network accessible, in a single action
  • Compact VIO control pane
    • VIO management control plane has been optimized and architected to run in a compact architecture   VIO
      • Reduces infrastructure and costs required to run an OpenStack Cloud
      • Ideal for multiple small deployments
      • Attractive in relaxed SLA scenarios
      • Database backed up in real time: No data loss
    • Slimmer HA architecture
      • VIO0
      • educed footprint on management cluster
      • Full HA: No service downtime
      • Database replication: No data loss
      • 6000+ VMs
      • 200+ Hypervisors
  • Import existing vSphere workloads
    • Existing vSphere VMs can be imported and managed via VIO OpenStack APIs
      • Quickly import vSphere VMs into VIO
      • Start managing vSphere VMs through standard OpenStack APIs
    • Quickly start consuming existing VMs through OpenStack

 

Nike CTO who’s a VIo customer came on stage to discuss how Nike deployed a large greenfield OpenStack deployment using VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) and an EUC solution at all Nike outlets / shops using Airwatch which was a good testement for customer confidence though it did have a little markletting undertone to it all.

 

NSX

the head of the NSX business unit within VMware highlighted the key advancements NSX have made and the 400% YoY growth of adoption from fee paying customers deploying NSX to benefit from Micro segmentation (through the distributed firewall capability) and automation and orchestration. NSX roadmap extends far beyond what you can imagine as its current usecases and its sufficient to say that NSX will play a being part as an enabler for customers to freely move their workloads from onbe place (i.e. On premise) to a Public cloud (i.e. AWS) through the dynamic extension of L2 adjacency and other LAN services, transforming the WAN in to an extended LAN.

To this effect, VMware also announced the availability of a free NSX Pre-Assessment which is now intended to enable customers to employ the Assess -> Plan -> Enforce -> Monitor approcah to NSX adoption.

 

VSAN

Yanbing Li, whos the VSAN business unit head came on stage and discussed the hugh demand from customers in VSAN which currently stands over 5000 fee paying customers using VSAN in production as the preferred storage for vSphere. The following roadmap items were also mentioned for VSAN

  • VSAN is the default supported storage platform for VIO and Photon.
  • Intelligent performance analytics & policies in VSAN for proactive management
  • Fully integreated software defined encryption for VSAN

There are couple of other new features coming out soon which I am fully aware of but were not annouced during VMworld 2016 US so im guressing they’ll be annouced during the Barcelona event? (I cannot disclose until then of course :-))

All in all, not a large number of new product or feature accouncements on day 2. But the key message is NSX & VSAN are key focius areads (we already knew this) and VIC & VIO will continue to be improved which is good to see.

 

Slide credit goes to VMware

 

Cheers

Chan

 

 

Heading to #VMworld 2016 Vegas

Chan Leave a comment

Capture 309728B09D1231310A4501F778AC28B1

I am a regular attendee of the VMware VMworld and have continuously attended each of the last 4 years VMworld events in Europe, as an ordinary attendee like most others, mainly thanks to my employer who understands the importance of such events. This year however, there’s a little change of plans. I’ve been lucky enough to receive a free blogger pass to attend the VMworld 2016 event in the US from VMware. VMworld 2016 US event is being held in Vegas, in the Mandalay Bay hotel and conference center which is pretty awesome…!

I’ve never been to Vegas so little excited to be heading over there but to be really honest, I’m more excited about being able to attend the US version of VMworld. Having done European VMworld event over the last few years, they’ve all been great but the contents & the new product announcements have been by and large the same as in the US version which usually takes place before European event (So most of the news / updates / announcements you here in VMworld Europe are already somewhat public knowledge). However this time around, I will be one of the first to hear about them as they are being announced which is great.

And its the first time I’ve been selected to receive a blogger pass by VMware. Blogger passes are issued to a handful of current VMware vExperts (only 50 issued in total for the US event) so I was very lucky there. Its usually given to active community bloggers who take the time out to evangelise technology and happy to blog about it for the good of the community. I do this anyway whenever I attend VMworld where I summarize each of my day there and mention any exciting topics / updates / vendors I’ve come across or things I’ve learned. So I’d expect to do the same this year too and aiming to get a summary blog post out at the end of each day to cover the news & the activities of the day.

While the blogger pass covered the cost of the event, VMware doesn’t cover the other expenses such as flights and hotels… Thankfully, my employer, Insight has stepped up there which was great.

Given below is a summary of my plan during the event. It would be good to meet my fellow vExperts / customers / techies / community members while I’m there, perhaps over few beers. Please do come say hi if you see me or hit me up on twitter (@s_chan_ek)…etc.

Itineraries

Most people will typically travel either few days earlier or stay behind few days after the event to explore the city..etc but unfortunately due to cricket commitments where I play league cricket on every Saturday, I’m reduced to being there for the exact event duration only. As such, my itineraries are as follows

  • Travelling out: Sunday the 28th of August: Travel from London Heathrow via Chicago to Vegas (United Airlines)
  • Accommodation: I will be staying in the MGM Grand hotel which is a little walk away from the event location (Mandalay Bay Hotel & Conference Center)
  • Travelling back: Friday the 2nd of Sept, from Vegas via Montréal back to London Heathrow (Air Canada)

 

Planned sessions

Anyone travelling to VMworld are advised to use the Schedule Builder beforehand and schedule any breakout sessions you want to attend. I’ve always done this in the past and have tried the same this year. However, despite attempting to book many interesting breakout sessions and workshops on the same day the Schedule builder went live, most of the really good ones were already full. So I’m guessing the demand for the event in the US is far higher than the one in Europe and I’m expecting to see lot more crowd that at the European VMworld.

The sessions I’ve managed to book to attend are as follows. Some of them are new subjects while most others are more of a refresher from previous knowledge for me. Having learnt from the previous VMworlds, I’ve been careful not to book session after session and allow enough time for blogging in between as well as hall crawl and networking with people which, arguably are far more important that attending breakout sessions or workshops which lot of people, especially newbies don’t realise.

  • Monday the 29th of August – I have the following sessions I’ve scheduled so far. Some may change depending on when I managed to get in to some other sessions I’ve had to wait list for.
    • 11am-12pm: Software-Defined Networking in VMware Validated Designs [SDDC7587]
    • 1pm-2pm: Virtualize, Secure, and Extend Your Data Center to the Cloud Using NSX: A Perspective for Service Providers and End Users [HBC7830]
    • 2pm-3pm: Introducing Virtual SAN for VMware Photon: The Best HCI Platform for Containers and Cloud-Native Applications [STO8256]
    • 3pm-4:30pm: VMware NSX Distributed Firewall with Micro-Segmentation Workshop [ELW-1703-USE-2]

 

  • Tuesday the 30th of August
    • 11am-12pm: Understanding the Availability Features of Virtual SAN [STO8179]
    • 12pm-1:30pm: vSphere Integrated Containers Workshop [ELW-1730-USE-1] – Wait Listed
    • 2pm-3pm: How to Deploy VMware NSX with Cisco Infrastructure [NET8364]
    • 4pm-5pm: Containers for the vSphere Admin [CNA7522]
    • 5pm-6pm: The Architectural Future of Network Virtualization [NET8193R]

 

  • Wednesday the 31st of August
    • 9:30am-11am: Realize Automation 7 Basics Workshop [ELW-1721-USE-1] – Wait listed
    • 11am-12pm: How to Use Machine Learning to Increase Application Availability [INF9608-SPO]
    • 1pm-2pm: PowerNSX and PyNSXv: Using PowerShell and Python for Automation and Management of VMware NSX for vSphere [NET7514]
    • 2pm-3pm: Implementing Self-Service Storage Provisioning with vRealize Automation XaaS [SDDC9456-SPO]
    • 3:30pm-4:30pm: Building Cloud Native Architectures [CNA9926]

 

  • Thursday the 1st of September
    • 12pm-1pm: VMware Certificate Management for Mere Mortals [INF8631]
    • 1:30pm-2:30pm: Winter Is Coming. Are You Dev/Ops Ready? Instant Clone Is! [INF8396]

 

Other events

Usually there are many other vendor and vExpert events that also take place, out of hours to discuss products as well as networking with people. There is a list of such activities published here and outside of the normal VMworld welcome reception and the VMworld party, I will probably attend the below (I may have to cancel some last min due to exhaustion & last min change of plans…etc :-))

  • Sunday the 28th of August 7:30-9:30pm: 2016 VMUG member party @ House of Blues – Mandalay Bay, 3950 S Las Vegas Boulevard
  • Monday the 29th of August 9pm-11pm: Trace3 Annual VMWorld After Party @ Daylight Beach Club, Mandalay Bay, 3950 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89119
  • Tuesday the 30th of August 7pm -10pm: vExpert 2016 Las Vegas reception @ The Mob Museum, 300 Stewart Avenue, Las Vegas, NV 89101

 

About VMworld Event

As mentioned earlier, I’ve attended VMworld Europe edition over the last 4 years and it has been such a good event to attend given the amount of knowledge, insides, tips you can gather, seeing the variety of the VMware echo system partners out there and their solutions and most importantly meeting and being able to network with people that you’d otherwise never get the opportunity to (like product managers and engineers). And usually its such a well organised event and having attended other similar events such as NetApp Insight, Cisco Live and HPe TSS & Ambassador events, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that none of them has been as good, well organised, well attended or useful to me as an attendee as VMworld, period….! If you are a VMWare customer or a partner, I’d highly encourage you to attend somehow. (use the link here)