VMworld 2018 Roundup: Day 2

The crowds have arrived and VMworld is fully underway on Monday.

General Session

This year’s opening General Session saw Pat Gelsinger double (triple?) down on VMware’s vision: Any App on Any Cloud from Any Device. Generally the announcements continue the trend of incremental evolution for a company as mature as VMware.

There were a couple of stand out items for me:

• VMware’s increasing its offerings to control IoT, with the announced VMware Pulse IoT Center 2.0. Most impressive about this announcement is that, not only can it be consumed as a service, but VMware has scaled it to support 500 million devices.
• Workspace ONE can now (or soon will?) do automated patch testing before rolling out patches to end-user devices (likely Microsoft Windows, specifically). Any devices that don’t pass the tests will not have the patch deployed until the relevant team (who are automatically escalated to and notified) have resolved the issue and marked it complete. This will significantly improve speed to deployment for patches, while minimizing end-user interruption.

For more coverage, check out our live blog post.

Foot Loose and Session Free

I’ve decided to follow the advice of some of the seasoned VMworld veterans, and have significantly cut down on the number of breakout sessions I’ll be attending in person. After all, many if not most of the sessions will be available online shortly after the conference finishes.

Instead I’ve spent more time chatting with fellow conference goers and taking in the Solutions Exchange.

So far, I’m finding it satisfying and worthwhile. The conversations being had and new friends and acquaintances made are something that are much harder to make happen post-conference.

CONVERGED Meeting

This was the second time for me attending the CONVERGED User Group meeting at VMworld. As a refresher, CONVERGED is a user group concerned with Dell EMC’s converged and hyper-converged infrastructure products (CI & HCI). Michael Dell graced the meeting with a brief address to kick things off, further indicating his, and Dell Technologies, commitment to HCI.

Being a new VxRail customer, the meeting held more relevance for me this year. I ended up sitting at a table with one of the gentlemen taking part in the customer panel discussion. His company’s been using VxRail for a little over a year, and we were able to talk and exchange anecdotes about how HCI adoption, thru VxRail, was going for our respective companies. It was also refreshing chatting briefly with Lee Caswell,l VP of Product, SABU at VMware. He was genuinely interested in our customer experience with VxRail.

These sorts of events where you can trade experiences with fellow customers, and engage with folks who have direct influence over products you use is what conferences like VMworld are really great for!

VMware{code} Hackathon 2018

To round out the day was the third-annual VMware{code} Hackathon. This year’s event was setup a bit differently, with participants needing to supply their own tech and environments, but this format also allowed for more flexibility. Some teams worked on IoT and blockchain, which would have been a little less strongly encouraged with the shared vSAN-based environments available in previous years.

While the time given is never enough to create a reasonably comprehensive solution from start-to-finish, the Hackathon delivered on what it’s exception at: bringing like-minded folks together for an evening of learning, fun, and camaraderie. The hacking ends up being the catalyst for all of this to happen. Whether your individual team can make magic happen in under four hours matters less than the collective result. By those standards this year was yet another outstanding success. Thanks to the VMware{code} and VMTN folks for putting this on once more. I hope to see it become a staple at the conference.

Day Done, More to Come

The sun sets on VMworld 2018’s Monday, but the week is just barely started. ‘Till next time.