VMworld 2018 Roundup: Day 3

Ding ding. The next round of VMworld is underway.

General Session

The Tuesday general session had some interesting panels. The undisputed highlight being the one-on-one interview Sanjay Poonen had with Malala Yousafza. Her story and message to support education for girls and women is inspiring.

Check out my dedicated general session post for more details.

Meeting Old and Making New Friends

Following up from the morning session, I spent some time catching up on blogging, then headed to lunch. There I met up with a colleague I’d worked with before, as well as making some new friends that he brought with him, as well as those we met at our lunch table. We chatted about our tech experiences, work experiences, and life in general.

These kinds of interactions are what make conferences like VMworld very rewarding. You learn not just about technology, virtualization or otherwise, but also about our peers, old and new. Next time you head for a conference meal, pick a table where there are some folks you don’t know. Instead of eating quietly, kick off a conversation. It may even make the food taste better…

HPE Briefing

HPE graciously invited bloggers and vExperts to a briefing in the afternoon. They provided about a dozen of us with a brief overview of the various goings-on within different business units. HPE highlighted their alliance with VMware, noting that it’s been an 18 year partnership, with HPE become their #1 partner.

Regarding storage, HPE’s working on products that will help customers place workloads in the right place, whether that’s on premises or in the cloud. HPE has a storage service that can be placed in the customer’s DC/colo and then connected to public cloud compute. That way the customer has more control over data capacity and locality, while taking advantage of public cloud compute offerings. The HPE service is block only at the moment.

HPE’s finding that customers are most interested in placing secondary and tertiary data into cloud storage over primary data. Both Cloud Volumes and Cloud Bank, both from HPE can help with that.

A participant asked about Simplivity deployed on HPE Synergy, and was told that it’s still being worked on. Also HPE InfoSight is now available for Nimble and 3PAR storage.

HPE’s working on building out a developer community called HPE DEV. They decided to create a forum separate from HPE’s existing forums as the current one isn’t really developer focused. For example it’s conducive to sharing code. An example of what HPE’s been working on, from a developer perspective, is the Grommet open source project. It’s a UX framework that was open-sourced by HPE with version 2.0, and is now in use by multiple companies.

Last, but not least, we chatted about HPE GreenLake. As described to the room, Greenlake, which started out as an IaaS offering in Europe, is a service offering for “rolling your own” HPE technology stack/environment. This includes not just cloud services, but also on-premises solutions as well. It enables flexible capacity for the customer, as HPE can bring in the right gear when needed. To support this, HPE works with the customer to forecast their requirements and capacity, determining when the opportune times are to bring in added capacity. From a licensing perspective, licenses are included with each “unit” of service, so as your capacity increases so does the associated license spend, which is built-in so you don’t have to manage it yourself or bring your own. Given that Greenlake is essentially a service agreement, when capacity increases the customer shouldn’t have to go through a PO process. HPE’s found that within a four-year contract, customers typically grow their capacity an average of 18%.

Apple VIP Reception

I had a brief window to attend the Apple & VMware VIP Reception, and was keen to hear what Apple had to say about using their end-user devices within an VMware-powered environment. Unfortunately, during the hour I was able to attend, no one addressed the crowd. I did manage to have some interesting chats with fellow attendees, who also all pretty much were there to see what the messaging would be.

vExpert BBQ

The vExpert reception was held at the Las Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame again this year. The VMTN folks brought in a company specializing in BBQ, with three full spit-roasted hogs. The food, company, and venue was perfect for the vExpert crowd. Pat Gelsinger was gracious enough to stop by and chat with us, taking about an hour out of his busy schedule. It’s always great to see the support he shows for the vExpert community.

Thanks to Pat Gelsinger for stopping by and the VMTN/vExpert crew for putting on another excellent event.

K.O.

That’s Tuesday knocked out of the park. ‘Till next time.