Recently, I went to VMworld 2019 Europe in Barcelona with my ITQ colleagues. It was my third VMworld Europe and my second with ITQ. ITQ made a large impact because we attended the conference with 40 colleagues!
If you never went to Barcelona and you want to go to VMworld Europe next year: Fly in a few days earlier so you can visit Barcelona. It’s a beautiful city and worth a visit!
Last year I thought how awesome would it be to speak at VMworld 2019? Beyond all expectations, I was able to get 2 community speaking slots this year! I spoke at the vBrownbag stand and at Brian Maddens Community Tech Talks. Let’s break down my VMworld Barcelona 2019 day by day.
Monday
On Monday morning I had a great VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX ) workshop. Existing VCDX talked about their own experiences. What the requirements are to pass and other great tips and tricks! The most important tip was to read the blueprint. Everything you need to know to is in there and reach out to the community for help.
In the afternoon I had another workshop about deep learning and vGPU’s. It was an awesome session about what types of machine learning there are and how they leveraged vGPU’s as compute.
The best moment of the day was one of our founders Francisco Perez was on stage during the partner General session. He talked about how we obtained the 4 master server competencies and how closely we work with VMware.
Tuesday
My second day started with the VMware general session, Pat Gelsinger was on fire talking about project Tanzu and many other new announcements.
They also introduced zero-day support Microsoft Endpoint Manager how awesome is that? After the general session, I went to a session about NSX Advanced Load Balancing, this is the new name for AVI networks. I was amazed by how simple the architecture is and how easy it is to scale out.
Then it was my time for my own first VMworld Community session at the vBrownbag stand: “Why do I want to become a VCDX?”
I was a little nervous because the session was fully booked. A lot of people who are interested in the VCDX certification were in the audience. After the session, people came up to me to talk about their experiences and someone even wanted to start a study group. It was a great experience!
Later that afternoon it was time for the EUC showcase with Shawn Bass. He announced many great new innovations for the Horizon suite, Workspace ONE Intelligence integration with Carbon Black, and Workspace UEM support for augmented reality.
Later that evening Brian Madden hosted his Community Tech talks. It was a great setting with beer, wine tapas, and geeks. Johan presented about VDI by day and compute by night and I talked about how AI can empower your Digital Workspace. It was a great event, met many new people and had a great time. Johan and Brian were paying attention during my session :-). Thanks, Tom Vallons for the picture!
Wednesday
Wednesday started with a great general session full off awesome demos off what’s possible with the newly announced technologies. Followed by Baer Grylls personal story of how he became a Marine Commando, how you have to keep growing and embrace your failures. It was a great and inspiring story.
Another great session was how to use REST API’s of VMware EUC portfolio how you can create your own scripts and automation. They showed how you can edit users in WSO Access, create writable volumes all through REST API. In the evening it was time for VMfest with the Stereophonics. They gave a great show and we had a great time.
Thursday
Last day of VMworld I did a few more sessions. The best session of the day was ‘”How to fight cancer with VMware Technologies” by Johan van Amersfoort and Niels Hagoort. They explained how you can leverage vGPU’s for machine learning and image recognition. Leading to much faster data processing and patient diagnosis!
I want to thank my employer ITQ that made it possible to attend the event, and I hope to see you next year!
