VMworld 2019 Europe day 3 is almost over and that’s why were almost overdue to give you an overview of yesterday, VMworld day 2. Maarten Caus, Samir Verkuijlen, Kabir Ali and Michael van de Gaer have written a short overview of their 2nd day. Check out their highlights of yesterday!
The highlights of Maarten Caus at VMworld 2019 – day 2
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 for 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 how simple the architecture is and how easy it is to scale out. You can run it natively on any cloud and almost every platform. They also support Horizon load balancing and integration with Workspace ONE Intelligence is on the roadmap (I’m looking forward to that integration).
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, I met many new people and had a great time.
The highlights of Samir Verkuijlen at VMworld 2019 – day 2
Day 2 was even quicker over then Day 1. It is not normal how much cool new stuff I’ve learned today. This was not only because of all the sessions, but also because of the amazing talks I had with customers, colleagues and awesome partners. If there is one thing that definitely stayed with me, it’s this: VMware is going quicker, faster and harder with all their products across their entire (constantly expanding) portfolio. With constantly releasing new features, acquisitions, and improving specs and integrations, they are going amazingly fast. How cool this is for us! It also made me realize (again) that our customers and we are quite often in phase of transition towards the next big thing. Not in a sense that customers always have to have every product of the portfolio, or buy the latest and shiniest new thing, but rather in a sense of these tight integrations and operability. The integrations between the products are going further and are becoming better and better every release again. This is really great and awesome, but it is also really difficult to manage, and can therefore also be really scary. For me, it is clearer then ever that vCF together with VVD will be the best solution for this new challenge. We, as consultants and other partners, know it is not perfect, but I truly believe that they are getting there and with that also believe in that vision.
Besides all these cool tech realizations, the biggest highlight of the day was the Benelux party and also the vExpert party. Especially since the big chief himself, Pat Gelsinger, showed up at the vExpert party and even took the time to have a little talk with us. It is unbelievable how great and open this community is, and that a man like Pat just shows up to show his appreciations for the vExpert community. It makes me love VMware and their beautiful mission even more.
The highlights of Kabir Ali at VMworld 2019 – day 2
So, today was all about the performance series. Did you know by the time the first Iron Man hit the cinema’s, monster VMs had specs like 4 vCPU’s and 64 GB MEM? And did you know when Avengers Endgame was playing in the cinema’s, monster VMs had specs like 256 vCPU’s and 6TB? Strange isn’t it: in those 11 years we saw specs go up, but still customers are complaining about not getting all the performance? The biggest key note of today was that, instead of blindly focusing on getting the maximum performance, one should focus on getting the right performance. I must admit: I did sign up for these sessions to get the last bit of performance out of the hardware, but that’s not the correct approach. It’s better to focus on the right performance. Try to find out how the NUMA layout is and try to fit your VM’s inside those NUMA domains. Make sure to keep a (hyperthreaded) core free for ESXi to do some householding.
One other important key note is that in order to create monster VM with more than 128 vCPU’s, the boot mode must be set to EFI, as you cannot switch from legacy boot to EFI without re-installing the OS. Make sure you already set the boot mode to EFI.
We ended the day at the BeNeLux party. While socializing and watching Ajax play against Chelsea we had a great time. And with that, a good days comes to an end.
The highlights of Michael van de Gear at VMworld 2019 – day 2
The 2nd day of VMworld started of with the general session which outlined VMware’s vision, strategy and some tangible customer cases. The first tech session for me was about Pulse IoT Center. A promising way to manage your IoT devices like sensors, cameras etc. focusing on your Edge Environment.
After lunch, we did an Expert Lead Hands-on Lab about PKS. We created Namespaces, Containers and triggered Bosh to redeploy a broken container. You can try out the Lab at home by going to https://labs.hol.vmware.com and searching for lab ‘2031’.
In the afternoon we scouted the Solution Exchange, hunting for some goodies. I learned a lot regarding ESXi on ARM! They showcased a simple raspberry pi running ESXi which creates the opportunity to bring all the benefits of virtualization to your Edge environments.
The evening started with a great vExpert party where Pat Gelsinger joined us for a chat. Afterwards the evening ended with the ITQ BeNeLux party! Never a dull moment at VMworld!