I went to VMworld for my first time and had a blast. The event was great, but not without its flaws. I tweeted during the event and I may start tweeting more often. Also, when I post a new article. However, I never got around to posting an article during the event.

Monday’s general session presentation fell flat for me. Project Pacific and Tanzu Mission Control were already announced earlier that day. Then the keynote felt too scripted. After looking past the superficial side, the content was huge. Project Pacific will have Kubernetes embedded in the hypervisor. This is a great move by VMware to work more closely where the industry has been heading. Their latest acquisitions definitely tell what they are up to; Pivotal and Carbon Black. Then Tanzu Mission Control will give central management for Kubernetes clusters on-prem and in the cloud.

Tuesday’s general session highlighted some of the prior day’s announcements and went into additional news. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is now available. It was previously announced at Dell’s conference, but this is the first time I heard about it. Dell will send an engineer to deploy a rack of hardware at a customer’s location and it shows up in a customer’s SDDC. Then Dell manages the hardware and ESXi stack. I really like this model. The best both worlds in my mind; a cloud-like architecture on-prem. NSX Intelligence was announced. VMware’s new CTO, Greg Lavender, was even announced on stage.

There was no shortage of sessions. I liked that VMware had each session labeled according to the technical level. My company has a TAM so I was able to attend additional sessions, which were under an NDA. I attended mostly them since they are not recorded. I am looking forward to watching many of the recorded sessions later on. Below are my favorite non-TAM sessions that I attended.

William Lam and Emad Younis hosted a great session on ‘The Next Generation of Lifecycle Management for vCenter Server’. Here are a couple nice additions to vSphere 6.7, which are currently available. Display the topology view of all vCenters and PSCs in an SSO domain (U2). This is under administration and system configuration. Now able to change the hostname and IP address of a vCenter Center (U3). Then they went into potential future additions in tech preview. A better summary page for vCenter, which includes; notification for vCenter updates, last updated, last backed up by the native file-based backup, summary totals at this level, and overall health status from the 5480 page. The screenshot below is from their presentation. They said there will be a permission to set to enable the update available notification so it can be easily hidden from a client or whoever. My favorite tech preview was the vCenter interoperability built into vCenter. No more going to the HCL for some components. Some potential new features are desired state for vCenter, improved host profiles, and easier NSX install. I am looking forward to all of this. Hopefully in the not too distant future.

I attended the Intro to Raspberry Pi and Run K8s on VMware. I figured both would be good since they were hands-on. I already have a Raspberry Pi running RetroPi. I figured this would help me get more motivated to do something else with my new Raspberry Pi I received in my vExpert bag. I definitely want to think of a home project for it. The Kubernetes session had a lab and was actually the first time I got to use Kubernetes. It served as a good intro. The lab was on VMC on AWS so it was legit.

I decided I will work a few more articles on VMworld. One of the solution exchange. Then the fun side of VMworld. The final will be on personal travel after VMworld. I stayed a few extra days to check out the city. I thought this may help others interested in doing the same since VMworld 2020 is back August 31st to September 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

VMworld 2019 – The Business Side
VMworld 2019 – Solutions Exchange
VMworld 2019 – The Fun and Random Side