Cloud | VirtCorner

It was great for VMware Explore 2023 to be back in Las Vegas. I am sure attendance was higher than last year, but still not as many as before the pandemic. It’s definitely on the right track for continuing to grow. The Venetian is an amazing venue. It was nice not having to walk across a city block to attend sessions as it was with the Moscone Center. Though, I still, somehow, ended up with about the same amount of steps as last year. I really like everything with the Explore theme and I thought it was more embraced this year.

I have an article about vSphere announcements and vSAN announcements so I will focus on other areas in this article. As expected, AI was the main topic during the general session. I was impressed with VMware’s announcement of VMware Private AI. It makes a lot of sense to be able to have a platform to utilize AI, but without giving up your privacy. Many companies are not adapting quickly to AI because they see it as a security risk. You could be essentially giving up your data if you don’t own and control the AI model. With Private AI, that will not be an issue. Another announcement was VMware NSX+, which is another addition that makes sense. Customers can have one cloud console to manage NSX for both on-prem and cloud. That means consistent policies and management in one interface to keep VMware environments uniform.

The Hub had the best setup this year. Everything community related was in one big room. It felt too disjointed in past years. VMTN, Virtually Speaking Podcast, VMware Rewards, and a few other groups all had a setup in The Hub, and it was close to the expo.

The food was not as good as last year. Two days out of four days for lunch was sandwiches and salads. Vegas has great food so no one wants multiple days of sandwiches. I hope VMware can step it up next year.

The expo area is always a favorite of mine. It was nice to have a lot of seating and gaming options around and in the expo. Though, many vendor booths were a bit scaled back compared to last year. I hope vendors see how great this year’s event was and will be able to increase their event budgets next year. There were a lot of nice giveaways for watching a short presentation, such as Nintendo Switches from Tintri, Lego sets from IBM, and tablets from Lenovo. I also need to give a shout out to Cohesity as they always deliver for vExperts with a nice gift.

Be on the look out for more VMware Explore events this year as there’s more events this year than ever before with four more events. These events will be in Barcelona, Singapore, São Paulo, and Tokyo. It will be exciting to see what information VMware will announce at these events. I am also excited to see the US side will be back at The Venetian in Vegas next year.

AWSsummit2017a

I attended the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC this week. I usually do not attend so many conferences. This should be my last one for a while. I just happen to live nearby so I didn’t want to pass on the opportunity to learn more about AWS.

The keynotes were not really what a typical keynote address is at a conference. They were only a few minutes of announcements and then a few customer stories each day. The biggest announcement was GovCloud East is coming in 2018. Though, a more specific time frame would have been better received.

AWSsummit2017c

There were a lot of break sessions to choose from. There was a session on VMware Cloud on AWS. I don’t think there was any big news and sadly still no date for GA. Here’s a few things I got out of the session. Customers will purchase this service from VMware. AWS services will be billed separate from VMware by Amazon. All AWS services can be accessed from a customer’s VMware cluster, which will be hosted at a AWS data center. ESXi will boot from a EBS volume and no root access to the host for customers. The underlying storage for the VMs will be vSAN, which is a minimum of 4 hosts. Elastic DRS will be able to bring up a new host fast. I think within minutes. However, removing a host will take more time as data needs to be moved from the disks on the host.

I attended a fascinating session hosted by Kevin Murphy, Program Executive Earth Science Data Systems at NASA. He talked about and showed some of the projects NASA has been working on and how they leverage AWS. Some of NASA’s projects pull in petabytes of data ever day from satellites. The data is available for free for every person and company in the world. Kevin demonstrated one of his projects called Worldview, which I provided a description below. I highly recommend everyone to check it out. You can add an assortment of layers with various information, such as all major fires around the world and by date.

This tool from NASA’s EOSDIS provides the capability to interactively browse global, full-resolution satellite imagery and then download the underlying data. Most of the 150+ available products are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks “right now”. This supports time-critical application areas such as wildfire management, air quality measurements, and flood monitoring. Arctic and Antarctic views of several products are also available for a “full globe” perspective. Browsing on tablet and smartphone devices is generally supported for mobile access to the imagery.

I’m sure Amazon will be looking to expand the event next year. I heard the attendance was at least 7,500 before Tuesday afternoon, which seemed to catch Amazon by surprise. Despite the crowds, I had a good time and learned a lot during my two days at the event .