VMworld 2019 Europe was one of my favourite years yet. It was action packed and I am still writing up stuff to post as so much went on!
Not only were the announcements, sessions and workshops awesome – I actually got to see one of my personal heroes – the inimitable Bear Grylls. His motivational speech about tackling self-doubt and encouraging innovation was exactly as you’d imagine it to be. I felt a real synergy with what he was talking about and I came out of there wanting to climb a mountain…an innovation one! (I don’t know what that means, but I know how I felt that day.) I may even run an Ultra Marathon in 2020 to keep the mind and body all in check!
That week in Barcelona was exceptional and my personal highlights included:
Meeting Pat Gelsinger at the vExpert Party
Taking part in VMware Odyssey Hands-on Lab competition
On December 12th, VMware’s largest virtual event for IT professionals will be here to give you a special post-VMworld update. This special online event will bring you the latest announcements on VMware’s leading solutions, with insights from the pros you’ll certainly benefit from hearing. A few of these people below I always make an effort to see at events and you get the luxury of being and to dial in straight from wherever you are
Check out the action-packed agenda:
Keynote: Tech in the Age of Any
Joe Baguley, Chief Technology Officer EMEA, VMware
Digital Workspace Session: Why We Need to Put the Employee Experience First Today
Spencer Pitts, Chief Technologist EMEA, VMware
Live Q&A Session
If all of this still isn’t enough to convince you to join, everyone who signs up will also have the chance to win a FREE TICKET TO VMWORLD 2020 EUROPE*. Simply register today, attend the webcast and you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win one of three full conference passes to next year’s event.
Take it from me, vForum Online is something you don’t want to miss and don’t miss your chance to attend next year!
So today is the first day for customers at .Next in Copenhagen and its a massive milestone for them being 10 years strong.
The show was opened with some of their key customers and partners and it was great to see some familiar faces and thanks to Andrea Mauro for the shout out to the vCommunity
It was also really relieved to see that they are still doing their .Heart initiative to support charity especially for the people who do not want to come home with bags of swag. It’s also great seeing their support to Women in tech and a great way I can invest in the future by being here.
Another big thing I want to keep my eye on is the https://www.nutanix.com/theforecastbynutanix as I am sure this will have some interesting content soon
Their new campaign is about all being together and very much all in the 3’s Invisible, Trusted & Autonomous
It was interesting to hear the journey of AHV and how it sits alongside VMware to make each other resilient. I believe this is where they feel where some workloads can then burst into the public clouds with ease and then still work alongside what people are used to
The next thing up was all about XiLeap and making DR easy or rather not needing to think about it. I would highly watch the playback of the keynote about this as it was interesting see the RPO down to 1min over the internet and the floating internet address to still access the files. The humour of a dragon taking out your data centre with dragon fury was great but not something many of us could have planned for.
Now what was a bit of surprising news on this linked to their key tag about freedom of choice was you will soon be able to replicate an ESXI VM into the cloud with XiLeap
There are also some new data centres opening in due course
This was all followed up by a hardware portfolio refresh with Optane and an all NVMe node. It seems they are going to help accelerate this with HPE and their GPU platform to soon follow up with the lineup
Basically Greenlake is the as a service offering only charging customer for what they use like a cloud regardless of what is possibly onsite. Again this was all baked down to giving the customer choice
AVH Sync Rep and Metro availability with cross cluster live migration in the work could really help with in house systems. To me this I think will tie in with Karbon to make Kubernetes easy to manage and keep things all in sync. This followed into file and how to keep your data secure. It was also intriguing to see how they are tying in with hardware vendors to really go down to low level code to interface with the storage sub systems.
I did manage to grab a short clip of the live cluster migration with again something close to my heart gaming, it was quite cool to see this flip between clusters and storage with no downtime. I will hopefully have this up soon.
I am also interested to go to a few session to get some more information about Mine to see how the tiering works. It would be interesting so see if its as good as the marketing and I can forget about back up and data tiers
For me in my current role it was great to hear about the challenges from another Energy firm close to home and how they are trying to enhance their business.
Another section I want to cover in more detail is going to be their secure products and autonomous technologies of which I will probably cover in another post. Great to see how big enterprises could use servicenow and become hands off from the environment. It’s also nice to see how BlueMedora ties in and has the application aware monitoring.
Support insight also seems to be what Nimble Infosight did for the SAN world with health and support. It would be great to see this in action more but for new users its nice with the promise of how it ties them to a KB with real data
No major shock for me as I have been waiting for this but it will be interesting to see Nutanix on AWS fully in action in production. Welcome to see the tie in with the Amazon hardware on bare metal but the unique proposition here was you can utilise your current VPC and Credits already in place with Amazon. It will certainly save time for anyone who already has an investment in AWS and easy to get up and going in as little as 30 minutes.
I managed to grab a quick clip of the initialisation of this service below
The hibernate function seems interesting as it will collapse the cluster and put all the VMs and storage into S3 and you can bring it back for seasonal and burst workloads.
Well that was it for the morning key note and I hope to get more content throughout the day
So its has really been a busy few months of which will warrant a post soon but we are back with the OpenTechCast and its conference season! I will promise to get a few more posts here and also what I have been up to but do catch up with our latest episode here
So the next two days I lost some of my content for hence the delay in posting but I want to get some of this up there! Mainly so I can also reflect prior to hopefully attending next year.
For me this below was one of my personal highlighted sessions but I don’t think it was recorded as I got to see some of my heroes
I was also fortune enough to take party in the vExpert daily chat with the amazing Angelo
I then popped over to a few sessions and then mentally prepared myself for my next talk! Also since doing this I have refined (I think) and I have now done it at the UKVMUG. I am sure there will be one final version of this with some more exciting code someday
The day did not stop there and the party was not too far ahead but we recorded a new vMashup edition where can be found here and this personally was a great thing for me as I love the Virtually Speaking guys podcast
This then proceeded for a quick dash to the Rubrik booth as I was on their #vRockstar cards this year and I wanted to sadly get the full collection to display at home
It was then party time! We all dropped off our bags and for once it was a VMworld party I could enjoy! No rushing off for a flight or jet lag and we have some great memories from it, one of mine are here below
Now if you are here for the VR bits here they are, I think they turned out well especially when the confetti falls! It looks great on my Oculus. I would have gotten more but shall we say I think the UKVMUG or all of the UK VMUGs/vExperts were trying to drink the bar dry and cause a scene near the photo booth! You can use your mouse to look around too if you click on them and open them on YouTube!
Whilst we were waiting I did get this awesome caricature done though
The next day I am sure we all felt a little fragile but I managed to get some more sessions done and follow up great talks I have with people! I also managed to get this VR Tour done around the solutions exchange. I did this during a quiet time as usually it very busy and I didn’t want to trip over people so usually its much more busier than this
After this a few of us did the last few sessions and then a vendor crawl to see what we could get for the UKVMUG Charity Bag
One awesome stand was the VMUG stand where they were printing T-Shirts
I have a few more separate posts still to come such as the vExpert Shirts and also a few tips about conference and specifically VMworld but this year they made it for me. I will just leave a small gallery of any of the photos I haven’t used just for memories really and to try and inspire the next person to go!
I just hope I can make it next year and I will be much more on point with the uploads!
So last week I attended the UKVMUG and I was fortunate enough to speak there (which is another blog post) but myself and Rob Bishop decided to auction off some of our ‘swag’ bags to raise some money for Charity. I also think this is great as I know some people can’t make it to VMworld as I know I alway wanted to go at the beginning of this awesome journey I am on! Either way here is some pictures of the bags below, we had some awesome prizes such as a keep warm coffee mug, SNES and signed books
After a quick run around at lunch and between all of our sessions we managed to raise an amazing £177 which far exceeded my expectations and a massive thank you everyone who donated and to Kev for donating this for us as VMware would double it
that’s £177 donated to Aquabox as raised by the awesome folks at @UKVMUG on Thursday. Matched funding through the @vmware Foundation should double that – thanks to everyone who took part, and my employer for doubling the amount going to charity! @MyVMUG#UKVMUG#vExpertpic.twitter.com/gYXtxMYmFC
I certainly hope I can do another one of these soon and maybe do it online next time as so many people wanted to pay by card! Or maybe this is another VMware Code project in the making 😉
Also a massive congratulations to our winners of the bags! I never managed to get a photo!
I have recently been introduced to Uber Conference along with many others that could be named but this is a great way to join up with people on browsers or people I know in the US. One of the features that made me giggle is a particular music on hold you can choose which is Rick Astley so you get to #RickRoll people whilst they wait for you.
The only downside is there is no free UK dial in number but I found this service that allows me to use my inclusive minutes to dial US numbers https://www.freecallstousa.co.uk
I know that I like to have many of my conference bridges to auto dial if I don’t have access to the app or weak data or even if I am driving. With this method I can ask Siri to start UberConference and it adds me as the host automatically and enters my PIN
What you need to do is enter the following into a contact card
You can get the details from your settings page within your account.
If it take ages to connect you can play with the , as each carrier adds different delays and find the sweet spot for yourself. Below is a demo of this working
DISCLAIMER:- I have not tested the security of either service and I am not liable for any loses or charges. Also please check with your telephony provider this number is included as again I am not liable for any charges
