VMworld Europe 2013 – Day 1
Sam McGeown
I flew from Gatwick to Barcelona last night to my very first VMworld!
I’m staying in a hotel that is actually quite far from the conference, it’s a metro, train and bus journey away from the conference center and it takes about 40 minutes to get here. On the plus side I was only 5 minutes away from the VMUG party last night so I went over there for an hour or so. Note for future years - stay a little closer to the conference!
General Session
The keynote session was a very slick presentation (think lasers and smoke) from VMware’s CEO Pat Gelslinger with various guests laying out VMware’s vision for the future of the Software Designed DataCenter (SDDC). You can watch the general session here, if you’re interested.
Bloggers zone
If I was to pick one word to describe how I feel after a couple of hours at my very first VMworld, it would have to be “overwhelmed”. This place is massive and there are 8500 people here. I definitely felt a bit lost and isolated, but fortunately I found some familiar faces in the the Bloggers area. Great chats with @dawoo, @greggrobertson5, @vmfcraig, @egrigson and @gurusimran. Massive relief to finally find some people I know (at least from Twitter and LonVMUG). It was good to have some discussions around VCAP exams and also the VCDX process - it’s all very topical and relevant for me as I look towards taking the DCD and moving on to the VCDX process.
#net5716 - Advanced VMware NSX Architecture with Bruce Davie
NSX is an area I am very interested in learning about, and this session provided an overview of NSX and how it’s designed for scalability, how the nuts and bolts of that works (e.g. distributed services) and also how it interacts with physical VTEPs. I found the presenter engaging and the content was really good. The session was absolutely packed and there was plenty of interaction.
#vsvc4811 - Extreme Performance Series: Monster Virtual Machines with Peter Boone and Seongbeom Kim
This session kicked off with a good overview of various memory and processor management techniques. Overall I found this session quite dry with a lot of info and detail, but there’s not much to spice it up. Very good understanding of NUMA/vNUMA and how they affect performance of huge 64 vCPU machines - and also some good info regarding the vSocket/vCore discussion I had with @vmfcraig and @simoneady earlier this year.
Solutions Exchange
I spent some time wandering round the Solutions Exchange, which had some very in-your-face methods of attracting your attention and trying to get your badge scanned. It struck me a pretty shoddy to still be using pretty young girls to attract the primarily male geeks to a stand, but it’s effective - it’s much harder to be rude to one! I attempted to sit in on a couple of talks with vendors but found the hall too noisy to hear properly, with vendors seeming to compete with each other with loud and over-enthusiastic pitches! There’s a huge range of technology and solutions on offer, if you can get past the sales patter.
#vBrownbag Unsupported with William Lam
It was great to listen to @lamw doing his unsupported session with some really useful tips on how to evaluate vSphere 5.5. He demoed vmtools for nested ESXi which is awesome, as well as some vCenter Simulator features in the VCSA. Definitely some things to try out in the DefinIT lab, the session should be available on the #vBrownbag feed soon.
Summary
Tonight is the vExpert reception which should be a great networking opportunity so I’m looking forward to that. I am hoping to get a relatively early night as today has been packed and tomorrow promises to be just as, if not more gruelling. Promise I’ll try and get some pictures taken tomorrow!