VMWorld 2014: Day One
Sam McGeown
After a bit of a rocky start (missed my flight and the partner day due to tendonitis in my knee) I arrived in Barcelona for my 2nd VMworld Europe. I headed straight from the airport to the PernixData party and caught up with the rest of the Xtravirt guys.
Tuesday morning started as ever with a keynote address. It was a little disappointing, but not unexpected, that there were no real announcements or reveals in the keynote. It was essentially a repeat of the VMworld US keynote with a couple of new betas announced. Nothing really revolutionary, a new vCloud Air datacenter in Germany and some new partners for EVO:RAIL. It’s interesting to see that the pace of traction for both cloud and hyperconverged is increasing for VMware’s portfolio though.
My first session of the day was #MTG1969, vCloud Automation Center and NSX Integration Technical Deep Dive. This was a great session covering the integration of NSX and vCAC, two areas close to my heart 🙂 Combining the two allows for repeatable on demand application delivery, from simple one tier to multi tier multiple blueprint applications. NSX really comes alive and shines when paired with automation. I was particularly pleased to see the vCenter Orchestrator plugin for NSX is fully featured in 6.1 and some significant improvements have been made.
After a quick lunch and some time in the hang space and solutions exchange I went to my second session of the day, #NET1743, VMware NSX Technical Deep Dive. I have been fortunate enough to have been on the VMware internal NSX training and actually done some real world deployments, so I have had a lot of exposure to NSX. Unfortunately this meant there was no new content for me, but the session was presented well and was well received.
To cap off a day of NSX focus, I also spent some time working through HOLSDC1425, VMware NSX Advanced. This is a great way to get some hands on experience with advanced NSX services (over and above the standard routing, switching and firewall functionality available in the basic NSX HOL). Subjects included DHCP relay, scale out L3 connectivity including configuring OSPF and ECMP (very cool!) and Layer 2 VPN. There are also some examples of 3rd party integration with Symantec and Riverbed.
In the evening we headed over to the solutions exchange for the drinks reception, then on to the vExpert/VCDX reception, and finally the vJamon event. By far my favourite was the vJamon event, which was hosted in a great venue with live music and good food, and overall a really good event sponsored by Cisco and Intel. These events are a fantastic opportunity to network with peers and meet up with colleagues and are one of the most valuable features of VMworld for me.
All in, a great first day, even on crutches! Looking forward to more tomorrow.