VMworld 2014: Day Three and wrap-up
Sam McGeown- VMworld 2014: Day Three and wrap-up
- VMworld 2014: Day Two
- VMworld 2014: VCP NV Exam Experience
- VMWorld 2014: Day One
*This post was meant to be published on Friday, VMworld Sleep Deprivation meant I didn’t click the button!*
This is the last post and a bit of a wrap up on my VMworld 2014 series!
There isn’t a keynote on day three, and there’s definitely a “winding down” feel as people tend to arrive later (if at all) and many are…feeling the effects of the previous night shall we say! That said, every session I wanted to attend was still fully booked and it was a case of queuing for the spare seats.
I managed to get into the #SDDC1337 Techincal Deep Dive on EVO:RAIL really to get a good view on what the EVO:RAIL offering is. The session was presented very well and told the story of EVO:RAIL from inception to birth. There was a lot of information about the technologies involved in getting EVO:RAIL to a fully functional product. I was impressed with the 8 month timescale and the team’s focus on doing the core things right rather than feature creep which VMware can be guilty of.
I think the fact that the hardware is partner based means that it’s much more accessible for environments that are single-vendor (e.g. HP, EMC, DELL, HDS or Fujitsu shops) because they can purchase under existing agreements etc without needing to get new suppliers approved, and there’s already familiarity and eco-systems in place.
With VSAN still really a tier-2 storage solution, I’d expect these to go into remote office environments for large enterprises. I haven’t seen the pricing for EVO:RAIL, but I suspect all that packaged goodness will have a price - probably not one SMB’s will like. An interesting idea discussed with Michael Poore (@michaelpoore) was the idea of having EVO:RAIL clusters as vCloud endpoints.
That was the last technical session I was able to attend as I had to catch my flight home! It’s hard to summarise in a blog posting the value that you get from attending VMworld - as a vExpert I have access to a lot of VMworld sessions online after the event, but VMworld is a lot more than just the sessions. It’s a crazy mix of sessions, networking, meeting old and new friends, vendor parties, sleep deprivation, walking (lots of walking), exams, the solutions exchange and generally being immersed in all things VMware for the duration of the conference.
I would definitely encourage anyone who can get to VMworld and who loves the technology and community around VMware to go next year. It’s much more than the sum of it’s parts!