VMworld 2013 recap – Day 1

The day began with meeting up with Aidan Dalgleish and Kamau Wanguhu at the Hilton lobby, with us putting last minute changes to our slide deck for session VSVC7371.  Well mainly it was Aidan being the OCD expert he is putting last minute changes to slide deck.  We went straight to the speaker lounge and updated the presentation.

Keynote

After grabbing breakfast it was time to head to the keynote.  This was going to be the first keynote Pat Gelsinger presented.  I enjoyed this keynote, it was a different angle to what we have seen in the past from Paul Maritz, Pat poked fun at himself, showing off pictures of him as a dragon slayer among others.  It was good fun.  Then the moment came in the keynote where Pat announced the general availability of vSphere 5.5 and I was able to publish two of my articles I have had sat as draft for a number of weeks.  These are articles demonstrating the new VMware Virtual SAN.  I have been working with the pre-release version for a few weeks now, testing the features and learning some tips and tricks.  The articles are:

VMware Virtual SAN – How to configure

Configuring Disk Redundancy – Virtual SAN

Now, lots of other people have written about all the new features in vSphere 5.5, and listed all the topics of the keynote, which I wont do here (google VMorld 2013 Keynote and you will find everything).  One thing that did stand out for me, was VMware NSX.  I have written about this technology before, and it was great to see the CTO of Networking on stage talking about Network Virtualization and Virtualization in general.  He really is passionate about technology, and it was plain for all too see.

Now it was time to leave, and try to find some quiet time to reflect on what I had just heard.  This was not an easy task, as the 1000’s of people trying to leave the auditorium became herds of sheep through a small barn door.

While walking around VMworld, I stopped off at the VMware store.  One of the cool things I found was my name listed on the bookstore list of authors for my co-authoring of the VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit book, this was a nice surprise, in which I had to take a photo of.  I really am privileged to have worked some of the smartest guys in VMware on this book.

Architecting the Software Defined Data Center

It was now time to head to the Marriot to present my session with Aidan and Kamau.  As always before presenting I was a little nervous, we had 721 people registered for this session, and it was great to see this.  To my surprise at one point people were sitting on the floor, such is the interest and popularity around this topic.  Once VMworld Barcleona is over, I will provide an overview of the key design considerations for SDDC.

I then headed off to the Solutions Exchange for a wander round and talk to some of the people I know.  As always with VMworld, some awesome companies with some great products are in the Solutions Exchange, Virtacore who provide my vCloud hosting for this blog, Pernix Data were handing out the tweet sized design considerations, PHD Virtual had a zombie, and Veeam appeared to have sponsored the rest rooms at the back of the building (take a look, you will see what I mean).

A great first day, and I am looking forward to tomorrows Keynote with Carl Eschenbach, and Joe Baguely.  I haven’t had much interaction with Carl, but he is always a great presenter, and Joe is a great guy who has a lot of enthusiasm for technology, so tomorrow’s keynote should be really cool.

See you all tomorrow, its time for some sleep now.