VMworld Europe 2019 – Day 1 recap

Pre VMworld VMUG Event

Russel O’Connor and the other nice guys from the VMUG Barcelona team once more organised an event on Monday morning which I decided to start the day with. The event with the theme “Kubernetes in the spotlight” was again held at a conference room in the Hotel Porta Fira, which was crowded. This was probably caused by some prominent presenters. Besides some engineers from OVHcloud (the main sponsor of the event) Scott Lowe and Cormac Hogan talked about Kubernetes (“K8s”) in general and the interaction with VMware products today, e.g. Cluster API used to deploy and manage K8s, either used directly or under the hood by Tanzu Mission Control. Cormac explained how the Cloud Native Storage introduced with vSAN 6.7u3 can be used for stateful applications, which usually use Persistent Volume Claims or NFS shares.

Kicking off VMworld

Afterwards it was time to head over to the “Fira” and receive my badge at one of the plenty registration desks. All in all everything is very well organised, even small things as a coat and baggage drop area with a short queue at most time, especially considering nearly 13.000 people were attending.

First things first: The obligatory photograph at the oversize VMworld sign with a couple of mates, this time J�rn Rusch, Christoph Villnow and Niclas Sieveneck:

At this time the activities in the VMvillage started with lots of fun things to do and people to meet.

New to the VMvillage was the VMware Champions booth which offered snacks, games, prizes and give-a-ways for people already participating in the program, or new “recruits”. The program is based on an app called Advocate Hub and offers challenges like taking part in the community, reading news articles, provide feedback or refer new members.
It was fun to chat with the guys at the booth and take part in the challenge to get most points during VMworld, which would grant the winner with a longboard hand signed by Pat Gelsinger. After myself being at the top of the leaderboard for a while in the end a the vCommunity’s own Andy won.

*VMworld 2019 Europe – Champions booth social media wall*

Most regular sessions ran from Tuesday to Thursday as Monday is TAM and partner day, but some interesting 3-4 hour long workshops, like “Running Kubernetes on vSphere”, “vSAN operations best practices”, “VMware cloud on AWS” or “Operating the Ultimate Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation” took place in parallel which according to other experts were all packed.

Partner Forum – General Session

Especially held for VMware’s ecosystem of partners the Partner Forum in the afternoon gave a glimpse of their vision and strategy (explained more thoroughly in the key notes held in the next two days), as well as presenting the new program how the company will interact with its partners, called Partner Connect. It aims to bring the several different parts of the current partner network, like resellers, solution providers or service providers under one cloud services oriented umbrella. Partners participating are going to show their expertise either with Solution Competencies or Master Solution Competencies (requiring several certified employees and reference projects) in these focus areas: