Wednesday General Session key note
I tried to keep up with announcements during the second key note in this twitter thread. I highly recommend watching the recording as a large portion of the session consists of demos, and of course the motivational speech by Bear Grylls.
VMUG Leader Lunch
Everyone volunteering in a local VMware User Group community, so called Leaders, attending VMworld are invited to the Leader Lunch. Here a couple of individuals who went above the expected were honoured by VMUG representatives. Also all leaders were thanked by several VMware C-level executives for their engagement. Finally Cormac Hogan gave a great presentation on his journey through various job positions to where he is now. One important step was joining Tech Marketing, where he befriended William Lam, Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping.
Solutions Exchange
The solutions exchange was dominated by the usual suspects, hardware vendors like Dell EMC, HPE, Intel, nVidia and so on, Backup and Availability solutions as well as software vendors and cloud providers.
However one small stand in the far right corner was very popular e.g. in talks and blogs, even long after the event. There VMware gave a glimpse on the possibilities into ESXi on CPUs based on ARM architecture (opposed to the omnipresent x86). The modified software was running on several Smart-NICs. One possibility of this technology, as explained by the employee, could be to shift the computing power required for the hypervisor off of the main CPU so that workloads could use 100% of its resources. Other use cases lie in the edge cloud, where cheaper CPUs would present a competitive advantage.
At the VMUG booth every local community world-wide is listed, even the one called “Rhein-Ruhr” which was founded in September 2019 by two great guys (Christoph and Niclas) and me.
VMworld Fest
The day was topped off with two great bands. First the RPJ cover band, which already was rocking the Veeam Legendary Party the day before. Then the Stereophonics came on stage, a band from Wales not much known outside of Europe.
