VMworld Europe 2013 Day 1 and the vExpert / VCDX Reception

General session and keynote

 

Lasers, lights, and fog aside, there were some interesting announcements made at the opening keynote.

  • VMware acquires Desktone, and will offer DaaS in their vCHS offering.
  • vCHS spreading to the European datacenter region with a new location opening soon in the UK
  • VMware NSX officially launched now as a result of the collaboration of work between VMware and their acquisition of Nicira a while back. Number of Virtual Ports now exceeding number of Physical according to their slide. Not surprisingly, Cisco did not feature as a partner on the list of logos in the slide deck. (As pointed out to me by colleague Curtis Brown)

VMworld Keynote

Sessions summary

 

Here is a list of sessions I managed to attend on Tuesday:

  • General session as per above
  • vSphere UI Platform Best Practises: Putting the Web Client SDK into Action
  • Deep dive into vSphere Log Management with vCenter Log Insight
  • Automating the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): How do I get started?
  • William Lam’s “Not Supported” vBrownBag session at the community lounge

The session on the Web Client SDK was interesting for me, as I have recently started looking into what would be involved with web client plugin development. Some good advice was given out, and we got to see the road map ahead, where predictably, Flex is being cast out as Adobe are dropping support, and HTML5 will be taking its place with the vSphere web client. VMware plan to release “HTML Bridge” as private beta in November, which will help bridge the gap, and allow developers to start implementing their UI fully in HTML, or via a combination of Flex and HTML for the time being. The middle tier and back end systems for plugins will still be developed as they have been, so nothing is planned to change here.

The vCenter Log Insight session was well presented by Simon Flanders, and was interesting enough to get a good idea as to what the product does. It does seem fairly straight forward to use though, so I am not sure I would have called it a deep dive myself, apart from the delve into the architecture of the product, which was quite interesting to see how logs were dealt with in a circular fashion, or when archiving was implemented.

Automating the SDDC: How do I get started – this session was nicely presented, and provided me with a little bit of interesting detail on vCAC and vCO, however the PowerCLI content was very high level – as the title of the session would indicate, so this content was less relevant for me. I am however looking forward to the PowerCLI deep dive session on Thursday which should be far more applicable!

Lastly, I attended William Lam’s session “Not supported” session at the vBrownBag area, which was also live streamed. Two interesting things came up here which will be really useful for my role at Xtravirt:

  • VCSIM “2.0” released with vSphere 5.5. This is the vCenter Simulator, and the new iteration allows for configurations to be saved and restored, along with some new customisation functionality. Immensely useful for a development environment! Previously, the older VCSIM did not allow for some of this functionality, therefore was of less use to me
  • VMware Tools has been implemented for virtual ESXi hosts by a member of the VMware enginneering team – William showed us a quick look at this – it is available as a VIB and can be incorporated into ESXi image builds. Great news for those wanting tighter integration and ease of use in managing nested or virtual ESXi hosts.
William Lam presents his Not Supported session for vBrownBag

 

With things closing off, I headed back to the hotel for a quick 30 minute break, and then set off for dinner in the city with colleagues Ather Beg and Curtis Brown. We chose the same location as the vExpert / VCDX reception so that we could cross over straight to that after our meal and meet colleagues Gregg Robertson, Darren Woollard and Michael Poore. Here I met up with tons of contacts I knew via Twitter, but had never met in person before, including but not limited to: Erik Bussink, Andrew Mauro, Lee Dilworth.

VMworld Europe 2013 vRockstar Party, Partner Day, and PernixData Party

After a quick flight over from the rainy UK, I arrived in Barcelona along with fellow Xtravirt colleagues traveling from Gatwick airport, Darren Woollard and Michael Poore.

With very little time before the Sunday night vRockstar party commenced, we reformed and took a taxi down to central Barcelona to meet up with others at the Hard Rock cafe. It was great to meet some new faces (if you exclude Twitter profiles) for me – Fred Hofer, Lars Troen, Damian Davis, Patrick Redknap, Juan, et al as well as catching up with old – Jonathan Medd, and others.

Drinks and snacks were provided free, and the team that put everything together for the community did a really good job of keeping things running smoothly. Many thanks go out to them, as well as all the sponsors! Here are a few snaps I took at the event.

vRockstar Party #1

vRockstar Party #3 Prize draw

vRockstar Party #4

Early Monday morning meant Partner day had soon arrived, so after catching a taxi down to the conference center, registration was soon complete.

VMworld Europe 2013 entrance

Walkways were fairly empty at this stage, which was great for mobility and exploring the venue layout.

Darren Woollard and Curtis Brown, fellow Xtravirt colleagues walk the travellator
Darren Woollard and Curtis Brown, fellow Xtravirt colleagues walk the travellator

I took the time to complete a few Hands on Lab sessions – targeting down Puppet Labs, VMware vCO and vCAC, as I really do enjoy my automation topics. The hands on labs were predictably fairly quiet on partner day, so this was a good time to get them done. The sign up process was smooth and the staff handled things well – guiding people in to the BYOD or traditional HOL sections and getting everyone setup. Soon the VM counter had risen from around 7, to 1000 virtual machines deployed.

Hands on Labs, VMworld 2013

HOL - Cloud topics

An interesting wall mural/interactive VMware Timeline seen – I can place myself as really starting off with learning VMware technologies around 2007-2008 when VI3 was the “in thing” 🙂

VMware timeline
VMware timeline

The day ended after speaking with/meeting some new faces at the Bloggers lounge and us heading off to the PernixData party at the El Boo beach club in Barcelona. Many thanks to the guys at PernixData for putting this event together. The atmosphere and location were awesome, and so was the selection of food and drinks.

VMworld Europe 2013

Finally, I have the chance to attend the much anticipated VMworld Europe conference. I’ll be attending along with a few work colleagues and have pre-booked all my sessions using the VMworld.com schedule planner.

It looks to be a very busy week up ahead for me with conference sessions, hands on labs, and solutions exchange events booked one after the other, followed by various parties and events every evening.

A few of the sessions I am really looking forward to are: surprise surprise, the PowerCLI sessions, Puppet labs, and VMware vSphere web client SDK related sessions. All relevant to my interests in automation and programming 🙂

With regard to evenings events, I will be going to the vRockstar Pre-VMworld party/gathering on Sunday. I’ll also definitely be attending the vExpert/VCDX reception on Tuesday evening (15th October). Both should be great opportunities to meet others in the community and have a catch up with those whom I have met at previous VMUGs and events in the past. Other than those two, I’ll probably tag along with others to the EMC party and from there see what else is on the cards.

I plan on doing one or two blog posts based on what I get up to or see at the conference, time permitting, so watch this space for more on VMworld Europe 2013!