VMworld Europe 2019: Day 2

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I should probably call this post VMworld Europe day 1, the actual day 1 as it kicked off with the first General Session keynote delivered by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.  It was interesting to hear all the updates coming out of VMware such as

  • Project Pacific: Running Kubernetes natively on VMware vSphere.
  • VMware Tanzu: A Portfolio of products and services to transform the way enterprises build modern apps. 
  • Project Galleon: An app marketplace delivering enterprise security and operations.
  • Software-defined Intrusion Detection: Delivered by VMware NSX Distributed IPS/IDS.

Sanjay Poonen delivered an update on how the recent acquisition of Carbon Black is going to be delivered. This looks to be launched with 7 modules plus AppDefense and Vulnerability Management from VMware to give a comprehensive security suite. The key takeaway was this will be fully agent-less with vSphere.

There were also a lot of updates around VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solutions and VMware Cloud on DellEMC. The quote that resonated with me the most was “Technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade”.

Following the keynote it was time to hit a few sessions. Following some good advice from the community I tried not to book too many sessions and this was quite difficult as there is a ton of interesting topics to choose from. One of the first things I did once signed up was to look for a deep-dive session delivered by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman and made sure I was on the list. It was also nice to get a retweet from Frank.

As you can guess Twitter was going crazy with all the updates going on but I noticed a few people discussing these cool VMware pin badges, and I had to get the vExpert one. I quickly found the Community stand where I met fellow vExperts including Ariel Sanchez Mora , Abdualla Abdulla and Wouter Kursten. It was great to chat to these guys and get some more advice being a first timer. They pointed me to the main desk where I manged to get my hands on this.

My day concluded with a meet up with the NSX vExpert group where we had chance to talk directly to the product managers about the future of the product. I can’t go into detail but I can say there is some exciting stuff in the pipeline. Tomorrow I plan to hit the solution exchange and also try to get a Hands on Lab session under my belt, but before any of that I need a few hours sleep and lots of coffee!