VMworld Europe 2019: Day 3

Posted on by

I kicked off day 3 with the second general session, delivered by VMware Executive Vice President, Ray O’Farrell. The session covered four key focus areas for VMware and used a fictitious company called Tanzu Tees – who manufacture and sell t-shirts via their online store. 

  • Build and Run: 
  • Connect and Protect
  • Manage
  • Experience

Each area involved demonstration that showcased the solution to a problem using VMware technology. I was amazed how good the demo’s worked and the whole process was utterly seamless. Following this was an inspiring story of resilience delivered by Bear Grylls who shared his story on how he deals with the four F’s, Failures, Fear, Fire and Faith. The one statement Bear made that’s stuck with me is “failure is a doorway you have to go through to succeed”. I think he’s spot on with that. 

Following a quick pit stop for coffee I made my way to the solutions exchange to have a chat with some key vendors about their products and direction. Some of these I work with day to day but I made sure to visit stands such as Rubrik and Cohesity where I’m not that familiar with what they do. 

My fist stop was the Veeam stand as I was very keen to hear the latest on v10 (along with probably 15,000 other people) and got some good demo’s of this release and also a tour of Office 365 backup v4. I also managed to get access to the beta program of v10 which I’ll deploy in the lab once I’m back. Following this I also had some useful discussions with Zerto, Kemp, Dell EMC, iland and VMware. I loved the way the VMworld stand was setup, they had multiple pods and each one covered a specific technology along with a screen and white board. I was able to get some good demos on HCX, VMConAWS, Network Insight and more. I spent far more time than I planned to in the solutions exchange which meant I ran out of time to complete and of the hands on labs (sad face). 

The evenings entertainment was called VMworld fest and this years headline act was the Stereophonics. To warm up the crowd the organised had booked a band called RPJ. These guys performed covers of loads of classic songs and were absolutely amazing. I was later informed that RPJ stood for Rick Parfitt Junior, yes the son of Status Quo legend Rick Pariftt. Once they warmed the crowd up it was over to the Stereophonics to belt a few of their classics. Fortunately getting a beer refill was easy as there were guys with what I can describe as a beer rucksack passing by every few minutes.  

After one or two drinks I headed back to the hotel to crash out for one final time…. after writing this post. Tomorrow is straight to the airport to catch the flight home so unfortunately I’ll miss the vExpert swag bags that Corey was giving away.