Post VMworld 2019
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Another VMworld is in the books, and as always I left having a great time. The conference in Europe grows every year and this year had 14000+ attendees. Barcelona is a great venue and as this has been the home of VMworld Europe for many years now the organization of the event seems to run smoother every year.
Some people complain on having the same venue year after year, and as much as I would have loved visiting other citites in Europe, I believe the benefit of being able to repeat the "last known good configuration" is key. And anyways, I'm in it for the conference and have no or little time to do any sightseeing after all so as far as I'm conserned Barcelona is fine, especially as the conference seems to be held even later in November next year.
The tagline for this year's VMworld was "Make your mark" and was the story for the opening keynote video when it turned it's focus on each and every attendee and what we can do, with the help of IT, for our businesses, the community and ultimately the world. Technology as a force for good is still a key for VMware with the investments in the Mercy Ships, and now also with the Netherlands Cancer Institute.
The General sessions this year was of course focused on Project Pacific, VMware Tanzu and the multi-cloud era. Much of this was already announced in the U.S. and I must say I was slightly disappointed that we didn't get anything "new" in Europe. Day two was a bit better with some nice demos on Tanzu, Pacific etc, but still I guess a lot of people had expected to maybe get the announcement of the next vSphere version. I talked to a few people about it, and to summarize, I think it's ultimately better to wait with the announcement until you have a solid product instead of rushing out something just to be ready for VMworld. We'll just have to look out for a VMware event in the coming months. If there is one thing to learn while waiting, it's Kubernetes.
What I do think was nice to see was the way the VMware vision really seems to materialize in something solid. The vision of Any Device, Any App, Any Cloud, has been preached for many years now, and with the recent announcements I believe VMware is coming really close on delivering that. A lot of the aquisitions done over the last years now seems to fit their part in the puzzle. There's exciting times ahead!
As last year I had a session in the VMTN / vBrownBag TechTalks. I'm honored to get the opportunity to present at such an amazing event and I hope the presentation gave some value to the people that attended. Here's the recording of the session. I'll have a blog post on it as well shortly. Thanks to all of the vBrownBag and VMTN folks for their community work! A lot of the value in attending these conferences is the opportunity you get to connect with other community members.
This year was my first as an official VMUG leader so I also got to attend the VMUG Leader lunch on Wednesday which was a nice experience. Always great to see the investment from VMware to the independent community. We got to have a panel discussion with Sanjay Poonen and Joe Baguley, a video from Pat Gelsinger, and a session where Cormac Hogan talked about his unexpected journey up to his work in the Office of the CTO at VMware.
As for breakout sessions I attended a few. My top ones this year was "The next generation of Lifecycle Management for vCenter Server", "60 minutes of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture" and "Evolving vRealize Automation". As always I also did the "PowerCLI deep dive". There's a few I missed, like some of the deep dives on Pacific, luckily you can catch the session recordings here.
To summarize, another great VMworld is over. Let's hope next year will be even better. See you in Barcelona, November 9th - 12th 2020!