VMworld Recap: So Much Amazingness, So Little Time
In case you’ve been living under a virtual rock, VMworld is one of the biggest trade shows in our industry—the self-proclaimed “top cloud infrastructure and digital workspace event” on Earth. C2’s Solution Architect Jim Heintz and Senior System Engineer Paul LaPlaca, attended the latest incarnation of VMworld (August 27-31, 2017) at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center.
Here’s a quick overview of some highlights:
Bootcamps Galore
VMworld was chockablock with partner exchange bootcamps and customer bootcamps that emphasized application virtualization. These instructor-guided sessions helped attendees put theory into practice. The customer camps included dive dives into Microsoft SQL Server on vSphere (presented by Deji Akomolafe and Microsoft MVP David Klee); Oracle on VMware vSphere (guided by Sudhir Balasubramanian); and The VMware vSphere Advanced Performance Bootcamp (hosted by Mark Achtemichuk and other experts).
Showcase Keynotes Sessions
These four hour+ long presentations discussed VMware innovations and solutions regarding data center modernization, security, public clouds and digital workspaces. They included:
-A Monday afternoon keynote on “Delivering New User Experiences with Digital Workspaces” with Sumit Dhawan. Blogger Paul O’Doherty has a nice roundup of this keynote here.
-Raghu Raghuram, COO of Products & Cloud Services for VMware, delivered a talk on Simplifying and Accelerating Your Multi-Cloud Strategy.
-VMware’s VP of Product Management, Milin Desai (along with Tom Corn and Pere Monclus of VMware) offered insight about “Transforming Networking and Security for the Digital Era.”
-Chris Wolf, Paul Fazzone, Yanbing Li, and Purnima Padmanabhan broke things open with “Transforming the Data Center to Deliver Any Application on Any Platform.”
During Day 1 and Day 2, the top minds at VMware explored tech that will remake digital business. In case you missed these sessions, check out on-demand replays here. Quick run-down below:
-On Monday 8/28, VMware’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, together with COO, Sanjay Poonen explored “the key pillars responsible for reshaping industries – cloud, mobility, networking and security.”
-On Tuesday 8/29, CEO Pat Gelsinger and CTO Ray O’Farrell showed “demos… to help you deploy compelling and differentiated solutions and services, showcasing how VMware is innovating in exciting and unexpected ways.” Their session also featured a cameo from Michael Dell, CEO of Dell!
-On Thursday 8/31, MIT’s Hugh Herr, University of Cambridge’s Rana el Kaliouby of the and Boston Children’s Hospital’s Peter Weinstock joined forces to “reveal their world of natural machines that have already arrived.”
Meet the Experts Roundtables
Why work through challenging tech problems in a vacuum? Collaboration is the watchword. To that end, these whiteboard sessions gave participants “best-practice advice to guide [the] journey from strategy, to implementation, to adoption and value realization.”
Experts offered a nearly uncountable number of panel discussions, quick talks and roundtables on niche topics where “like-minded collea
gues [could] discuss common challenges and best practices.”
Personal Thoughts on the VMworld Experience
VMware is new and flexible and confusing. How exactly will this technology force us to rethink fundamental assumptions? How quickly will the most exciting tech come online? Which ideas are overhyped? And which amazing insights are possibly slipping under the radar?
Stay tuned. The C2 team is busy digesting the VMworld experience, and it’s going to take us some time to absorb the lessons of these dynamic presentations. We’ll keep you posted in the coming weeks and months, so you can get the most out of VMware.