Yes, yes, I know the post is late. I’ll do day 3 and release day 4 immediately after this one. My excuse? Family time.
Anyway back to Day 3.
Today, I was a really busy day. I had resolved to meet with a few people on the solution floor as well as attending as many sessions as I could.
Session: General Session
Speaker: Various
The two General sessions are worth a watch You can see them here
NSX 6.2 got a big mention with a really interesting customer story (look out for the customer with the funky jacket).
A large part of the focus was talking about where VMware want to push NSX going forward. This is a really interesting space. While NSX can be very complicated, I believe bits of it going to make their way into other products.
Pat Gelsinger also can onto stage. What he had to say was quite interesting about companies needing to change and move forward or face being left behind. However the big elephant in the room wasn’t really talked about EMC/DELL. I was a bit disappointed but in hind site I agree that it wasn’t right to talk about that to the conference attendees before you spoke to the employees.
Session: Solutions Exchange
Dimos and I hit the solutions exchange. There were a few vendors I wanted to see and look at their products, Solidfire being one and HGST being another. Take a look at HGST if you get the change. Their products are very mature and very well priced. What was nice to see a lot more smaller companies participating this year too.
Session: Virtual SAN Customer Panel
Speaker: Rory Choudhuri
Another good session but this time with customers themselves giving updates of their experience with VSAN. This was very enjoyable and I managed to participate quite a lot.
Session: Stretched Clusters with Expert
Speaker: Lee Dilworth – Principal Systems Engineer , VMware
A much smaller meeting with seven of us and Lee. This was in the experts lounge and Lee took us through what to look out for in Stretched clusters, SRM, Stretched VSAN. Nice participation with the attendees.
Session: vRealize Operations Insight: Manage vSphere and Your Entire Data Center
Speakers: Himanshu Singh and Hicham (he-sham) Mourad
Good talk. Big focus on Log insight and the benefits of intelligent analysis. Both speakers had a good raport with their audience.
Session: VMware Virtual SAN – Architecture Deep Dive
Speakers: Christian Dickmann, Rawlinson Rivera
I was quite interested this. I wanted to see what had really changed under the hood between 5.5 and 6.1. Well it turns out a lot has changes. Both speakers really know their stuff but i was very impressed with Christian. Looking at how the snapshot process has changed (for the better) and the new Virsto on-disk format was quite cool.
After this I headed back to the sister-in-laws. I decided to give the VMworld party a miss and take the sister-in-law and her boyfriend out for dinner to say thank you for putting up with me for the past few days. We had dinner at a little Japanese restaurant called Yen in Gracia.