vkernel

This year was my first time attending VMworld Europe 2019 in Barcelona. I was very excited for this event because this is the place where you need to be for the latest updates, hands on labs, sessions and to meet up with vendors/partners.

The first thing to do before going to Barcelona is register to the sessions that you would like to attend. Registering to sessions was possible through the VMworld website or the VMworld mobile app.

Scheduled Sessions

• [HBI3485BES] How to MIGRATE Windows and Linux Servers to vSphere and vCloud Director with near zero downtime
• [CNET2141BE] HCX – Automating Workload Migration for Data Centers and Clouds
• [HBI21452BE] vCloud Director 10; Deliver Cloud Services on Any VMware Endpoint
• [HBO1689BE] Get More Insight into Your Network with vRealize Network Insight
• [ELW-2015-01-SDC_E] VMware Skyline – Proactive SupportBeyond Break/Fix
• [EDU2111E] vSphere Performance Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis via ESXTOP

All the good sessions were fully booked in a few hours. If you are planning to attend VMworld next year and the session that you would like to attend is full, just go to the room were the session will be held. I went to some fully booked sessions to and most of the time they just let me in.

Hands-on labs and Odyssey

Beside the sessions that are held there were also other cool things to do at VMworld. There was a big area that was used for the Hands on labs. They had a lot of new content that was available in the hands-on lab at VMworld, that they are planning to release online. I did a lot of hands-on labs myself to see the new functionalities of vCD, NSX, Skyline and other products as well. There was also an Odyssey section where you can compete against other VMware engineers. The game exists out of a few tasks that needs be completed in for instance NSX-T. The end time from all the participants was shown at the end of the game on the leaderbord. I decided to join the game as well and this was the result:

There was also a big area reserved and used for the solution exchange. In this hall you were able to meet up with vendors that have a product that leverage the VMware stack. All the vendors had their own booth where they could demo their product. Most of the vendors were also giving away free goodies.

A few highlights of VMworld Europe 2019:

• Project pacific was announced during the first keynote of VMworld. Project pacific is basically turning vSphere into the app platform of the future. More information can be found here.
• Ray O’Farrell (former CTO) will now be leading cloud-native strategy and Greg Lavender will be the new CTO of cloud architecture
• VMware Tanzu will be the most comprehensive enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based portfolio for modern applications.
• The roadmap of vCD in combination with NSX-T. Some important features that were available in NSX-V (like SSL-VPN) will be available in NSX-T.
• VMware announced new feature called NSX distributed IDS/IPS. More information can be found here.
• VMware cloud director service (cDS) was announced during VMworld. This will help VMware cloud provider partners to offer multi tenancy to vCloud users by adding a new provider backed by VMC on AWS.

VMware already published the recorded sessions online. You can find the VMworld 2019 sessions here.

Final Words

Overall, VMworld was a blast. Met a lot of great VMware engineers. Shared knowledge and learned a lot during the great sessions.