VMWorld 2015 – Day 3

Yesterday started off with the second keynote of the event, which is traditionally more technical than the first day. The big highlights were:

• A partnership was announce with Microsoft regarding delivery and management of Windows 10 to end user devices.
• A new version of Identity Manager
• Some enhancements for Horizon 6.2

Overall very focused on End User Computing which brought about an interesting remark. CEO Pat Gelsinger was describing his 5 Imperatives for Digital Businesses, one of which was security. He used Edward Snowden as an example of why companies need to look at security from the endpoint up.

I was able to get into the much anticipated Stretched Cluster on vSAN session, hosted by Duncan Epping and Rawlinson Rivera. That was yet another packed session, and with good reason. Rawlinson was able to give a technical overview of what is involved with a stretched cluster, and he also announced that there is now a Witness appliance which handles all of the syncing, which can be cloud hosted. The big take away of this is that now if you lose a site, your witness will be able immediately figure out what site is down and keep on going.

The other big news that came towards the end of the session was that a new Remote Office / Branch Office (ROBO) of vSAN will be available. This new version only has a two node requirement which will definitely open up a lot of doors for the SMB and for situations where three nodes just isn’t feasible for whatever reason (cost, space, security, etc.).

I attended the vSAN 6 workshop, which was a big letdown. Not because of the content, but mainly because of how it was presented. There were two instructors, and things started off good, but once the second instructor took over things went off the rails a bit. Unfortunately he was a little hard to understand, and he was moving so fast that most folks couldn’t keep up. In some cases he was not conveying some steps, or he would have to go back to the beginning so folks could catch up (but still blow through it quickly). I ended up leaving that sessions about 20 minutes early as it just was not valuable enough for me at that point.

I managed to catch a few more vBrownBag talks on topics such as PowerCLI, growing your career, and vExpert spotlights. These talks are all about 15 minutes in length and are available at www.professionalvmware.com – I highly encourage you to check it out.

I ended the day off by attending a Veeam session which was chalk full of announcements; so much so that it will likely have to be a different post (hopefully soon). Lots of improvements on existing technologies as well as some new goodies.

The evening was spent bouncing around between parties, but it was phenomenal with regards of folks that I got to meet. This conference gets better and better with each passing day.