VMWorld 2015 – Day 4

You’ll notice that all of these VMWorld posts are always up a day after the fact – that would be because there is a severe shortage of free time here. Even when you sit down at the bloggers table, it’s extremely hard to get work done because you have tech legends standing around you talking, sometimes even talking TO you.

Anyways, a recap of yesterday:

• VMWorld kicked off their first hackathon to push forward their DevOps initiative. I didn’t spend any time over there, but from where I sat in the hang space it looked like it had pretty good activity for the first year of the event.
• I attended the vExpert Panel on Hyperconverged Infrastructure. The takeaway there is that HCI is definitely a use case scenario, and one of its biggest drawbacks is that you have to scale everything linearly (i.e. If I need more storage, but not as much compute, there isn’t a whole lot that can be done). Overall it seemed that about %20 of the audience either had implemented or will implement HCI in the next 12 months … Interesting stat.
• I was lucky enough to visit Steve Pantol who is the co-author of the excellent Networking for VMware Admins  and got him to sign my book.
• Later on I met Nick Marshall and Grant Orchard, two out of three of the authors who worked on Mastering VMware vSphere 6. Josh Atwell couldn’t make it as he was busy receiving the 2015 VMUG Partnership Award. Incidentally I bumped into him when he joined my group of three folks for beer, and then later again on the street. Both times I was without my book though.
• I was planning on heading over to the Hang Space when I ran into Ariel Sanchez (@arielsanchezmor) who is part of the vBrownBag community. We ended up heading over together where I was introduced to yet more members of the community. He had a podcast to do (the LATAM vBrownBag) in Spanish, so I took the time to head over to the Solutions Exchange to talk to some vendors.

I was back in the Hang Space to watch a live The Geek Whisperers podcast. That was very entertaining to see live. I also watched a talk by John Arrasjid (VCDX001) – that made me feel like I was in the company of royalty. John was super approachable and made sure to talk to anyone who was interested. Plus he had some circa 2003 VMware stickers he was giving out.

The day was wrapped up with a visit to AT&T park, where VMware was throwing the biggest party I have attended. All the food booths were open, the field was filled with carnival rides and midway games, and they had some live bands. The music wasn’t really my taste, but I found some good company there. I ended up talking with a reseller who I had met while in line. Next thing I know they were closing up the park – yet another example of how much networking you can do at this conference.

I’ll likely have one more post covering what happened today at VMWorld … Expect that up in the next couple of days. I’m also planning something along the lines of a full recap of sessions, announcements, and thoughts, along with a few posts about some interesting things I saw there.

Stay tuned.