No general session today, but that doesn’t mean it’s time for a lay in, oh no I did my usual walk to Moscone this morning trying another coffee shop I noticed walking back from the party last night. Unfortunately it didn’t meet up to my standards (coffee snob here), I’ll need to get over to @bluebottleroast again before VMworld is over 🙂

My feet/legs were fine again today taking on the extra walking I’ve been doing, but my shoulder seems to be sore after wearing a shoulder bag for the entire conference I went with an iPAD for blogging and have been posting my entire VMworld blog series via iPAD with WordPress and iPhone for pictures, these seems to work well although I have had to create each twitter handle link manually which isn’t the best.

The shoulder bag was exceptionally full with vExpert swag yesterday (which I blame for my shoulder being sore today), I’ve been staying out all day and not returning to the airbnb apartment inbetween just to maximise my time at the conference. I’ve actually found it fine and haven’t felt overly tired (due to no jetlag and plenty of coffee), it’s also meant when I did finally head back there was no problem sleeping.

So onto the event, this morning I started off with attending @deepstoragenet‘s session Putting Virtual Volumes to Work – Storage Best Practices for vSphere 6 and Beyond #STO5822 which I found to be really valuable, Howard went into some detail about what vVOLs brings to storage and he offered some great advice on what questions you need to ask your vendors when looking for features.

I then went on to attend @rayheffer session VDI Sizing Deep Dive – The Horizon Sizing Tool #EUC4827 which included the introduction of the Horizon sizing tool, again good content and some useful advice on sizing Horizon designs.

I also got an email from the #VCDX Program to confirm my submission had been accepted and that I’d progressed to the technical review stage (prior to defence).

Next I had the chance to share a quick milkshake with my buddy @vstewed and catch up with him to hear about his experiences of the conference before heading over to the VMUG Leader Lunch.

This was a great opportunity to meet with other VMUG Leaders and discuss what we do and come together to hear more about VMUG initatives. Brad Tomkins @vmug_ceo who reacently joined VMUG as the new CEO also gave a speech sharing his vision on the future of VMUG.

We were then provided with a Q&A session with Pat Gelsinger, Ragu Raghuram and Kit Colbert where we talked openly about VMware’s direction, how VMUG is involved and how as Leaders we can help shape adoption of the new changes VMware experience as they grow beyond infrastructure into Public Cloud and Development.

One of the topics discussed was the inclusion of EVALExperience with VMUG Advantage. If you don’t know about this then you should, as it providing 365 day licensing for a whole load of VMware technologies and makes subscribing to this compelling!

We were also told the following products being included before the end of 2015:

• NSX
• vCloud Air ($600 subscription valid for 365 days)
• Airwatch.

These are all exciting inclusions into EVALExperience!

Each year the VMUG awards it’s Leaders for their contribution to the VMUG community and this year we came away with 2 awards (w00t) The Extra Mile award (Melbourne VMUG @mvmug) which myself and @daunce_ picked up and the Outstanding SE/VMware Support Award which was awarded to @wheatcloud, well done mate and thanks for your continued support!

It was then time to head back to the Hang Space where I bumped into @vcdx001 and @markgabbs and got a chance to glimpse at their new IT Architect book which hopefully will be released soon! If you’re interested in IT Architecture follow @ITASeries on twitter to learn more!

I then headed over to the Solutions Exchange for the last day of booth duty, I’ve really enjoyed the interaction with VMworld attendees and the vibe created down on the showfloor, I think it’s a highlight of the whole VMworld experience.

I took a bit of time to walk around the show floor and have a look at some of the more interesting companies at the show this year, have a look at their websites to learn more about their offerings (I promise you wont be disappointed investing time in learning about these technologies):

Platform9 

http://platform9.com/product/why_platform9.html @Platform9sys who have a simplified OpenStack for on premises deployment supporting vSphere.

Disclaimer: They also had a masseur who got to work on my shoulder and made it feel loads better straight away, thanks! 🙂

 

CloudPhysics

http://www.cloudphysics.com/product/ @CloudPhysics who have introduced big data analytics to vSphere management. I also caught up with @virtualirfan and @anilsedha.

Rubrik

http://www.rubrik.com/product/ @rubrikinc who have created a converged data protection solution to manage all your backup woes, they’re reinventing how data protection should be managed via the cloud.

Evening Entertainment

I then spent some time with the Pure Storage team and had the chance to check out the @NANDRover before heading off to the #UNparty.

I decided to attend the #UNparty as I really wanted to have a chat with some of the community, enjoy some microbewery beers and hear other peoples perspective on the event instead of the loud noise of live music, thanks to @millardjk and @mattvogt for organising!

Hunger got the better of us and we ended up heading over to In-n-out Burger before calling it a night.

I wanted to finish todays post with a picture of VMworld at AT&T curtesy of @uber_tech_geek (Thanks mate!)