VMworld 2014 - Day 2

Day 2 can often get off to a sluggish start for many. Either from hitting the parties too hard the night before, or misjudging the time required to get into the conference centre, there were still quite a few people arriving after Wednesday's keynote session had started.

Keynote

The keynote on a Wednesday is usually used to take a closer look at some of the new and forthcoming changes in VMware's products and this year was no exception. Naturally, vRealize Operations got some attention, but so did CodeStream – VMware's forthcoming DevOps integration with vRealize Automation. I'm not an application developer myself but it would be interesting to see that in action with real developers using it. If you missed the keynote or are curious about codestream, it's purpose is to manage the release process of application code into different environments (Test / Acceptance / Pre-Production, Production etc) in accordance with definable processes.

Also of interest in the keynote were Docker containers. This is something I do want to learn more about.

VMUG Leader Lunch

Once the keynote was over I had very little time before attending a lunch meeting for VMUG leaders. As with last year, this was an opportunity to meet VMUG leaders from other European countries – and some from further afield – have a quick lunch  away from some of the noise of the main conference halls and join and open Question & Answer session with Joe Baguely (VMware EMEA CTO) and Pat Gelsinger (I think he's VMware's CEO or something :)). The topics discussed ranged from the next version of vSphere, Joe's designs on Pat's job, product name choices, through to five-year plans.

Sessions

Probably my favourite session of the day was MGT2047 – Planning a High-Availability Deployment of vRealize Automation. Although I've done of this, I decided to go as I wanted to be sure that I'm doing it correctly and that there aren't any gotchas that I didn't know about. It's also an opportunity to meet and question the people who might be able to get me answers in the future.

Hall Crawl

This is a traditional, pre-VMworld-party event that basically involves drinking beer (if that's your thing) and visiting the vendor stands.

VMworld Party

Sorry if you're a fan, but Taio Cruz last year wasn't very good and my sister-in-law laughed very loudly at the idea of him being the entertainment at a technical conference. This year's band was announced fairly early on and turned out to be Simple Minds. (My brother was a bit jealous.) They may be getting on a bit but they got a great reception and an encore.