VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 4 – Closing Sessions

VMworld

Yesterday was the last day of VMworld 2016 in Barcelona. It was a great day for me personally because of all those nice chats with people which i look up upon. I learned much this week, learned much about technology, future trends and i met some really nice and kind people. It’s somehow sad that it’s just one week of VMworld. But with all the early wake up at morning, walking throughout the day and probably the one or another party the evening it’s also little exhausting. Let me provide you a short overview what was on my schedule yesterday.

VMware Hands-on Labs

I took another hours to get some experience with the VMware Hands-on Labs (VMware HOL). This is a great opportunity to learn something about a product which you don’t know much about, but it’s also great to know more about an already known product. I took the labs for VSAN and VMware Horizon View. In my homelab i’m already used to work with VSAN, but i didn’t know much about Horizon View. We use it in our company to enable our technicians an easy way to connect from on the go or at home to some virtual desktops, looking at customers network documentation or doing all the reporting stuff. Now i’ve got some little more insights about that great product.

Meet the experts

The afternoon i’ve spent with chatting and exploring the solutions exchange, and too for gathering some schwag, you know that, Kev 😉 I had also the chance to get into a close circle of people (we were three) to have a chat with VMware’s senior technical marketing engineer Emad Younis about the new version of VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance). We took a look at the deployment of Platform Services Controller (PSC). And now we know to keep the deployment flat and simple. Another VMware specialist joined in, we had also a talk in the same session with Mike Foley, VMware’s guy for security of the core platform (vSphere). There we had a short insight about securing the Web Client with RSA tokens.

vSphere Troubleshooting made easy

The last session which i attended was “vSphere Troubleshooting made easy”. Well, what we saw at the presentation wasn’t that easy i think. Lots of CLI commands, lots of useful tools most people probably don’t are aware of. It was a technical deep dive in my opinion, but it was a good one. I’ll do a blog post about this session in a short while, because i think you should know some of that stuff. If you don’t had any issues with your vSphere environment then you’re a lucky guy, but you probably can too take some benefits from the following post.

Conclusion about VMworld week

This week was one of a kind. Exhausting, interesting, informative and sporty at the same time. I met some really kind persons and i’m looking forward to meet them at another time at another VMworld. But i’m starting too to miss the mountains in my home country. So one week is probably enough.

Special thanks go to Kev, Ather, Gareth, Chris, Chris, Chris, Amit, Fred and Andi. You are cool guys and i really enjoyed the time with you. You gave me some good insights about certification and how to not fail again 🙂

And another special thank you goes to CloudCredibilities CloudCredGeeg Noell. Thanks for your support in the labs and the nice memories i can take home 🙂

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VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 3 – Announcement Overview

VMworld

Today in the morning i will provide you a short overview over the recently made announcements here at VMworld Barcelona. VMware announced some long expected new product versions at the general sessions at VMworld. Lets look a little closer.

vSphere 6.5

vSphere 6.5 is the foundation of next-generation infrastructure for your next-generation apps. Decrease CapEx and OpEx, simplify data center operations and increase business efficiency through virtualization.

Learn more >>

vRealize Suite Cloud Management Platform

The enterprise-ready cloud management platform from VMware, vRealize Suite, delivers a complete solution for managing private, public and hybrid clouds. And there is a 25% discount to on this solution for some time, take advantage of this limited time opportunity.

See what’s new >>

Workspace ONE Essentials

It’s all about the digital workspace. Work from from anywhere from any device. The new Workspace ONE Essentials delivers a customer-simple experience, integrating single sign-on access to web and mobile apps. Starting at 4$ per user and month at a cloud subscription its fairly attractive to get started with Workspace ONE Essentials.

Read more >>

What’s new >>

Photon Platform: Built for Cloud Native Workloads

Photon platform is an enterprise cloud infrastructure platform. Give your developers the tools and services they need to build and run modern applications, while retaining control and security of your data center. Enjoy an intuitive and easy-to-use REST API, CIL and HTML5 user interface. Deliver on-demand access to high available Kubernetes clusters, scaling up or down with zero maintenance.

Discover more >>

Read the announcement blog post >>

Virtual SAN 6.5

Virtual SAN is the storage platform used in the hyper-converged systems. With version 6.5 VMware delivers new capabilities. Consolidate your data center silos, accelerate responsiveness and deliver extensibility to meet future cloud and cloud-native demands. Virtual SAN enables you to respond 10x faster, reduce TCO by 50% and makes you ready for scaling to tomorrow. Virtual SAN 6.5 now brings iSCSI access to non-virtualized workloads with iSCSI support. You can also connect to nodes togehter (2-Node Direct Connect) to save up to 20% per ROBO site. It supports the next-generation hardware, like large capacity drives with 512e support.

Get the details >>

Thats it folks for the moment. Stay tuned for more to come!

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VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 2 – Solutions Exchange

VMworld

An awesome day finds his end after visiting the VMworld Solutions Exchange today. At day 2 at VMworld you can visit the Solution Exchange. Here you will find the many booths from different hardware and software vendors, VMware partners and more. I circled mostly around the Veeam booth today and walked around to get a rough overview of this overwhelming presentations all around.

Veeam at VMworld booth #P207

I’ve learned some great new things today. How about using the ReFS filesystem on a Windows Server 2016 as a backup repository for Veeam? It gives you so many benefits, you just want to get started with it. Fast cloning gives a real boost to the synthetic full backup. This feature doesn’t move or copy files, but instead references just the backup file blocks already existing on the filesystem. Another great new feature is the spaceless full backup. You can now have more full backups on disk which are sharing the same data blocks. You can lower costs for backup storage and get more speed than using deduplication storage (data rehydration process). Last but not least the data integrity streams. Veeam Backup & Replication enables data integrity streams automatically. These streams are used in the background by ReFS data integrity scanner. It scans your whole archive and not only the latest restore point. As Rock Vanover says: “storage-level corruption guard feature on steroids”.

When Veeam Backup 9.5 is generally available i’ll do some more detailed blogging about these new features. Veeam is my first choice backup and availability software, even at the customer or in my homelab.

Intel at VMworld booth #D303

I’m getting used to SSD disks (solid state drives). They are much faster then normal spinning disks and the price per gigabyte comes down more and more. I’ve got them in my home computer, in all of laptops and running also an all-flash vSphere homelab. Today i visited also the Intel booth here at VMworld and got a nice deep dive about actual and future SSD development. They had a 8-node vSphere cluster running completely on NVMe disks. It delivered about 750k IOPS when they did the benchmark for several hours. Did you know that you can, depending of the Intel SSD model, write 2TB to 8TB of data daily for about five years? Five years of constant writes, with full manufacturer warranty!

This was it, my short overview over the day.

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VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 1 – Partner Exchange

VMworld

Today its the really first day of VMworld in Barcelona. The event kicked off with the Partner Exchange. In this part of the exhibition, especially designed for partners, you will get some insights in marketing, development of products. Also there will be deeper insights in actual cooperations between VMware and other companies. And for sure, tons of numbers. How bigger your sales can be? How your customer can benefit from VMware products? Just to name a few. There were some interesting breakout sessions today.

But its not only the products, the sessions and all that information. Its also the community. There are so many people here, from different countries, with different interests and ideas. Bloggers, gurus, specialists, sales professionals and technicians. It is always a good idea to join a chat or discussion, to learn people and perhaps get a new sight at a specific topic.

Today i was really overwhelmed about the huge amount of stuff to do and to see. You can attend the sessions, you can learn with VMware Hands-On Labs, even self paced or led by a teacher. And there are quite a some challenging ones.

If you wan’t to get certified you can profit from the discounts here at VMworld. Some 50% off a certification exam isn’t bad at all. And even if you fail you will gain experience. And don’t forget the discounts on specific on-demand courses online. If you wan’t to access those courses in a on-demand manner, when you have the time to, then why not profit of these discounts?

And last but not least the exhibition itself. So many vendors of hardware and software are here in Barelona with their own booth, showing off the latest invention in server hardware, storage, backup and restore, availability solutions.

If you are here at VMworld and not using the official VMworld app for your smartphone you should probably get it in the app stores. With this app you can access your personal schedule, if you scheduled it their website. You will get notifications about the upcoming sessions you scheduled, you can schedule a session you missed or wan’t to attend through this app too.

How to get the app:

Go to the website http://www.vmworld.com/en/europe/mobile-app.html and there you’ll find the download links. Its available for iOS and Android devices.

Now have fun and enjoy the first day here in Barcelona at VMworld 🙂

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VMware VMworld EMEA 2016 – Day 0 – Travel to Spain

VMworld

VMworldToday i traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to attend one of the biggest IT tech events on the world. I’ll attend VMware VMworld this week, the little sister of VMworld in Las Vegas.

The travel itself was nice and comfortable. Having a nice view out of the train windows and a good coffee at the SWISS Business Lounge before flight was great. It was my first visit in the Business Lounge. I don’t flight often, but when i do, for short trips, i’ll book business class. The tickets aren’t that expensive as you might think. But you’ve got some good benefits, as extra hand luggage, more leg room, the Business Lounge and some other things. Think about it the next time you’ll do a short trip.

I started my travel from Zurich Airport, one of the bigger hops in Europe. I was a little early, as always, and the gate information wasn’t available at this time. So i spent the time waiting for an update here in the nice Business Lounge with a coffee and my blog.

I don’t know what to expect from VMworld. It is my first visit ever of a VMworld. I will meet some people i only know from Twitter but not yet personally. I’ll try to attend some VMware Hands-On Labs (perhaps also some challenging ones). There will be tons of informations to literally soak up. Whats the next trend on cloud computing? What are the features of new vSphere and other VMware software solutions? I will also meet up with some guys of Veeam at their booth, having a good talk.

Sure there are some parties too. And as i heard they are legendary. The first one will start today evening. The famous #vRockstar party at the Hardrock Cafe is one of those. On Tuesday there will be the Veeam party and on Wednesday there is the VMware party directly at the event hall.

Oh, in case you missed it: VMware has now a strong partnership with Amazon Cloud Services, Amazon AWS. You can run your vSphere, VSAN and NSX directly in the Amazon Cloud, using your known management tools.

I hope to see some of you, my dear readers, at VMworld this year! Have a nice week!