Posts in the series:
- VMworld Europe 2017 – TAM Customer Day
- VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 1
- VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 2
- VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 3
Following on from Day 1 of VMworld Europe 2017, Day 2 started off in similar fashion with the General Session in Hall 4.0 at 9:00AM CEST.
General Session
The Day 2 General Session started off with a “fireside” Q&A session with Pat Gelsinger, CEO; Sanjay Poonen, COO and Ray O’Farrell, CTO which addressed some of the questions that had been submitted following the General Session on Day 1.
The Q&A questions covered a variety of key areas surrounding VMware’s strategy, vision and technology; these ranged from Open Source, NSX, IoT and Containers with the main theme being the “evolution of technology” and that from VMware’s perspective this is technology that is evolving at speed.
After this Q&A session, Pat + Sanjay left the stage and Ray proceeded with the main part of the General Session where he along with assistance from Chris Wolf, VP & CTO Global Field and Purnima Padmanabhan, VP, Product Management, CMBU demoed the VMware product offerings using a fictitious company called “Elastic Sky Pizza”.
If you were either at VMworld US or watched the General Session online the bulk of this demo followed the same format and had similar content however there were some exceptions as VMware wanted to showcase new products / technologies which had been recently announced.
The purpose of the demo was to highlight the challenges that IT departments are facing on a daily basis to meet the challenges and demands of their customers and internal businesses and how VMware products can help them achieve this.
Some of the technologies and products that were highlighted during the demo:
- VMware HCX was used to show how the Help Desk workload for ESP could be migrated seamlessly from an on-prem data center to a vCenter running on IBM Cloud. This was very impressive and could be a game changer for VMware as I mentioned in my tweet.
Pivotal Container Service (PKS) is a new collaborative offering from Pivotal + VMware + Google which is used to create a container platform that can deploy and operate enterprise-ready Kubernetes (hence the K in PKS) as well as a seamless method to run and migrate container-based workloads either On-Prem or on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
VMware AppDefense is a new product offering that leverages virtual infrastructure to monitor running applications. It creates a configured state and uses this to detect any anomalies and automates responses.
VMware Design Studio
The next major event for me on Day 2 was a 90 minute session with the VMware UX Team. In this session I got a sneak peak at mock-ups of the new Capacity UI, which is planned for the next release of vRealize Operations due out at the end of 2017 as well as an opportunity to provide my feedback and suggestions which could be implemented before the GA release.
The purpose of this session was to look at not only the UI but also put myself in a user / customer’s shoes and see if the UX workflow made sense and was intuitive or not by running through different scenarios and End To End use cases. I was excited to attend this session as a top pain point I hear from customers is around Capacity and Capacity calculations and how to interpret the numbers.
From what I saw, the UI looked more fluid and I can definitely see improvements which I believe our customers are going to like and embrace in the next release. Unfortunately I cannot say much more as this was internal information and subject to NDA.
At the end of the session I got a souvenir t-shirt which was an added bonus!
Whilst I was passing time and getting some work done waiting for the evening’s events I saw my earlier tweet from the UX Design meeting flash up on the main Session Highlights screen within VMworld which was an unexpected surprise!
VMworld Customer Appreciation Party feat The Kaiser Chiefs
After a meetup with some fellow CTO Ambassadors, the evening ended with the Customer Appreciation party featuring The Kaiser Chiefs, where I was hanging out with various members of VMware R&D and having a good time. It seems my “Keep Calm and Get Logs” t-shirt from VMware GSS was quite popular especially with Steve Flanders from the Log Insight Team!
I’m not a huge fan of the Kaiser Chiefs but they gave a good performance and there was a positive vibe from the crowd.
After the party, I headed out for more drinks and craft beers at Kaelderkold and got back to my hotel in the early hours – a little worse for wear! 🙂
Stay tuned to more posts reviewing my time at VMworld Europe 2017!
— Lukas
lukaswinn.net 
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