Dell EMC Yeah, I know, Dell buys EMC for a proper Doctor Evil amount of money, on top of the billions it already owed the banks and VC guys who helped it to go private last year, but like I say, a debt is just a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper until someone actually calls it in. So whatever. VMware is still independent, just as it was last week, so we all have to wait to see just how this shakes out.

Ok, so first things first, I don’t know what day this is, day 1, day 0 or day -1, so it will have to stay as Sunday. That means flying to VMworld Europe day, a number of hours spent in transit, by now the normal Airbnb approach to staying in Barcelona, considering that basically all I will do in this apartment is sleep and shower. OK, and blog. It’s only a couple of hours from Gatwick to Barcelona, but today’s transport involved car, train, plane, taxi, taxi, feet, which would have been a lot worse had I not been able to sponge lifts off of unnamed people’s expenses :-) You have to love this community.

There’s no doubt that the likes of Nutanix, and SimpliVity are the standard bearers for a whole raft of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) products which are changing the way that we can think about our infrastructure these days. There’s definitely use cases out there. Maybe you’re finally having your year of VDI, your FC fabric switches might be getting full, perhaps a new requirement needs separate storage or maybe, like me, you’re just HCI curious.

This is a quick post to compare the releases of some Pure Storage products which I’ve been using over the past couple of months now. I have to say I was very impressed with the towel 1.0 release, excellent capacity and coverage, a smooth side and a rough side, the well known Pure orange colour prominent throughout. At some 160 x 100 cm, there’s coverage for even the most, shall we say, ‘demanding’ IT Professional.

Cormac Hogan has posted a couple of blog posts in the last 24 hours detailing the new features offered by the newly announced (today?) release of VSAN 6.1 and also lifted the veil somewhat on what can be expected in the next release, including another VSAN beta signup offer. Whatever you may think about the adoption rates for VSAN there’s no arguing with the pace of development coming out of VMware for this technology.

So here we go, The Keynote from the first day of VMworld 2015, San Fran. This is more a stream of thought than anything totally structured/sensible and is partly my notes to see what I need to go look at later on! Apps and Cloud huh? Opening with a video before Carl Eschenbach takes the stage. There are a record 23,000 folks attending in person this year, somewhat different from the 1,200 in the first year, plus loads of folks like me watching from further afield.

Sometime yesterday, VMware announced the existence of VMware Validated Designs, which are a series of architecture designs validated by VMware experts. These appear to be a number of fluid designs (sorry to use a brave liquid word there but you’ll see what I mean) which will be updated regularly, meaning that the design principles espoused within will not be stuck at a single release version and more importantly will not be stuck at a single product.

Once you have created an account with Ravello and Uploaded some images, then it is time to start building a lab environment on someone else’s cloud. If you’ve not signed up for a Ravello account, then you can do that here and if you’ve not read my first article in this series, then you should go here. I’ll wait. So, to get started you’ll need to create an empty, cloud optimised, ESXi application and then install ESXi within it.

Background Ravello Systems was founded in early 2011 by the same people who created the KVM hypervisor. Rami Tamir is the CEO and he took an invited audience of vExperts through a preview of Ravello InceptionSX on a pre-launch briefing early in August 2015. The Ravello Systems mission statement is to provide Cloud Economics (Pay as you go, on demand, endless capacity at commodity prices) for All Workloads across All Environments while Maintaining SLAs, Tools, Security etc.

So, the VMworld Europe schedule builder opened up today and some of the sessions are already full up. Scary. Almost every guided lab session was full up by lunchtime on day 1, I wonder if the same folks got in to all of them, quite likely! This is the list I am thinking of at the moment. I am sure this will get turned on it’s head when more info comes out about TAM Customer Central, additional sessions get announced after the releases announced at VMworld US and I’ll need time to take a look at the solutions exchange and talk toa ll the clever folks around the place.