A lot of folks head back home on Thursday, so the train and bus were both pretty empty this morning. The hardy folks who do make it in generally make use of the bag drop today for all those suitcases full of accumulated swag. I had 5 sessions planned for Thursday, so for me, this was a busy day session wise. Most of these were TAM sessions, so TCC was my first port of call for some welcome tea and croissants.

Rubrik The first thing I had on my agenda after the General Session was to take a look at Rubrik, one of the companies that have been getting a fair aount of buzz lately and so I took the opportunity to go and find out why. A hyperconverged type solution, a number of blocks (briks, obviously) a nice interface, dedupe, replication, all that seems to be the thing to do these days.

Setup Poised with the same team as yesterday in the Hang Space awaiting the General Session, plus a couple of extra faces. The raised desks and UK plug adapters are well set up for the blogger types. Cloud Stuff The cloud academy video from US VMworld opens up proceedings again, so I am expecting Carl, but it’s Sanjay Poonen, without people dressed as clouds or apps. He even slips in a Louis Suarez comment, but I didn’t bite.

TAM Session - ESXi Lifecycle I was straight off to the first of my TAM sessions after the general session, covering the ESXi lifecycle. The basic gist of this one is that VMware recognise that customers find it time consuming to maintain hosts and possibly difficult to spin up hosts. There’s one tool to provision (auto deploy), another place to go for initial configuration (host profiles) and then another to manage going forward (VUM).

Setup A better start than last year since we were able to set up in the Hang Space before anyone started speaking. I managed to get a seat along with @julian_wood, @scott_lowe and @vcdxnz001 and had a go at the minimal setup, iPad for blogging, iPhone for twitter and a bluetooth keyboard. That wasn’t as “corridor warrior” as I had hoped, it doesn’t really cut it as a practical solution, is’s simply too slow to keep up and I struggled to blog and watch the twitter feed at the same time.

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.

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.