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. Suffice it to say, I was expecting #vmworld to top my twiftter feed today, not #dellemc.

TAM Day

For me, Monday is TAM day, that generally means an entertaining talk by Joe Baguley, the EMEA CTO, followed by whatever’s hot this year. And so it came to pass, Joe is one of the most entertaining and engaging speakers I have ever seen, so he didn’t disappoint. There is always some gem in there that makes you think, no matter how many times you see him talk. F’rinstance, ‘God only created the world in 7 days cos he didn’t have legacy’. You know it.

Then we had Kit Colbert up to cover the #vmwcna Cloud Native Apps, which VMware definitely thinks is hot this season. This takes me back to Joe and his pearls of wisdom, container workloads have been found to run faster or docker on VMware than on bare metal, because VMware have spent years on tweaking and refining the Linux kernel to, guess what, run workloads in VMs as fast and efficiently as possible. Maybe this really should not be a surprise. Kit covered all the bases on cloud native, right up into the NDA space, so let’s leave that there. 

Ask the Experts

The ask the experts lunch followed this and I took the opportunity it’s to talk to some VMware staff and fellow TAM customers about the trials and tribulations of implementing VRA, Log Insight, Business Manager, then into NSX and a range of other good stuff, including gems like NSX requiring VMware Tools to be running to avoid simply taking a default block or permit action for traffic in versions before 6.2. 

Hands-on-Labs

I was so enamoured with the the CNA stuff that I figured it was time to visit the other side of the conference and take a hands-on-lab, something that would be right out of my comfort zone, so I selected the platform 3 friendly, cloud native lab, HOL-SDC-1630 “DevOps, Containers, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Microservices, 12-factor applications, 3rd platform, oh my!” Which is so far away from my normal sphere of operations, that if it was formula 1, then I’m close to lapping myself. It’s also the longest subtitle I have ever seen. But it was cool, it really is simply a few correctly written lines to kick off applications built with Docker, Kubernetes, Flannel (yes, really) et. al. Plus it’s getting easier to monitor them too, with both log insight and VROps also in the lab. I doubt this is the last I will see of this particular stack of apps, given what I saw today.

The lab action meant I missed the next session, but hey, I wasn’t alone. I heard Pat Gelsinger was gonna come talk to us, but I reckon Mike and Joe (Dell and Tucci) had a little more gravitas than a few captive TAM customers. I did get back in to the TAM track in time to see Carl Eschenbach round off the day and give is a few ideas of what he’ll say in his keynote (no mention of the D word though - yeah, Dell, as if you didn’t know by now). 

Drink!

That was business done, so then the TAM drinks reception, followed by the vExpert party, followed by the Pernix Data party, but you clearly don’t want to know about them, right? It’s all vendor schmoozing, right? No. I met an Australian at the TAM event who could have been my antipodean twin, given the issues, updates, firmware, vendors, politics etc. We both deal with. He came a long way for this, so fair play! Then literally back to the apartment for ten minutes, shower, change of clothes, vExpert party. This is my first year of being a vExpert so I didn’t have to blag my way in his time. LonVMUG represent (as always) plus friends from Scotland, Europe, USA and so on. I love the vExpert program. People give, so they get rewarded, so they feel obligated to give more, it’s self perpetuating and people just want to keep doing it. Cracking! Then Pernix at Ocana, my favourite party of the week, best tapas, you can order a mojito for free, you can hear yourself speak, there’s a great crown present, love it! 

Now time for some kip before blogging the General Session. At least this year it looks like there is nothing to stop us hitting up the hang space and blogger tables instead of the general session itself…