AKA TAM day 2 for me, I’d got so many TAM sessions planned that it was going to prove difficult to keep the step average up!

TAM 3842 – VMware Cloud on AWS

Wednesday morning saw me wake up to discover a session which I did not have on my calendar when I planned my sessions, although I was rather pleased to see it there, given that it was about #VMConAWS. This was most likely a parallel in some regards to the sessions being run out in the main show during the week. The cloud offering is going to be an interesting play – one potential upside being the ability for VMware to increase the iteration of their features due in part to the very limited set of hardware that the AWS platform runs on, the downside to that being that these iterations will be forced upon the users to some degree, so you are going to have to keep up with the pace of development.

TAM 3844 – VSAN Roadmap

There was a whole bunch of NDA stuff in here so not too much to say about this one other than the impressive pace of VSAN development does not appear to be showing any signs of slowing down. The announcement of iSCSI support in VSAN 6.5 was one of the highlights of the show for me, given that this means that you can use it to present VSAN storage out to non-VSAN or non-virtual workloads. I am assuming at this point that this also means that SIOC does not get upset by external workloads in this fashion, as it would if you were using a storage device which has external workloads shared with vSphere.

TAM  3847 - Automating SDDC Process Engineering

A rather grandiose title for an interesting discussion around the development of VMware Cloud Foundation and the roadmap for the future. I’d not seen anything around the level of automation involved but I was told in this session that it can take less than an hour to install Cloud Foundation, although 2 hours may be more likely with a more realistic level of complexity. Either way, this is some hosts, vCenter, NSX, so no mean feat. Plus of course, this is all backed by the VMware Validated Design approach, so of course, all the versions work together and will be updated together, so it should (should) be harder to break an installation during an upgrade. My summary on this is that there’s a line drawn from back at EVO:RAIL through EVO:SDDC to Cloud Foundation and that the level of integration and dare I say it commoditisation of the vSphere stack is going to broaden. There should be more products delivered this way in future. The Converged vendors are doing it already.

TAM 3848 - Policy Based DRS

Probably my most interactive discussion of the week (all the TAM sessions are to some degree) this one was a real round table on the potential for developments around DRS in future. It’s no surprise to see that software policy based management of storage is the way forward, so policy should shape other aspects of the SDDC also. The group came up with some really good ideas in this session, so hopefully I will be seeing some of those in products in future!

VMworld Village

I did actually manage to make it out of TAM customer central after this, to head on over to the VMworld Village to find the OpenTechCast guys and LonVMUG CloudCred guys in the blogger space. It seemed like the boys had been hovering up prizes in the Hands on Labs rankings so whilst they were off collecting swag, I managed to get a chat in with Gareth around LonVMUG and the forthcoming UK UserCon (as usual, this is taking place at the National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham. This years UserCon is on Thursday 17th November, with the vCurry the night before, please go and register, thanks for listening!).

Customer Appreciation Party

The Wednesday evening does not tend to have as many parties organised as the preceding nights as vendors tend to leave the way clear for the VMworld Customer Appreciation Party. This years event for me, was a bit of a damp squib in comparison to previous years. There was a band, there’s food, there’s beer, it’s all in with your ticket price, you’re most likely there with a bunch of your mates, but for the majority of the folks I was with this time, there was something missing. There didn’t seem to be any of the other fun things around this time, like the slot-car racing or the games, there were less places to sit and so on. All in all, I should have gone to Camp Nou for the footie.