Recap of VMworld 2018 US
Introduction
Now that VMworld 2018 is over I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at what happened. It was a tough week on Twitter seeing all that was going on! Maybe next year…
Announcements
The big product update was vSphere 6.7 Update 1. I generally wait until Update 1 of a vSphere release before upgrading so this is good news. The biggest highlight for me in this release is the HTML5 client is now fully functional. Goodbye Flash! That makes me very happy.
Also as part of this release is the vCenter Converge Tool. This looks very interesting for me. I have an external PSC from an earlier decision. Before 6.1 Update 1 I was stuck with that decision. Now I have a way of migrating to an embedded PSC design.
I also like the Enhanced Content Library feature of being able to sync OVA templates between vCenters. Now I can manage and maintain templates in one place and let Content Library take care of distribution.
The other big vSphere announcement was vSphere Platinum. This is basically Enterprise+ with the addition of AppDefense. As a sign of VMware moving to a true Hybrid Cloud model when you buy a certain number of CPU licenses for vSphere Platinum you get $10,000 for VMware Cloud on AWS. This could be the gateway to using the product.
The last announcement I found interesting was Project Dimension. This is VMware along with hardware partners supply and maintain your on-premises HCI solution. This includes all the cool technology such as vSAN, NSX, VeloCloud, etc. It is basically VMware Cloud Foundation in a HCI format. What is cool is that VMware take care of all patching, firmware updates and support. I would love this. I used to like maintaining hardware spending weekends migrating VM’s booting ISO’s, etc. Now I like to spend time working on interesting problems! As part of this there is a Hybrid Control Plane that links the hardware to VMware on AWS. Pretty cool stuff.
Other software releases/updates were:
- vRealize Suite 2018
- VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0
- VMware Skyline
- VMware Network Insight 3.9
- NSX-T Datacenter 2.3
- ESXi on ARM
Session Videos
As I wasn’t there the next best thing to get all the great sessions is the videos. I love it how VMware have almost all the videos online already. They can all be accessed on the VMworld website. The videos used to only be available with a VMUG Advantage membership but they are now available to everyone.
VMware also publish the Top Rated sessions from each day. These are available here.
Speaking of video shout out to the amazing William Lam. Once again he has published links to all the videos with both streaming and download links. Find them all here.
vBrownbag
vBrownbag had a big presence at VMworld again this year. Absolutely love the work they do to provide such great content to the community. What I like about the sessions from VMworld is they are 30 minutes or less. You can easily watch a video in little moments of free time such as lunch breaks. The content is varied (from Creating a Blog with Hugo to How migrate and create a Hybrid Cloud using VMware HCX to My trudge through IT Burnout and the fight to keep it at bay).
Go have a look at the content. I guarantee you will find something of value there.
Wrap Up
From seeing all the product announcements and all the activity on Twitter it looks like VMworld US 2018 was excellent. For those of us at home seeing all the tweets of people learning cool stuff and having a great time it was a rough week! I have heard people say VMware are on a decline with the Hypervisor being a commodity item but I think nothing could be further from the truth. VMware are positioned well for the Hybrid Cloud with all the news that came out.
I spotted some stats on a VMware blog post:
- There were 300+ customers certified
- 11,000+ hands-on labs were completed
- 800 breakout sessions took place throughout the conference
- 61,000 and counting social media posts using the hashtag #VMworld
- 7,200+ attendees at this year’s VMworld Fest
Looking forward to seeing what happens at VMworld 2018 Europe in November.