Simon’s #VMworld 2017: Sunday and Monday

Sunday

Arriving in early on Sunday as the local flight choices are more limited from Bristol than perhaps a larger Airport, very fortunate to have a hotel so close to the VMworld venue, perhaps not so great for the evening activities but I am happy with it this way around.

Other than registration (4pm-8pm) and hopefully catching up with a few folk who have also arrived early.

In the evening I had the pleasure to meet many awesome people from the vCommunity.

My current focus has been on vRA so it was great to meet some well known and knowledgable.

Monday – Partner Exchange (PEX)

My first session of the conference is titled – How to build a Software Defined DR Practice with vSAN and SRM

This was a really great session expanding on how to use vSAN and SRM together to get a reliable solid DR solution for your infrastructure.

A few useful take aways.

• vSphere replication is free with Essentials plus or higher
• HCI is the fastest growing technology ever (until the next thing I guess)
• An SRM appliance is on the roadmap. (yes please!)
• As if it was not already obvious SRM supports vSAN stretched clusters.

Hackathon

This was the first hackathon I have ever attended so I was curious as well as excited to see how it was. Needless to say it was a really great event with 10 teams participating. The team I was on “One Pod to rule them all” looked at ways to automate the deployment of SDDC components (mostly using JSON and PowerCLI).

We had about 4 hours to come up with something to present at the end of the evening. For me it was a really strong learning experience, particularly as I am endeavouring to learn more about PowerCLI.