This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series VMworld 2018

Day 2 of one of the biggest tech shows of the year. The keynote yesterday was really good. ESXi on ARM?!? That and so much more. I plan on taking some significant time when I get back to the real world and getting more detail around all the things that were demo’d and announced. Yesterday was a whirlwind of announcements and vExpert briefings and content. I only captured a small part of what I was able to do yesterday. Such a great start to the show so far.

I got to tour the Hand-On-Labs on a guided vExpert only tour and later in the day I met the esteemed Ather Beg and Johan van Amersfoort. I ran into Calvin Zito again and saw Snoop Dogg in concert at the Cohesity party. What a day. Let’s take a look.

VMworld 2018 – Monday

It’s way busier than it was yesterday. Everyone’s here and ready to rock!

The screens are almost too bright.

The Solutions Exchange is open and I’m pretty sure there’s more vendors here this year than last.

The VM Village was packed with people watching the keynote streams.

Still can’t get a good clear shot of the VMworld sign. Maybe tomorrow.

The vendor booths are all big and over the top as usual.

Everything is nicely spaced and there’s plenty of room for everyone.

The Rubrik booth looks pretty cool. I got a signed copy of the vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive. Incredibly smart people floating around here.

Cohesity has a neat digital plinko game.

Druva had THE MOUNTAIN! Otherwise known as Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson who plays Ser Gregor Clegane on Game of Thrones! I can’t even begin to pronounce his name but it was cool seeing him.

For some reason there’s a fake pond in part of the VMware Transformation Zone.

I’ve got to spend some time over her tomorrow.

They have a DJ in one of the lounge areas.

I met Johan van Amersfoort in the Solutions Exchange. We had a great conversation around VDI and his book. I plugged my blog a bit and the VDI related series I’m releasing this week. Very cool guy and he even gave me a pretty dope hat!

I was able to tour the Hands-On-Labs and got a behind the scenes tour with a group of vExperts.

Hundreds and hundreds of labs available.

These massive screens towered above the lab workstations cycling stats of the top labs and resource utilization.

The layout was interesting with four sides of lab workstations all focused to the center.

This is the Network Operations Team. One of their engineers explained how they use 5 different datacenters and some AWS to support the Hands-on-Labs. They use a staggering amount of resources to support it all.

They weren’t full but there were very few unused stations.

I like taking labs at home at my own pace but this was a really cool environment.

The numbers here speak for themselves. Yeah that’s 2.1 Petabytes of vSAN storage being used to support these labs around the world.

The heavily use vROps and other tools to monitor the labs.

It’s a pretty impressive sight up close.

vSphere 6.7 is at the top followed by NSX, vSAN and Horizon 7.

Here’s some closeups of the Command Center.

I attended a vExpert briefing from HPE. I’ve seen Greenlake before but it was nice getting to ask some direct questions about it. Greenlake is HPE’s flexible capacity offering and it’s a really interesting model.

We’re at the Border Grill again for another happy hour.

Pretty much the same as last night. Always a good time.

My customers and coworkers settled on the Gordon Ramsay Pub & Grill. This is the 4th time I’ve eaten here and it’s been amazing every time. I had the Beef Wellington and wow it was so good.