Day One of VMworld 2019 is finally here.  All the cool announcements, general sessions, hands on labs, expert led workshops and sessions galore.  This is probably the best tech conference around.  The community is awesome and the show is just amazing in scope and scale.  I’ll be documenting my trip here with pictures and commentary as time allows.  Keep checking in throughout the week for all the latest updates I can manage.  Let’s get started!

VMworld 2019 Sunday

First up, I nearly missed my flight.  It was an early flight at 7:10AM on Sunday morning.  I slightly overslept and had to high tail it up to the airport but I made it safely and boarded without issue.  Kansas City’s airport is probably the quickest and easiest airport to get through security and boarding so I didn’t have to wait in any long lines and it helped that it was Sunday morning.  Short on amenities but easy to get through.  The flight was uneventful thankfully but I got stuck in an aisle seat and the seats were much like sitting on a couple of bricks for about 4 hours.  We made it safely to San Francisco though and I took an Uber to my hotel.

The hotel seemed nice except it was 10AM and my room wasn’t ready so I dropped off my luggage and decided to go check out the new Moscone Center.  Honestly I think the new Moscone Center looks pretty much like the old Moscone Center.  Apparently they did a ton of renovations to it but I can’t see where anything is that much different.  The picture below if of Moscone West.Registration was incredibly quick and easy.  You put in your email and click print badge.  The registration kiosks were at Moscone North.You then have to move over to pickup your badge. Took all of a few minutes.  Full disclosure, I actually had to get my badge from the Press & Analyst Registration desk since I’m a VMworld Blogger this year.There’s a surprising amount of people here already.  This is at 10AM Sunday morning.The laser printed badges are sharp & durable.  I got my VMware Certification pin already as well for my VCPs.This is over at Moscone West.  Sort of annoying you have to go to two different buildings to get your badge and backpack.The backpacks this year are well made and have lots of good features.  The only thing is why in the hell didn’t they put a water bottle holder/pouch on it.  Who thought not having that was a good idea?  I get that you can hang this bottle off the hook but who wants that dangling around all over while you’re walking?  Nobody, that’s who.I heard a bunch of people were mad about the Rubrik tag on the shoulder straps as well but it would be easy enough to cut off if you really wanted to.The VMware Store was packed.  People were clamoring to buy books, shirts and other VMware adorned items.Cloud City on the 2nd level of Moscone West.I headed up to level 3 to check out the Hands on Labs area and it was packed full of people.  Hundreds were taking labs this morning.It’s wide open with the expert led workshops in the back.I stood around for a minute and one of the nice green shirt people asked if I needed help or wanted to do a lab.  I said not right now but they noticed my badge and asked if I wanted a tour.  I of course said yes and met Jon Schulz, Senior Staff SE with VMware who kindly showed me around the entire HOL area.
The Hands on Labs area has 320 workstations on site to access the labs.  There’s another 320 seats in the expert led workshops.It was 10AM and they had already run 656 labs including the external lab takers.  Some pretty impressive numbers there.Some more fun numbers.  They really eat their own dog food running this all on vCloud Director.The VMworld HOL Staff here showing me the management components they use to keep the labs running.  They call it the VMware Learning Platform.  The staff is comprised of over 204 people from VMware.I also got a quick tour of the expert-led workshops.
I was told these are so popular that they’ve had to expand the number of seats significantly to handle the demand.  It’s really cool to be able to talk to the product managers and experts during these workshops and really get the answers from the people that make the products.
Nearly every seat in the place was full. They are so many new labs available.  Skyline, Kubernetes, and NSX-T are big this year.Here’s the Command Center!  It’s nerd cool.That’s 179,000 labs completed in the last 90 days.  They told me that HOL runs on 5 different clouds, IBM Cloud, VMC on AWS and three VMware Private Clouds.vROPS Cloud is the new vROPs SaaS.Branding is everywhere near the Moscone Center.This is Moscone Center North.This is The Square.  It’s what they used to call the VMVillage.  This is where you can come to hang out. Much of the tagged social media posts about VMworld will show up here on the big board.  Maybe even this post.

Here’s the hallway to the Moscone South building.
The Solutions Exchange opens later today.This is outside Moscone North. My colleague and I decided to take a trip up north to Petaluma, CA.  It tooks us nearly 40 minutes just to get out of the city.Lots of tunnels here.This is the Golden Gate Bridge but the fog rolled in thick so it’s pretty hard to see as we cross it. Half of the bridge was clear of fog so we got to see some of it.The fog is real!More crazy tunnels.And we arrived to the This Week in Tech TWiT,tv Podcast to watch the filming.I got to meet and talk with Leo Laporte.  He was showing me his new Note 10 with the crazy rainbow back.We headed back to San Francisco and the fog was rolling in again.
We detoured through Sausalito and saw the fog from sea level.  Pretty cool!We saw a newly married couple get some pictures with the fog as a backdrop.  Not sure if that’s a good omen or what lol. The fog rolling over the hills in realtime was amazing to see. Back to the Golden Gate Bridge.  The traffic was terrible. We went to a couple happy hours and ended up at the ole Irish Bank.  One of the coolest bars in the city.  Fun times were had by all.Thanks for reading/looking at my pictures lol.  It was a great first day in San Fran.  Stay tuned for more tomorrow.