VMware Explore 2022

Sunday

After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, it was time once again. From November 7th to 10th, the renowned VMware conference took place physically in Barcelona, now under the new name VMware Explore (formerly VMworld).

The strike at the airline Vueling did not deter us (9 Axxes employees) from attending this massive conference. After some puzzle work, the flight was rebooked, and we landed in Barcelona on Sunday, November 6th, at 8:20 AM. After dropping off our luggage at the hotel and enjoying a delicious breakfast, we set out to explore beautiful Barcelona. Plaça d'Espanya, Plaça de Catalunya, La Rambla, and the Sagrada Familia, including a visit to the towers, were on our agenda.

After a delightful steak dinner in the evening, it was time for the vRockstar event, where we had the opportunity to network with clients and partners.

Big day tomorrow!

Monday

After a restful night and breakfast, it was time to head to Fira Barcelona Gran Via, a large event center where VMware Explore takes place. The entrance turned out to be on the other side of the metro station, so we had to walk a bit further. In the Spanish sunshine, this was certainly no punishment.

Once we arrived, it was time to line up for our access badges and take our first steps into Explore. After exploring the entire conference, it was already time for lunch.

After lunch, the real work began, and we could attend the sessions for which we had registered. By chance, everyone had the same first session, "VMware vSphere Advanced Performance Bootcamp." We first received a brief explanation about the search for the history of the name VMWare with a capital W and the current name VMware. The capital W was only used for a very short time, and currently, it has been VMware for 22 years. Then, the technical part began about multithreading, latency, (v)NUMA, EFI, cores per socket.

After this session, our paths diverged, and we learned about NSX-T, Carbon Black Cloud, Kubernetes, VMware Aria, Tanzu, and much more.

Tuesday

On the second day, we were immediately valued in the morning. We were allowed to take our seats right in front of the stage in the VIP section to watch the opening keynote by VMware management from the front row. A star parade of big names was kicked off by Raghu Raghuram, the CEO. He shared his vision of Cloud Smart. Everyone is using various cloud offerings, but these are very heterogeneous and managed by various different tools & teams. VMware wants to address this by introducing Cross-Cloud services.

Of course, there was also a focus on NSX and its further expansion, called Project Northstar. The CTO, Kit Colbert, focused on energy efficiency in times of expensive energy prices. According to Kit, part of the solution is the consolidation of servers and storage to reduce the footprint of a data center. In addition, the CTOs of the EMEA and AMER regions provided some insights into VMware Aria. VMware Aria is the new name for vRealize Cloud Management, which now includes vRealize Operations & vRealize Automation. To top it off, DaShaun Carter briefly explained Tanzu Image Builder and Tanzu Service Mesh. As the cherry on top, the General Availability of vSphere 8 was announced, which went live on that day.

After this opening keynote, some colleagues immediately went to the next sessions to learn more about all these innovations. Others headed to Hall 7 to learn more about the innovations of all the vendors present, all vying for some attention from the Axxes consultants. We visited Microsoft, Intel, Rubrik, Veeam, NetApp, Quest, and many others.

In the evening, for a change from Spanish tapas, we had Italian food. Afterward, we were invited to attend the Legendary Veeam Party at club Pasha Barcelona. Legendary is certainly an appropriate description for this party. There were Veeam-branded cocktails, dancers in laser suits, and of course, a lot of people at this beautiful location by the beach. Once our dancing shoes were worn out, it was time for a well-deserved night's rest.

Wednesday

"Don't you forget about me…"

Day 3 naturally begins after waking up and getting ready at the breakfast table with colleagues. Reflecting on the experiences of the previous day (and night). Arriving at the Gran Fira, everyone starts their day of sessions. I spent most of the day myself in the VMware Community Space. This is a gathering place for VMware customers, partners, and others passionate about sharing knowledge and educating their IT colleagues. Bloggers, vExperts, VMware{code} coaches all come together here. Trending topics such as Aria, Tanzu, NSX, Carbon Black, and oh yes even PowerShell are discussed.

My last session of the day was a Live Audience chat session between VMware CMO Laura Heisman and Ed Green, Head of Commercial Technology for the Formula 1 team McLaren. This year, VMware technology is helping the McLaren Racing team to the winner's circle. Here, I learned more about the technology used, the partnership, and what it's like to run IT for a Formula 1 team.

As a finale, we made our way to "The Party" via a clever shortcut. VMware treats its visitors to amazing food trucks with a wide variety of dishes and later in the evening, a live performance by the Simple Minds to close out the day.

VMware kindly provided shuttles to Plaça d'Espanya. A small bonding session with colleagues from Katoennatie and a local drink on a terrace during a light rain shower wrapped up the day.

Thursday

Time flies, day 4 of the conference had already arrived.

After the usual morning routine, we returned to the Gran Fira to immerse ourselves in the wonderful world of VMware for one last day. Everyone had filled their agenda again with various technical sessions, but first, a group of us attended a session on soft skills. These are certainly important skills for consultants to grow into.

Afterwards, I moved to the "Customer Experience and Success Theater" where the focus was on sessions with many demos.

The possibilities of Tanzu Mission Control were explained, and personally, I found it to be the most impressive session of the day. How simple it can be to deploy a Kubernetes cluster on vSphere, AWS, or Azure, but also "day 2 operations" such as resizing, upgrading, standardizing packages, and enforcing policies were covered. A platform to manage your Kubernetes clusters in a multicloud environment.

Tired but satisfied, we returned to Belgium.

4 days of VMware Explore have triggered us to further delve into many new technologies and features in the coming weeks and months:

vSphere 8 became General Available during VMware Explore: https://core.vmware.com/resource/whats-new-vsphere-8

vSphere Plus: brings the benefits of the cloud to your on-premise workloads via the cloud console: https://vsphereplus.com/

Integration of DPUs (data processing units) on SmartNics for workload offloading: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2022/04/project-monterey-snapshot.html

Veba: VMware Event Broker Appliance: an appliance to implement event-driven automation: https://flings.vmware.com/vmware-event-broker-appliance

NSX: the network and security virtualization stack that allows you, for example, to extend your network and security across different clouds to easily move workloads between those clouds: https://www.vmware.com/be/products/nsx.html

VMware Tanzu: A suite of products for Cloud Native App Development and Enterprise-Grade Kubernetes: https://tanzu.vmware.com/products

VMware Aria Suite with the three pillars, Cost, Operation, and Automation, a multi-cloud management portfolio that provides a range of solutions for managing costs, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud-native applications: https://www.vmware.com/products/aria.html

And much more: Carbon Black, Horizon, Workspace One, ...

VMware has become particularly known and successful with their virtualization software vSphere, but as you can see from the above list, the product portfolio has expanded significantly in recent years with a focus on cross-cloud/multi-cloud services.