VMworld 2016 - Day 0 - Partner Exchange

VMware VMworld VMworld 2016 Barcelona

Published on 17 October 2016 by Christopher Lewis. Words: 821. Reading Time: 4 mins.

Monday was Partner Exchange Day and I have to admit the atmosphere was buzzing. I’m sure there is still people arriving but the halls all seem busy and the HOL section is consistently full.

My day a started at 0830 with Matt Steiner ( @Steiner_Matthew ) at the Automating Infrastructure and Application Delivery with vRealize Suite (PAR3698) Session.

As the title suggests, in this session Matt provided an insight into how VMware’s vRealize Suite can automate IT provisioning to provide real business benefit.

The Key messages from this session (and benefits of the VMware Cloud Management Platform) were that the VMware vRealize Suite provides :

Agility – the ability to self-provision in an automated fashion to deliver consumable IT.
Control – Automating cost control and policy governance.
Efficiency – Delivering the IT quickly.
Choice – Managing other hypervisors.

Matt talked about various case studies covering both “IT Automating IT” and “DevOps Ready IT”, luckily he managed not mention bi-model IT once.

Matt went on to cover the ever complicated quagmire that is licensing and packaging of the vRealize Suite products (answering deftly my question on why SRM was removed from the vCloud Suite pricing) as well as outlining the differentiation that vRealize Suite provides against its competitors (VMware being the Market Leader in the Cloud Management Platform since 2013)

Most Complete Solution
Best Cloud Management Platform for SDDC
Trusted Market Leader

Next on the agenda for me was the 3 hour VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam. I wasn’t at all confident going into the exam, not because i’m not a hands on kind of a guy (far from it) I just have never taken a VCAP deploy exam before. It was not a difficult exam, the experience was laggy, and I broke the cardinal rule of exams, I got flustered and fixated on a single question to my detriment. Did i break it, was it meant to be broken? i’ll never know. Next time i’ll be skipping through the questions, answering the easy ones quickly and going back to the more difficult ones (sage advice I had read before taking it but completely ignored!)

A few hours later I had the email I was expecting from the VMware Education team, a narrow fail this time, but a lesson learnt (for half the normal price!) and valuable experience gained for the next attempt.

I missed my schedule 12:30 session on Cloud Native Apps because of the exam,but from speaking to those in there I didn’t miss a great deal.

Coming out of the exam, I swung passed the VMworld shop and spent more money that i probably should have on VMware merchandise, a few t-shirts later and I decided to try and get some lunch, after all as a fee paying Partner I get free hot food today and after 15 minutes in a queue all that remained was Pastrami miniature rolls.. oh well I could do with loosing a few pounds!

At 14:30 the running total of completed Labs was 780 which is more than 100 Labs completed per hour since it opened this morning.

My first session in the afternoon on Partner Exchange Day was a short 30 minute session on Application Networking and Security Lifecycle Management from vRealize Automation and NSX (MGT8733-QT) with Helen Michaud and Hiral Doshi.

In this session, Helen and Hiral provided details on the high level overview of both what NSX and vRealize Automation were given an overview of the benefits (self-service provisioning, approvals, micro segmentation, etc) of each and how they can be seamlessly be integrated to provide a full solution for automated network and security.

Helen then went on to provide a simple demonstration on how to create a converged blueprint for for a multi-tier, multi-machine blueprint with a load-balanced with NSX networks. The whole concept is very cool, and its very simple to create a simple NSX/vSphere blueprint which can be published for end users to request from the catalog.

The next session I managed to sneak into was Enabling Automated Neworks & Security Services with NSX and vRealize (PAR3722) with Atif Qadeer ( @atifqdr ) and Dan Watson. (I say sneak as I wasn’t booked into to it so had to queue up outside and wait until 5 minutes before it started but the session was half empty).

The session started with Atif providing an overview of the what vRealize Automation and NSX are and how they fit nicely together (which actually followed on nicely from the previous session).

We then jumped straight into the Design considerations of vRealize Automation and NSX. Covering (at a high level) NSX Edge Gateway (including On Demand Edge), Network Profiles and NSX Security.

This was a REALLY good session and a good primer the the VMware Validated Design Sessions later this week.

Finally, to round of the off the first evening I attended the very first VMworld Barcelona Hackathon (#HackVMW) run by Alan Renouf ( @alanrenouf ).

Published on 17 October 2016 by Christopher Lewis. Words: 821. Reading Time: 4 mins.

Blog Categories: VMware VMworld