VMworld US is a wrap! My original intent was to have a daily recap, and after scrambling to get day #1 up there, I realized that was probably biting off more than I could chew. As I’ve learned with tech conferences, it is always hard to squeeze everything you want into 3-4 days. My week was personally filled with a bunch of learning, as well as a lot of networking and meetups with both customer and vendors. I also had a few extra hours to kill on the vendor floor, as the VCAP deployment exam was the ONLY exam that had technical difficulties during the conference. I received a voucher and will be sitting that exam next week.
I had an initiative to gather as much information as I could on the new VMware on AWS offering and sat in on a handful of sessions based on that topic. I can understand how it may be daunting for some customers to consider a move from VMware to a native cloud platform like AWS or Azure out of the gate. VMware on AWS certainly looks like a great offering that will allow customers who are already familiar with running VMware on-prem to feel more comfortable jumping over to the cloud with a platform they already know. Hopefully the price point won’t hinder adoption, as the technology itself looks very promising.
There were some other sessions I attended, but definitely was disappointed to miss a couple that I just couldn’t squeeze in. There is great news though, and it is that you can catch many sessions on demand! Currently, VMware has posted the top 10 sessions per day, which are available to the general public. All of the sessions are available to VMworld attendees via logging into the VMworld Content Catalog with your VMworld registration credentials.
In addition to the content catalog, the general sessions from Monday and Tuesday are also available to watch online. These sessions gave a look into the direction of VMware as a whole, and where you can expect to see a lot of new and exciting things coming down the stretch in 2017.
One of the other great things about VMworld is a new batch of Hands on Labs. I haven’t seen the latest ones posted to the official Hands on Labs site just yet, but expect them to appear some time after VMworld Europe. I do see a link to the top labs from VMworld, and it looks like you can currently give these a run. Hands on Labs are a great way to get away from the craziness for a little bit. You can sit down with some headphones and test drive a multitude or products without the responsibility or worry of blowing anything up! My week was just too busy to allow for any labs this time around, so I look forward to catching up on my own once they are released.
Last but not least, I did check out a couple of the #vBrownBag Tech Talks in the VMTN lounge during the week. These are 10-15 minute tech talks that are presented by people throughout the vCommunity on a variety of topics. They will be live streaming from VMworld Europe, and also have the videos from VMworld US available on demand.
I hope everyone who attended had a great time, and if you haven’t yet been, definitely make an effort to get to a VMworld some time in the near future!
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