VMworld Europe 2018: last tips before the show!

VMword Europe 2018 is about to begin! After an intense campaign of news, announcements, rumors, party, sessions, and funnies the time to start the journey has come! In this post, I’d like to share technical and funnies around one of the biggest European event focus on virtualization and cloud.

What’s new from VMworld US 2018

A few months ago, during VMworld 2018 in LasVegas, it was announced the launch of vSphere Platinum, VMware Cloud Foundation and CloudHealth acquisition.

vSphere Platinum is the new vSphere edition that carries the power of the ESXi hypervisor with advanced security capabilities like VMware AppDefense. We know, the security theme is going to be covered by NSX with micro-segmentation and all networking related issues that could happen against the networking side of the infrastructure. Next vSphere evolution brought the focus on security data, introducing vSAN and vMotion encryption, on the security infrastructure, introducing secure boot and on the User access audit. Now the application security features represent the final level of the infrastructure stack that really include visibility and control of what is implied but sometimes not directly managed by the infrastructure administrator.

Here the official announcements: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/08/introducing-vsphere-platinum-and-vsphere-6-7-update-1.html

vSphere 6.7u1 with its new HTML5 finally covers the functionalities gaps from the Flex-based interface and introduces other tools and features like:

vCenter Server Converge Tool (allows an administrator to migrate from an external Platform Services Controller (PSC) architecture into the simpler, easy-to-manage embedded PSC architecture)
Some enhancement for HCI and vSAN
Enhanced Content Library (natively supports VM templates (VMTX) and associated operations such as deploying a VM directly from Content Library)
vMotion for NVIDIA vGPU & Support for Intel FPGA

Further information here: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/08/under-the-hood-vsphere-6-7-update-1.html

VMware Cloud Foundation is the simplification that every sysadmin would like to have when it’s time to deploy or move workloads across the hybrid infrastructures. This is an integration of cloud infrastructure and cloud management services. There is an interesting “Hands-On Lab” that gives the opportunity to test this new product: https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=cloud-foundation-18-hol

VMTN activities …and community moments

VMworld represents the best networking event of the year. The news in my life on this VMworld is the debut as a speaker for the {code} Power Sessions. My session is entitled “Building a front-end for PowerCLI scripts [CODE5606E]”, and is scheduled Wed 07 at 14:30. Just check here: https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld18eu/eucatalog?search=lino

Hackathon is taking place on Monday starting at 7 pm. This year, the chosen venue for the event is Esferic at Plaça de Dante. As usual, I joined a team and after the event, I’ll post a lot about what we’re going to hack and what I’ll learn and other funnies! Last information here: https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2018/10/23/vmworld-europe-hackathon-know-before-you-go/ and stay tuned.

As well as the past years there’s an area dedicated to the community. This is a great place to know VMTN community guys, have a conversation with them and attend community session in the theater inside (My session will be there).

Last tip: don’t forget to play CloudCredibility VMworld task and say “Hello!” to Noell Grier, the CloudCred Manager (in the HOL arena)

As VMUG Italian board member, my agenda is now full of appointments, involvements, and parties. Near VMTN, VMware Users Group is one of the most important points of contact with the community because is handled by the users. As usual, I’ll give my volunteer support in the VMUG booth number 419 located in the Hall 7 on the Solution Exchange. Reach me Tue 6 at 2:30 pm.

Here the full list of parties (official and unofficial) and activities: https://www.running-system.com/vmworld-2018-barcelona-party-list/ (Thanks to Andreas Lesslhumer)

And here my public Google Map containing the places I’ll visit.