VMworld 2018 Recap

What did I have to lose? Never mind that VMworld was only a month away, and I had no approval to actually travel to Las Vegas. I filled out a little survey about how much I love NSX, and pressed submit. Fast forward a week, a wild email appears:

Uh oh. That is not what I expected. After a good amount of scrambling on my part, and some very gracious actions by my employer, I was approved for travel and lodging in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018. What an exciting an unexpected turn of events! I registered, made arrangements, and started prepping to head to a conference I never expected to attend. With CiscoLive fresh on my mind, I made a concerted effort to keep my schedule realistic. I definitely wanted plenty of time to meet new people, hit some hands on labs, and some down time so I didn’t exhaust myself. I exercised self control while scheduling sessions, but it was not easy. There was a long list of options that piqued my interest.

It’s no secret that my roots are in networking. I’ve spent plenty of time in the compute and storage silos, and I attend my local VMUG, but I am an “outsider” when it comes to the #vCommunity. I expected that VMworld was a lot like CiscoLive in terms of form and function. I found this to be mostly true, but there are some differences that I will call out throughout this post.

Overall the session content was very good, and I was surprised at the depth of the networking material. In general, I found the sessions to be a bit more technical at CLUS than VMworld, but not by much. One thing I missed from CLUS was having access to a copy of the slides for each session. There were several times a presenter blew past a slide that I wanted to digest a bit more. It also keeps people from feeling like they have to snap a picture of every slide. Here are my highlights:

Honestly, I don’t really care about keynotes at conferences. The only ones I’m truly interested in are the non-technical ones, a la Michio Kaku & Amy Webb at CLUS, and Malala Yousafzai at VMworld. All of the announcements are already well covered, so I’m not going to generate yet another list. I was absolutely thrilled at the opportunity to hear Malala speak, and I give VMware major credit for bringing her to speak, along with committing to supporting her charity. There were some grumbles about the increased security, but in my opinion it was all worth it. I am so inspired by this young woman and her commitment to fighting for education for girls everywhere. Someone — I’m not saying who — recorded her talk on Periscope, and you can watch here. Thinking it still gives me all the feels.

Maybe it’s because VMworld is in Las Vegas, but it would be an understatement to say that there were lots of parties going on. My MO for conferences is to treat them like work. I’m there to learn, and my employer is paying for me to be there. However, there were a few baller parties that are worth mentioning.

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