VMworld 2019 Barcelona will officially start on Tuesday with the General session and lots of breakout sessions. But there’ll be activity on Sunday and Monday too. As usual we flew in early on Saturday to get a rest before a busy week and get ourselfes organized. The next few days will be a rush. My schedule looks like patchwork and it’s tight. Most of my appointments are related to community work like VMUG, VCI, official bloggers, vExpert, Inner Circle, 3rd party vendors etc. Breakout sessions not included. It’s good to know that sessions will be recorded and can be viewed or downloaded afterwards. This is really great about VMworld, because it’s literally impossible to attend all interesting sessions. I’ve downloaded some VMworld US sessions on my phone and watched them on the flight to Barcelona. My personal infotainment. 🙂
VMUG Leader Gathering on Sunday
My first offical appointment is the VMUG Leader Gatheruing on Sunday afternoon. VMUG Leaders from all over the world are invited to exchange their experiences and views. To network and find some old and new friends. Finally you can meet people in person, that you normally only know from social media or their blogs.
I’ve joined VMUG Leaders in 2019. So this event is completely new for me and I’m curious to see my fellow leaders and the VMUG team today.
vRockstar Party on Sunday
This has become a tradition as a pre VMworld warmup event. VMworld attendees meet in a pub or restaurant for a vBeer and some food. The event is very popular and the free tickets are usually gone within a few hours.
Workshop Monday / VCI day
On Monday there are all kinds of workshops to get deep into a subject like NSX-T or Kubernetes. These are usually half day workshops and can be scheduled from the VMworld homepage. They are very popular too and filled up quickly.
For VMware Certified Instructors (VCI) Monday is also an important day. It is dedicated to all education related questions and topics.
What can we expect from VMworld 2019 Europe?
I’m writing this as a kind of mindmap for myself. What are the subjects I think I can expect from the event all together and the announcement of the general session in particular.
Project Pacific
Running Kubernetes container workloads natively on ESXi had been announced during VMworld US in August. It’s a strategic move for VMware to unify VM and container workloads under a single pane of glass. Ensuring same availability features for containers that have been a standard for VMs for years. DevOps and VI-admins can now work hand in hand to have best of both worlds. None of them has to change the way they work. Developers can go on deploying containers the way they used to do it in the past and VI-admins will keep to their vCenter – which will get some additional features in a future release.
VMware will surely not share any dates about when we can expect Project Pacific to go GA, but may we can get a rough estimation.
vSphere.Next
It is quite likely that vSphere 7.0 vSphere.Next will be announced at VMworld2019. We all expected that announcement during VMworld2019 US, but maybe it has bee too early or they wanted to keep a goodie for VMworld Europe. 😉
Those who are taking part in the VMware Beta program had the opportunity to play with latest vSphere beta releases in recent weeks. Of course it is still under NDA, so I can’t share any details.
Integration of Carbon Black
During VMworld US the intent of buying Carbon Black was announced. Since October 8th 2019 Carbon Black is formally acquired by VMware. Carbon Black fits perfectly into VMware’s intrinsic security strategy, where security features are built into the infrastructure.