VMworld Day 2

Day number 2 is in the books for me at VMworld 2015. I’m not huge on details coming out while I’m here as there’s way to much content to make complete rational decisions, YET.

Here’s what I found interesting and will be ready to investigate further:

1. Need to look into REAL use cases for Photon and the applications I support.  Going to be tough to get our developers to change applications to support it, if they can.
2. Really liking NSX 6.2 and thinking it’s even better than ACI for OUR use case. Have a couple things we need figure out that ACI does better though.  Really need to dig into design and use cases.
3. New SRM functionality is nice but need to check out some of its competitors to meet our needs.

After my last session I headed out to a #vExpert dinner and a few parties.  SolidFire #vExpert dinner was awesome and enjoyed playing their Cards Against Humanity add-on set.  Headed over to #vBrisket and had a blast with that group from Pittsburgh. So great to put faces to twitter handles. They’ve been great to me after my travel issues as well. I made an appearence at the Nimble Storage party as well.  I was getting tired so I didn’t make it back over to the PernixData Star Wars party.  I heard it was good but my lack of interest in Star Wars made it less of a priority this year.

Once again there’s two disappointments this year.  Both of them have to do with conference logistics and not the content.

1. The WiFi in this place is terrible.  I get it. There’s A LOT of people here. But there’s as company who’s sole job is to provide this service and once again I can’t get connected to the WiFi network, and if I do I can’t get to the internet.  I was in one session with less than 150 people and 6 WAP’s.  It took over a minute to get connected and was unable to ping the gateway let alone anything on the internet.  I couldn’t even get DNS resolution, in case ICMP traffic was being blocked.
2. The food.  If I was paying full conference pass price ($2,000) I would be even more pissed off.  Cold, boxed lunches is crazy.  I paid less for a conference pass years ago and had hot lunches.  Since 2011 it’s been cold lunches only.  Being out here on my own dime makes it hard to go out for lunch and shines a light on this even more.