VMworld 2014 Sunday report

After arriving in San Francisco on Saturday, the first thing that happened on sunday was the 6.1 earthquake, that did shake my bed. Not being used to earthquakes, I didn’t realize it was an earthquake, until a few hours later I read the news.

After a good breakfast with the VMware VMTN Communities moderators, I went to the Hands-On-Labs to do some labs. I did the HOL-SDC-1429 Virtual Volumes Tech Preview. It is a good lab and it showed me that from an administrator point of view Virtual Volumes are not very different from datastores. You can use Storage vMotion to migrate a virtual machine from a datastore to a Virtual Volume and back, just like Storage vMotion between datastores.

The second lab I took was HOL-PRT-1468 Automating your cloud with vCloud Automation Center 6.0 and the Infoblox vCO IPAM Plug-in. In my day job I work with vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) and I was wondering how the Infoblox integration works. vCAC already does IP address management and in this lab Infoblox only adds DNS integration. So if you need that, Infoblox may be a good solution for you.

The HOL-HBD-1481 vCloud Air – Jump Start lab had some troubles, so I quit this lab soon after the start.

Finally I did the first module of the HOL-PRT-1469 Puppet Labs – Automating Your Virtual Data Center with Puppet Enterprise lab. I am interested in DevOps and this lab gives a good introduction into Puppet.

At the end of the afternoon, there was the Welcome Reception at the Solutions Exchange. I used the reception to talk to some vendors and to collect gifts offered to me because I am an vExpert.

In the VMworld bookstore they sell my Learning PowerCLI book. It made me very happy to see this and it made me even more happy to see that the pile of books was much lower at the end of the day.

In the evening I attended the #VMunderground Software-Defined Warm-up Party-as-a-Service. This party is always a good opportunity to meet friends who I haven’t seen for a year and to make new friends. Unfortunately the jetlag (nine hours time difference with the Netherlands where I live) made me very tired, so I went to bed early.

For more information about VMworld, visit www.vmworld.com.