vmware explore – vLenzker – a comdivision partner

Due to some personal health incidents I was not able to join VMware Explore in Las Vegas -> But guess WHOOOO’s backkkk….

VMware Explore is back this year in Barcelona November 4th-7yh. This event marks the first European VMware Explore in the new VMware Broadcom era following the Broadcom acquisition. Attendees will gain insights into the evolving dynamics of VMware under Broadcom’s ownership, with a focus on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 and leveraging VMware for AI workloads.

For sure we all know William Lam’s playlist to bingewatch the session that have been presented at the US conference (https://github.com/lamw/vmware-explore-2024-session-urls/), but still there are several good reasons to attend Barcelona in Person.

Why Attend VMware Explore? Here Are 10 Compelling Reasons:

Connect and Network: Forge meaningful connections with fellow data center enthusiasts. Whether you’re meeting new faces, sharing a meal, or engaging in business discussions, VMware Explore offers the perfect platform to build lasting relationships. Contribute to the community through blogs, tweets, or vBeers, and you’ll find that giving often leads to receiving valuable insights and support.
Explore the Solutions Exchange: Dive into the core of the software-defined data center and multi-cloud ecosystem. The Solutions Exchange provides a unique opportunity to explore the latest innovations. Engage in in-depth discussions with booth representatives, and if needed, schedule one-on-one meetings to address your specific needs and ideas.
Attend High-Quality Breakout Sessions: Choose from a wide range of breakout sessions designed to enhance your knowledge and skills. Your VMware Explore ticket grants access to all sessions, even post-event. Be sure to check out William Lam’s comprehensive collection of direct links to previous sessions for a preview of the valuable content you can expect.
Engage with the Community at VMTN: Visit the VMTN booth and join discussions at the blogger table. Share your expertise or learn from others in a welcoming, community-focused environment. Submit your own session proposal or simply absorb the wealth of knowledge available. Unfortunately, vBrownbag will not be attending this year, but don’t miss out on joining the VMware #code program at the community booth.
Meet the Experts: VMware Explore gathers a high concentration of industry experts. Arrange meetings to discuss specific challenges, design questions, or product insights. This is a unique opportunity to gain direct input from some of the best in the field.
Pre-Event Networking: Connect with attendees beforehand on social media platforms like Twitter/X, TikTok, LinkedIn, and more. Discover what’s happening in Las Vegas, join or organize public meetings, and keep up with vendor and community-sponsored evening activities. Register early for various late-night events to secure your spot.
Participate in the Hackathon: Join the hackathon for a collaborative and intellectually stimulating experience. Work with brilliant minds to tackle specific challenges. Even with limited time and resources, the hackathon is a fantastic way to engage with peers and enjoy a creative challenge.
Meet the Community and Social Media Team: A highlight each year is the community booth, where you can interact with bloggers and active community members. Engage with VMware’s social media team, including Eric Nielsen and Corey Romero, who help make this community vibrant and welcoming.
Return to Work with New Ideas: Gain fresh perspectives and innovative solutions to apply in your daily job. Engaging with thousands of smart, forward-thinking individuals will inspire new approaches to technologies, methodologies, and problem-solving.
Discover Business and Job Opportunities: While this might not be the primary argument for your boss, VMware Explore offers the potential to uncover new business and job opportunities in the SDDC and cloud sectors. Understanding the market and environment at VMware Explore will help you identify and capitalize on these opportunities.

Ready to Transform Your Career?

Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to enhance your skills, network with industry leaders, and explore the latest in VMware technology. Convince your boss and register for VMware Explore 2024.

And if you are still reading this and meet me in person; let’s catch up… I will be at one of the pre-conference event starting on Sunday [and I hope to not end up in a club at the beach this year :)]

Things have changed over the last few years. I have become a dad, my blog was on pause, but now I am back :) And so are our IT-events. Like Olivia Newton-John have foreseen it in 1982 – let’s get physical.

VMworld is now VMware Explore – and a lot has changed. The window for VMware was open just for a short timeframe (a little reference to himym) has decided to not be solo anymore & get part of broadcom. Even though we are in the middle of the takeover and certain scenarios have been discussed I am looking forward to how VMware will present itself during this years VMware Explore. To bring you on track what major topics are going to be the theme I am going to give you a short wrap up about the current state of VMware’s VM & Container/Dev strategy.

Register HERE

As in the years before VMware will have two main conferences in the United States (San Francisco) & Europe (Barcelona). Besides that 4 more 2 day events are coming to countries with a huge growing market around IT.

The topic will remain the same as the last years: multi-cloud multi-cloud & multi-cloud (and for sure workplace :). VMware’s Cloud Console is gaining more and more cloud services. A lot of common products we use are available as a subscription based service & still there is a lot to do from my point of view.

VMware follows certain strategies in the world of multi-cloud. One of those strategies is

“One (cloud) foundation to rule it all”

Within the pure infrastructure & virtual machine space VMware is pushing its cloud foundation (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) into all major clouds for several years now. The goal here is to convince customers & enterprises getting rid of their datacenters to migrate everything as it is in a lift & shift manor to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud or one of the plenty VMware Cloud Provider’s out there.

And if you don’t want to go to the cloud? If you simply want to keep your datacenter or choose a partner as a co-location for your datacenter VMware is going to give us surely more insights in vSphere+ & vSAN+: the new subscriptions around vSphere & vSAN included in a centralized cloud console. What would be the target of the business to go that road?

This strategy is is something we have seen for years now. What are the challenges for VMware & it’s partners? Convince companies that it is more useful to keep the current operations models you have to today & migrate it to the cloud. That will just works when you talk to companies that are satisfied with how the IT is operates today. Otherwise the CIO will prefer a way to migrate to the native infrastructure service instead of putting it on a vmware-in-the-middle stack.

If you have a solution based on vSphere/vSAN/etc. running today, that satisfies the business goals but lacks scaleability, availability (in terms of – I need that solution on all continents within days) and maybe operability the VMware Cloud Story is just great. IMO the best way to get the quick wins of lift & shift projects into the cloud.

But since most cloud initiatives also wants to reduce the amount of legacy VMs with a concrete set of things like cpu, memory & disk we need to talk about modern applications that are not just installed on a ‘fat’ system. We need to talk about applications that scale out if required & scale down to zero once they are not used. The answer to that is:

tanzu

Now you see it :) VMware’s Tanzu is an interesting name for all tools & solutions around developing application & running them. Over the years the story around kuberentes has changed a lot and seems to be finally finalized (the story is finalized not the products & velocity of features / products within tanzu).

Within the comdivision team we did some cool stuff around the infrastructure part of tanzu & if someone would ask me what the goal here is I would say the following.

The cloud native landscape is huge and to get things here up & running from scratch is nearly impossible for enterprises.

With tanzu & its tools VMware tries to make a lot of those things consumable in an easy fashion. From an infrastructure point of view Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) clusters are the key.

You run this K8s conformant (VMware supported) cluster everywhere (on vSphere/EC2/Azure VMs), manage it centrally with the SaaS solution Tanzu Mission Control.

If you want to create new clusters -> Just do it. If you want to scale out k8s clusters -> Just do it. If you want to extend clusters with services from the Cloud Native landscape? -> Just do it.

With just do it I mean -> run a simple cmdlet for the pros or click on the proper buttons in Tanzu Mission Control.

From my point of view what Cloud Foundation is the core foundation for the infrastructure within all the clouds, is the Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) cluster for everything cloud native.

So I am really looking forward on new things coming into the cloud native world & I am really hoping that broadcom will follow VMware’s current strategy in the cloud-native space.