VMware Empower Europe Online – experience
Yesterday I attended my first full day online event. VMware Empower Europe Online. After attending the physical VMware Empower Europe 2019 event in Lisbon I was really curious how an online version would work out. In all fairness, an online event is not as vibrant and alive as the physical event. This shouldn’t come as a surprise ofcourse. Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t really good! Just different. The interaction and networking is not really there. It’s hard to mimic the view of the 25 de Abril Bridge. Walking along the Tagu river. Eat some pastel de nata. All that good stuff.
event and planning
It is probably good to mention that VMware Empower Online is a partner event and freely accessible for partners. The duration of the event was one day. This made it a really busy day with a packed agenda. It is possible to do stuff afterwards on demand, but I still do have this urge to want to do it all on the same day. Anybody who recognizes this? With a 20 minute lunch break I had a sense that if I wouldn’t hurry with my lunch I would miss some important stuff.
general sessions
The first technical general session was actually, well, technical! Among things we got an impressive VMware Tanzu demonstration by Amanda Blevins. It showed what Tanzu can do and how easy Kubernetes can be. From an administrator point of view this is pretty cool. There were four general session and to me that was a bit long.
breakout-sessions
There were tons of sessions available, which makes it hard to choose! Basicly I like the cloud and hybrid cloud sessions and the vRealize Automation stuff. However there is also NSX and ofcourse Kubernetes. Demos and sessions at VMware Empower really have showed me the power of VMware Tanzu Mission Control and I left the day with a better understanding of the whole concept. VMware did a lot of rebranding on PKS and Tanzu. On Twitter I got pointed to an interesting article from Cormac Hogan about VMware Tanzu (re)branding. Read the article if you are interested in Kubernetes and Modern Applications.
Azure VMware Solutions, presented by Martin Hosken, really stood out to me. He gave a really good insight in the future of VMware on Microsoft Azure. Today this is already possible with the Azure VMware solution by CloudSimple. However, when you search in Azure for ‘VMware’ you will also find a result with a preview notification. This will, or probably will be Azure’s own approach to VMware on Azure. I’m excited I must say ! Hopefully I will be able to touch this soon!
Last thing I want to mention is vRealize Automation 8.1, which has some fantastic enhancements and integrations. For starters there is VCF integration, which is supercool! Support for Openshift and Ansible Tower, nice! vRealize Orchestrator now also supports Powershell, Python and Nodejs for tasks in workflows. Also now you can have NSX security groups on demand, which I am pretty interested in. There is much more if you like to have a look. When you have access to the on-demand content of VMware Empower Online I can recommend this session: Designing for the New World Order: VMware vRealize Automation 8 and vRealize Automation Cloud. I myself need to re-watch it as well, as it was on the end of a day with tons of information.
conclusion
The event was very well organized. The quality of the content was excellent. The amount of the content was overwhelming which at certain times made it hard to choose.
The lesson I learned on how to attend such an event is to plan for two or maybe three days. Just like with the physical event. All content is available ‘on-demand’ for I think two days after the live session ends. This approach should give you more time to see and do everything you like. Also this would contribute a little more to mimic a physical event where you have breaks, walk around, talk and all that stuff while processing information.
links
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vmware-cloudsimple/cloudsimple-vmware-solutions-overview
https://www.vmware.com/content/microsites/empower-europe/home.html
https://www.vmware.com/content/microsites/empower-europe/home.html