VMware Explore – Day 1 – Labs and Meetings

Today I visited the Fira Barcelone Expo center for the first day of VMware Explore. Upon registration, everyone with a full pass received a backpack, water bottle, and T-Shirt.

^{VMware Expolre 2022 backpack – Barcelona}

The journey to the conference center started by getting in a taxi. The driver dropped us (me and my friend) at the opposite entrance, which resulted in a lovely walk around the complex. Fortunately, there were hostesses to point everyone in the right direction.

The weather was amazing, taking into consideration that the conference is in November wherein most of Europe is cold and snowy, hence the walk was a pure pleasure. We arrived quite early, around 9 am and thanks to that we avoided a long queue for registration. If you have not registered yet for the event, to speed the process up, please download the VMware Explore app, log in to it and there will be a tile to scan a QR code to print a badge. The app is developed for both Android and Apple, just search for VMware Explore in the app store.

The app will help you to organize your sessions, sign up for new ones, and also have a map of the complex.

After registration and receiving my swags, I went to Hall 8.0 where the labs took a place. The place was amazing, with a variety of options, there were self-paced labs, guided labs, and BYOD (bring your own device) one. I met there my solution engineer from VMware, Greg for the first time face-to-face. He has flown here from the USA to provide the labs. I sat down for TANZU labs. As you know I already played with vSphere 8, so there was no point for me to go for this lab.

My lab took about one hour and thirty minutes. After the lab, I had some free time to explore the venue and taste the snacks. My first session of the day was vSphere Advanced Performance Tutorial, where we talk about vHT (virtual Hyper-threading), vNUMA, and performance in general. The session started by ensuring (in stand-up style, who misses that can regret) that everyone knows that VMWare was the official name of the company, but for the past 22 years, it is VMware! Please be mindful of how you spell VMware!

If you go to Halls 6 and 7 on the way you will see McLaren F1 bolid. McLaren Formula 1 Team accelerates innovation with VMware multi-cloud solutions.

I was lucky enough to get a spot on the session for vRealize Automation SaltStack Config Implementation in VMware IT, also I was able to meet the expert for Exploring Edge Performance and Scale. For me, the most important takeaway from the last session was that stateful service can not run on Tier 0 router if I want to scale and have active-active.

The cherry on the top

It was around 4 pm when I saw some movement near the VMware {code} station and I went to check it out. I was quite happy to find out that there were my friends from VMware, Matt, and Eric, who hosted me on their podcast in February.

I received a NUC computer for my home lab from them, as a gift to vExperts.

I would like to thank Cohesity and vExpert for funding this amazing gift.

And let’s not forget about friends from Rewards program. As a champion I will get some extra treatment, but I will tell you all about it in tomorrow’s post, so please, stay tuned.