After two years, the VMware Technical Support Summit took again place on 24/25 May 2022 in Cork.
I had the chance to attend the summit, joining with VMware customers from across EMEA.
On both days the attendees heard lots of technical information directly from members of the VMware Support and other interesting VMware speakers.
Day one was kicked off with the welcome speech by VMware Support management.
Starting the day with a warm welcome from @Karen_Egan01 #vtechsummit22 #vmwarecork #vmware pic.twitter.com/CfuCEnYXoM
— VMware Ireland (@VMwareIreland) May 24, 2022
Next, the keynote by Joe Baguley. He is the VMware’s VP and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – EMEA.
It was the first time for me to hear and see him speak live at an in-person event. I attended a few Zoom calls with him in the past 2+ years. But live is different – it’s just better.
Joe gave a VMware update on applications and platforms. He started with sharing VMware products and solutions in one slide.
He touched the topic that there are a lot of people who only know VMware for vSphere. vSphere is only one of the many buttons on the slide.
The product portfolio has grown in the past years and VMware covers a lot of areas now.
The next chapter for VMware is to become the multi-cloud and apps leader.
Joe also touched on the topic of today’s multi-cloud environment.
App modernization and the 5 Rs were the next part in Joe’s talk.
Next Joe talked about the either/or proposition on multi-cloud today.
- EITHER developer autonomy OR DevSecOps efficiency.
- EITHER enterprise apps on any cloud OR full control with cost savings.
- EITHER anywhere access for employees OR world-class security.
He then talked about the approach at VMware – freedom AND control of one’s multi-cloud business.
Last part of Joe’s keynote was about VMware’s ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) vision and the VMware 2030 agenda.
Next topic on the agenda was NSX V2T. Chris Campbell talked about how to migrate from V2T.
As NSX-V is end of general support since 16 January 2022, customers need to migrate to NSX-T very, very soon.
Next topic was performance and resource management. But Valentin Bondzio did not dive into the topic directly. He first took an entertaining detour.
Did you know that there are 2^6 ways of writing VMware? 63 are wrong ;-). The only correct way is
VMware
After making sure the attendees know the only way to correctly write VMware, Valentin dove into his “backup” slides on power management with bios and ESXi policies.
Next on the agenda “VMware Security Response – How we handled log4j”. Emer O’Neill and Adarsh Dinesh talked about the work and effort the VMware Security Response team put into handling the log4j issue. The team was focused on securing the VMware own environment and the customers’ environment.
They stressed the point how important it is to follow the workarounds and use the patches provided in the VMware Security Advisories (VMSA) – not only related to log4j but in general.
After lunch the attendees could attend breakout sessions. The sessions covered:
- vSphere Cloud Native Storage
- NSX-T
- New deep dives on field content
- vIDM 3.3.x known issues
- CD Troubleshooting and Best practices
- WS1 – Windows Modern Management – Troubleshooting 101
- vSAN Deep dives
- vCenter Troubleshooting
- vSphere networking troubleshooting
Food and sweet treats for lunch and break was provided.
Delicious sweet treats for all at #vtechsummit22 #vmware #vmwarelife pic.twitter.com/ewmE2JKY3W
— VMware Ireland (@VMwareIreland) May 24, 2022
Day one was closed by a nice evening event – we visited an Irish Pub, with live music and nice food.
Unfortunately, due to a call, I missed the kickoff of day two.
The first topics on the agenda were:
- Working in IT with Dyslexia
- What is VMware Tanzu?
- Modern Applications on vSphere: A vSphere Admin & DevOps View
After a short break Paul McSharry, Principal Architect, talked about VCF 3 to 4 migration.
The afternoon breakouts covered topics like:
- vRA 8 -What’s under the hood
- HCX migrations to VMC and Hyperscalers
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
- vSAN Under the Hood
- Postgres Oracle
- Beating the Queues – Storage Queuing and Latency
- TCP 2.2 environment and implementations
- VMC VMware Cloud on AWS R&R (Resiliency Availability Recovery)
- SRM, vSphere Site Recovery Manager – Scalability & Case Studies
For me the VMware Technical Support Summit was a great chance to talk to with customers – not only the customers I am working with as Technical Account Manager – and our support colleagues. Especially after the last two years where every event, when it happened, was virtual.
It was great to see that the attendees used the Q&A option after each session.
