I started the day again meeting up with Scott Lowe and other faithful attendees. After that and some breakfast, I headed back to the hotel room to lay low for the morning. My TechTalk was coming up at 12:30PM so I wanted to make sure I was good and fresh for that. I missed the General Session that morning but I did catch the replay online.

Some key points that came from it:

• Sanjay Poonen laid out innovations in the EUC space. He spoke about the three pillars of the EUC vision: Desktop, Mobile, and Content. Under Desktop, he announced the partnership with NVidia and Google, bringing rich user experience to desktop delivery. Under Mobile, he talked about the acquisition of AirWatch and the new partnership with SAP to securely deliver mission critical apps to all mobile devices. Under Content, he boasted of unified access to all content anywhere, anytime, on any device. Together these are now wrapped into the new Horizon Workspace Suite: Horizon Desktop, AirWatch Mobile, and Content Locker.
• Kit Colbert then came up to strengthen the EUC message. He demoed solutions around Workspace Portal, AirWatch Locker and CloudVolumes. He also showed off Project Fargo, mobile cloud architecture for desktop, showing off lightening fast provisioning of desktops with apps. He emphasized three messages as takeaways: 1. Unified experience, any device, anywhere. 2. Customers driving industry change. 3. Optimized for the Software Defined Data Center.
• Raghu Raghuram then boasted of the momentum seen in each component of the SDDC over the last year:  Compute – the released beta of vSphere 6.0;  Storage – VSAN enhancements;  Network – Adoption and industry accolades of NSX;  Management – the rebranding as the vRealize Suite.  He and Ben Fathi then discussed the latest platform choice to be offered: hyperconverged infrastructure and VMware’s answer with the EVO family. We got to see a much more detailed view of the new EVO:RAIL and EVO:RACK solutions. Raghu also provided further detail around the OpenStack partnership, the vSphere innovations around multi-CPU Fault Tolerance, cross vCenter vMotion and long distance vMotion, and then the partnership with Docker, Google and Pivotal around containers. We were also treated to demos and deeper information around the vRealize suite. And finally the one thing that most of were waiting to hear: improvements coming to the Web Client user experience!
• Simone Brunozzi wrapped up the session with an fascinating demo of vCenter Operations Manager.

Around noon, I headed down to the Hang Space to get ready for my moment on the community stage. I was so excited about this. My talk was, “vCOps and vCO: the Power Duo” and was essentially about how to integrate the two products for automated remediation. I thought it was a neat concept and was something I had been playing around with. I’ve been using vCOps for quite a while but am still fairly new to automation, so this talk was a bit of a stretch for me, but still a blast to work on. It gave me a taste of automation in general and the talk gave me a taste for technical presentations – both of these are areas I would love to pursue further. I felt like the talk went well, although maybe a little bumpy in spots. I can certainly see areas to improve, but overall, it was a great experience for me. I loved the challenge of deciding on a topic, putting the content and demo together and then of course, the excitement of delivering a presentation at VMworld. What an awesome experience to get under my belt. I did have quite a bit of positive feedback from my onsite friends who showed up and from my remote friends who watched the LiveStream. There were a few virtual high fives. Feel free to watch the recording below.

After that, I was spent. I did attend one session, DevOps Demystified, and after that I hit the Hall Crawl. I mainly wanted to spend time on the floor to meet some of the folks I had spoken with over the phone but had not met in person. I did get to meet some folks from Infinio, Tintri and VMTurbo. These are great companies, all with innovative technologies. VMTurbo in fact has a product that performs automated remediation, which is exactly what I discussed earlier in my TechTalk. Looks like I’ll be downloading the full product and giving it a test drive. I’ve so far only played around with the free version. I’m really curious to see how deeply the automated remediation goes and how much it impacts the readings within vCOps. I’ll perhaps write up a post after I fully evaluate it. Stay tuned for that one.

After the Hall Crawl, I headed back to the hotel and crashed. The TechTalk took a lot out of me so I decided to call it an early night; no customer events for me. The temptation to head out and hit a party or two was strong, but I had to resist in order to recalibrate. And I’m glad I did. The early night to bed did wonders for me so I was ready to hit Wednesday strong.