This time I was smart. Rather than being crammed into a room with thousands of other people to watch the Tuesday keynote on a screen, I instead made my way to the Social Media and VMware Community area in the lounge and grabbed a seat at the blogging table. Not only could I watch the keynote while blogging, chatting with others and keeping my devices topped off.

The second general session expanded upon the previous day’s session and presented examples of fictional companies using VMware’s Tanzu offerings to produce its fictional products. The presentation explained how Tanzu could cover all of the theoretical technological needs of business, from IoT to edge to datacenter to networking.

My first session of the day was a deep dice into the mechanics of vMotion on vSphere. Detailed hints for tuning vSphere to optimize the vMotion process were also provided, including NIC and vmkernel settings. The presenters also hinted at future functionality that would allow vSphere to be more intelligent about handling both local, remote and storage vMotions to eliminate the need to tweak it.

Back at the Social Media and VMware Community booth, I watched Ariel Sanchez Mora give a presentation on how to start and run mini local hackathons. As someone who is working to get more involved with the Austin-area community as well as improve my coding skills and solve some real issues in the enterprise, I am looking into doing this soon. Right after, Gabriel Maentz presented a talk about using vRealize and Terraform to improve automation in the enterprise.

Finally, I attended a briefing by HPe about some new initiatives, including Greenlake, which uses a consumption-based model to provide a fully-managed platform that extends from on-prem to cloud providers like Google Cloud. More directly applicable to me, though, it improved Nimble VVol support coming in the near future, and Nimble Cloud Volumes, which allow replicating data between cloud providers and Nimble Arrays with no egress charges. Also discussed was something I had heard about previously from my current Nimble rep: Nimble dHCI, which allows automatic provisioning of Nimble storage arrays and HPe Proliant servers into the dHCI “stack”, reducing operator work, while providing a single support point for issues anywhere in the stack. And unlike some other solutions, standard HPe arrays and servers can be ordered to grow the stack, rather than having custom hardware.

After a show and drinks, I hit the hay, preparing for a busy Wednesday.