VMware Explore Europe 2023 — A Recap
Once again, the Fira Gran Via Expo Center in Barcelona was booming with IT explorers from the 6th-9th of November for the annual, European VMware conference. In the following few paragraphs, I will share my perspective on attending this unique event.
Sessions highlights
It was no surprise the theme this year was AI, its current use cases and potential of what it could offer. Starting from the keynote, you could see AI being part of many conversations. For more details on the topics, fellow attendees have already done some excellent write ups and you can check that out here and here.
Since this year I have returned with more conference experience under my belt, I focused on the networking, so I cherry picked and attended fewer breakout sessions than last year as these are 100% recorded and will be available on-demand.
The sessions I did attend were about something not that familiar to me in my day to day job — of NSX and Smart NICs/DPUs. In my opinion, the best session on the latter was a Customer Experience and Success session, unfortunately not recorded, Accelerate Your Networking and Security Functions with SmartNICs by Nand Kishore Vyas, Jayaram K.G.
The ones I found most useful and were recorded were the following sessions:
- Best Practices for Hardening Your VMware Infrastructure (useful for everyone who has even vSphere homelab)
- NSX Operations Best Practices by VMware Customer (introductory type)
- NSX Operations and Troubleshooting Best Practices (rather advanced, but useful session to get exposed to terminology at least on which tools and metrics to use when NSX is not behaving well)
Honorary mentions:
As usual, William Lam goes an extra mile and publishes a nice list on Github.
And some of the recorded sessions that were ihe Hub can be found on the vBrownbag YT channel.
Something worth mentioning is that VMware have indeed listened to last years experience and have done particularly well on re-organizing the space. In comparison to last year (you can check out the map of 2022), the addition of the HUB created a nice, warm, engaging atmosphere to learn and struck up conversations with people working in that area which are usually approachable, community champions anyways.
Personal highlights
As my 2nd year around visiting the conference, I would have expected it to be less overwhelming and tiring, but it has once again exceeded my expectations, especially since it turned to be quite the adventure to get there. What would normally be a 3h flight, considering the distance from my country, turned into a 24h travel, dealing with delayed flights, missed connection, having a long layover until the next one.
Finally, I had arrived straight from the airport on the Monday morning of November the 6th, and thankfully for those VMware direct-to-the-expo shuttles and luggage storage, I was able to save that day!
Get registered, get into a session, meet up with fellow explorers in the HUB, which was the most pleasant area to be in any of the days, and most importantly: get my first VMware Professional pin, after having acquired the VCP-DCV cert earlier this year.
Right across the Hub was the Expo, so whenever you felt like you need a break from sessions, you could go for a walk around the booths, get some amazing coffee and learn about new products from demos. To keep it interesting, you can also score some swag or win some on raffles.
Takeways
All in all, the start of November was an amazing period in Barcelona and all that I have expected as benefits to be gained (I’ve talked about those previuosly in more length here) were yet again met end exceeded. An online experience will never be as engaging and create the drive for people to go the extra mile, especially when the core of their job is to be in a perpetual circle of learning and experimenting with unfamiliar territories.
Until next time Barcelona :)
