Well day 3 started like day 2 with a keynote from Sanjay Poonen on the digital transformation of mobility. Workspace One and AirWatch naturally feature quite strongly in this strategy, as a user of both Horizon and AirWatch I am quite excited about how these two worlds join together. Sanjay’s key points were:
- He repeated the demo of Workspace One, the Boxer mobile email client and Content locker that I have seen before but I have to say Boxer is a great mobile client.
- He also went on to demo a technology preview of Microsoft Skype for Business optimised for Horizon.
- We are seeing a key difference in how we manage the mobile device previously it was all about the device but now it’s about the user.
- He then showed a really cool demo of conditional access on an iPad and Airwatch using nsx to disable access and enable access to applications simply with a click.
Then there were a couple of extra speakers in the form of:
- Ray O’Farrell who gave a closer look at the new features in ESXi 6.5 including the new HTML5 vSphere Client.
- Yanbing Li, who went through the latest features of vSAN 6.5, the 5th version of vSAN.
- Kit Colbert, who gave us an exciting look at developments with VMware Photon Platform.
I won’t go through all the details but you can find the Keynote below if you want to watch it and hear all the news.
After that I had a couple of sessions to go to:
Monster VMs (Database Virtualization) Doing IT Right with Michael Corey and David Klee.
This was a very fast technical session and if you are running any databases on VMware I would recommend that you watch the session online as they covered a number of gotcha’s some as simple as checking your bios settings.
Virtualize Active Directory, the Right Way! With Deji Akomolafe and Matt Liebowitz
I missed this session last year so I was determined to see it this year, again this was a great session that I would urge any Active Directory admin who is either Running AD on Virtual machines or has been put off doing so to watch.
I then managed to catch a #Brownbag sessions from Chris Bradshaw from the London VMUG Chris Bradshaw “The Amazing World of IT in Higher Education”
This was a really interesting look in to Chris’s world I had no idea how challenging IT was for him and other university administrators. You can catch the Video online below
After that I headed to the hang space, managed to complete a VMware expert led lab on VMware vCloud Air – Jump Start for vSphere Admins which gave me some more points for the Cloudcred challenge. In fact I was sat in the Lab when the announcement came out that I had won the Cloudcred Overall badge prize of the VMware EDU Training Class Voucher. I was especially thrilled to win as it was the prize that everyone wanted to win. Congratulations to the other winners Gareth Edwards for Winning the GoPro that I know he wanted, and Andy Hardy for winning the Bose Bluetooth speaker.