Deji Akomolafe invited me over to Barcelona last week, to present two sessions with him at VMware’s VMworld Europe 2019 event.
After I had spend Tuesday November 5th at one of my favorite customers, I drove to the airport to take my first flight to Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. I had a short layover, that was truly magnificent to enjoy a French dinner at Air France’s lounge. Then, we flew onward to Barcelona, where we landed shortly before 7 PM.
I took a cab to Fire Gran Via and got there just in time to pick up my VMworld badge. I needed it to get access to my evening activities, so was glad to be there just before registration closed at 7:30 PM.
I headed to my first activity, that was organized by the vExpert program. Near the incredible W Hotel, near the beach, we gathered and had some nice conversations, including conversations with Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s CEO, who joined us.
After the vExpert meeting, I headed to the Benelux party, together with the RedLogic vExperts. It was a busy party at Fabrica Moritz. I talked to my countrymen and -women at this party. Then, I headed for the Veeam party. I talked to Nikola Pejková, as I was interested in how her presentation on the Veeam Vanguard program went at the Community stage.
As the Hotel Catalonia Plaza is just around the corner of the Veeam party, I crawled over and checked in to enjoy a nice warm bed.
The next morning, on Wednesday November 6th, I joined Deji in the speaker room. Deji shared his intention to reintroduce rubber chickens at identity sessions (of DEC origin) so we devised a strategy to share them. We then discussed the session and the flow in the slides.
We walked up to room 32 and were present 30 minutes early. Unfortunately, the keynote went over time, so we had to cut our 60-minute session short by 10 minutes. That’s okay, we were only trying to discuss 70 minutes of Active Directory goodness in 60 minutes anyway…
With feedback like “The best from Monday till now :)” and “very entertaining speakers”, I think we still managed to provide good information on virtualizing Active Directory on top of VMware vSphere.
After the session, I visited the Expo Hall and enjoyed some nice chats with a couple of vendors, including Microsoft. Microsoft brought their proposition to run VMware vSphere on physical servers in Azure datacenters to VMworld. So we had a good chat on that. At 5 PM it was time for the Hall Crawl. It was followed by VMworld Fest. I enjoyed the food, but chose to leave drinks be; there was another session planned for Thursday.
Again, I arrived early at VMworld. This time, I met up with Remko Deenink. We studied together in 2007, so it was about time to get up to speed with what we’re both doing. It was nice seeing Remko again.
At 10:30 AM, Deji and I kicked off the 4-hour workshop on architecting and implementing Active Directory on vSphere. For this session, we had all the time we needed to properly discuss time synchronization, the VM-GenerationID, Virtualization-safer Active Directory, Domain Controller Cloning, Domain Controller scaling, DNS and VM encryption. Sufficient time for me to snap some pictures of Deji, too.
After the session, I had to leave for the airport to catch my flight back to the Netherlands, but not before I recorded a short Identity Guy movie from the roof of the hotel.
Thank you! ![Thumbs up]()
Thank you to VMware for organizing VMworld Europe 2019 and to Pat Gelsinger for taking the time to discuss technology, partnerships and the future. Thank you, Deji. Thank you to all the attendees, especially the people in our sessions.
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