text: The general session on day 2 started with the story I’d how everything today is becoming digital in the digital transformation. Education, x-ray and even flamingos at a zoo are digital.
  Users want simple consumption and IT wants enterprise security. Users want any app on any cloud avaliable on any device. This is were Workspace One comes in delivering access to all apps from anywhere on any device. We saw a short demo of Skype for Business running inside a Horizon virtual desktop.
  Workspace One even has several apps to increase productivity from Boxer email client to a expense report assistance app. You can even show 3D renderings on a Samsung Android tablet powered by Horizon and Nvidia Grid.
  More info on vSphere 6.5 was shown like the ability to HA vCenter at the application level with a 5 min RTO. 6x the speed of operations compared to 5.5 yielding faster power ons. Max of 20.000 VMs per vCenter. And again the new HYML5 client which will have updates outside of the normal vCenter patch cycle for faster updates and new features.
  Encryption of VMs without guest agents and based on storage policies allows for more security
  And the monster VM can now go to 6TB RAM to support SAP Hana and other in memory databases.
  vSphere Integrated Containers
  Allows for running containers on your existing vSphere infrastructure with a Docker compatible interface. A registry of containers as well as a new management portal out in beta. VRA7.2 will even allow for deploying containers from the service catalog as you would any service.
  A new release tightly integrated in the vSphere stack. New management options and a new option to directly connect two nodes with a witness off-site for ROBO and SOHO deployment. iSCSI to physical or virtual machines is now also possible allowing for making those old MCSC clusters with shared disks as well as running physical workloads of of VSAN.
  5.000 users are running it now and 60% have business critical apps like SQL servers running of this.
  Danish supermarket chain Coop are using VSAN to run 1300 VMs. Everything that can run of VSAN does.
  You can even use VRA7 and policy based storage to allow users to request a change of storage and let the policy engine do the migrations necessary.
  I got around to a few vendors as well yesterday to talk about products.
  Showed me a few of their new features such as adapters running 10/25/40/50 and 100 g networks. Supporting all sorts of protocols from RoCe and NVMeoF which allows for RDMA like access to remote NVMe based storage.
  This lead me to Mangstor who along with Mellanox provide a solution that allows you to actually use the NVMeoF protocol against their box and get insane performance as either stand alone or as a caching layer between existing storage clusters like lustre for example.
  Had a chat with Intel about their whitebox servers supporting VSAN which contains hot pluggable PCIe NVMe storage in both standard and hyper converged solutions.
  Gave me a good demo and talk about the product and what it does for file services. With support for mixed access NFS and CIFS which I’m not quite sure works as smoothly as presented as well as replication and snapshot based data protection. Overall an interesting product with a lot of potential.
  What every might be waiting for now is the party Wednesday night. Overall a bit lackluster with not much going on except drinks and food. However the band this year was a surprise for me. I was happy to see Empire of the sun had been hired to give the night it’s musical touch. Very nice!
  After the party I went straight to bed and slept like a rock.
  And now to last day!