Last week I attended the VMware by Broadcom Explore on Tour in London, which was hosted at the Hilton London Metropole. Unfortunately I couldn’t afford the main conference in Las Vegas, but when it came to London I thought maybe I could justify it. 

Initially when you sign up you get a free exam certification voucher. I had booked to try and complete my VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCP-VCF) Administrator exam.  I had this booked for first thing in the morning as I wanted to get it out of the way. Unfortunately, I did fail it with a score just under the pass mark. I felt this was quite a hard exam considering that I have no real experience with VCF other than what I have run on VMware’s Hands On Labs, so had to base most of it on what I could. I do feel that it’s a bit unfair that they allow you take exams without getting any training\practice as otherwise your going into it blind. Also there were questions around VCF Automation (formerly Aria Automation) which I have never used (although seen from previous experience). Any how it gave me a good look at some of the types of questions and where I need to work on (all of it!). Watch this space! 🙂 

Once my exam was finished I moved to the main hub (unfortunately realising I had missed the main keynote). This is where lots of the main sponsors were and an area was setup for the Expert Led Hands On Lab sessions.

I also went and spoke to Eric Nielson (Senior Director Social Media & Communities, Marketing) around a talk he was going to give on how they had worked on small footprint machines in order to run the VCF stack. This included a look at the ever popular (thanks to Eric and William Lam) Minisforum MS-A2. It’s amazing that you can fit an AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX,(16C/32T), Dual DDR5-5600Mhz,up to 128 GB, 3 x M.2 drives and also has dual 10Gbps SFP+ Lan & 2.5G RJ45 Lan Ports with WIFI 6E & Bluetooth 5.3 into such a tiny machine!

I then attended a talk on Design and Architect Best Practices for Deploying VCF 9 by Simon Richardson (Principal Technologist UK & Ireland). During this talk Simon spoke about the main priorities needed by today’s businesses, including infrastructure, application and security modernisation. He also ran through the different components of the VCF stack and how they can apply to each of the priorities. He also ran through the different terminology in VCF and how they relate. Simon then went on to explain different VCF scenarios and how the components could be configured to suit. This included design takeaways and advice on using VCF design blueprints for architecting the right solution. 

All in all it was a good look at how we can architect the right solution with VCF and very informative.

After a bit of lunch (who doesn’t like a free lunch!) and a bit of networking\catching up with some former colleagues I signed up to the Expert Led Hands On Labs. This particular one was the monitoring private cloud infrastructure with VCF Health and diagnostics using VCF Operations with Erini Spanou (Solutions Architect) & Adam Trubridge (Solutions Architect). The way this worked (if like me you’ve never done an Expert Led HOL) was that you put on a set of headphones to listen to the experts and follow along with the steps in the lab\experts. This allows you ask questions as you proceed through the hands on lab. Having never done one of these, I found the experience really good with the experts showing great knowledge and understanding.  

I then attended a talk by Baz Basnett (Director, Solutions Architects, UK & I) & Simon Richardson (Principal Technologist, UK & I) called Global Scale Private Cloud. In this talk Baz and Simon explained how they worked with Broadcom to reduce their data centers from 42 to just 7! Not only this but they wanted to achieve this quickly with 12 months to build the 7 DCs and close the other 35 DCs! They explained how they had to look at the budget, time constraints and project ambitions whilst getting Executive sponsorship.  They explained how the architecture worked and how their 7 DCs were running at 90% (with spare units on standby) with increased efficiency, security and cost control. This was a fascinating look at how Broadcom work using their components and software.

All together it was a really good day with lots of good learning and catching up\networking. It was a shame about the exam but I was looking forward to the next day which was the VMUG UK UserCon, held in the same place. Stay tuned for that in a further blog post.