VMworld Partner Exchange 2016 is in the books. I can only say one thing, it was outstanding. The sessions were top notch, the presenters could not be of higher caliber. The general session and keynotes were incredible, so much new technology is coming out this week. My first stop was the EUC and NSX Technical Deep dive session with Gabriel Maciel (@gmaciel_ca). The main idea here is that most solutions and applications (if not all) can take be paired with the three main use cases for NSX.

• Security via micro-segmentation
  • One of the main characteristics of a virtual desktop is mobility. Desktops come and go and move around. It is really an intuitive approach to have a security policy follow that desktop everywhere it goes during its whole lifecycle.
• Edge services like load balancers and distributed routing.
• Network Virtualization

The last two just apply to most cases. Better performance with the Edge services and even more mobility with Network Virtualization.

My second stop was a follow up with a Horizon 7 Deep Dive session with Graeme Gordon. Reviewing the new features, what captured my attention was the Instant Clone capabilities, these reduce significantly the time to deploy the desktops using the Instant clone technology (vmFork). It is not the best option for every case, like when using vGPUs, but great if you hate recomposing pools.

From there it was the PEX General Session, and there we heard the news that the Dell-EMC deal is progressing, that we can have control and freedom and that during this week we will have great news with the new announcements.

The next stop was HCI in the Healthcare market, and there I felt better because I found out that the Windows Server 2003 problem from the medical devices is everywhere. After that, I’ve been eating, drinking and breathing NSX. I just realized in these two days that resistance is futile, if we don’t start solving our client problems using NSX, they will go to the cloud and NSX will catch them there anyway. I was joking earlier today about how VMware should change the name of Cloud Foundation and the Cross Cloud service to Skynet. Watch out Pat (@PGelsinger),  a Terminator may be coming this way to get you!