4 days in Las Vegas is right at the limit of being in Vegas entirely too long.  Luckily this is pretty much the last day of the show.  There are of course still things going on on Thursday but it’s usually reserved as a travel day for most people, myself included.  Wednesday is the last day of the Solutions Exchange and the night of the VMworld Fest.  It’s been a great show so far, let’s see what the last day had in store.

VMworld 2018 – Wednesday

I need some screens like this in my living room.
It’s still incredibly busy around here though you can definitely tell people are just barely mobile after the last few days.Cisco showing off some of their 6332 and 633216-UP Fabric Interconnects as well as some 1U and 2U Hyperflex nodes.I didn’t know this but Gigabyte, who you might be familiar with, not only makes motherboards and peripherals but also makes white box servers.SuperMicro demonstrating their NVIDIA Grid certified servers.VMware had some very cool interactive demos around IOT.  This one showed the entire layout of the convention center and camera layouts.It’s hard to tell from the picture but the VMware Public Cloud Intergation booth had smoke coming down to make it look cloudy.
VMware logo in front of a waterfall.  It looked neat so I took a pic.This was a wicked looking deployable security drone.This huge interactive display demonstrated responses to events by connected devices.I didn’t see what manufacturer that switch was at the Barefoot Networks booth, but I thought it looked cool.
The Silver Peak booth was a trip back to the 80’s.
It was like looking back in time at my bedroom.Some of my favorite movies ever.The giveaways were in full effect.  I didn’t win anything big that I know of but it was fun participating.Kingston showing off some SSD goodness.My buddy took this picture on Tuesday and I didn’t get it included but Tony Hawk was in the IBM booth.  There were some really strange marketing efforts going on at the show.  I don’t get what IBM has to do with skateboarding.  I’m sure there was some kind of marketing spin there to correlate the two but I didn’t get a chance to sit through it.
Still as busy as yesterday. HPE explaining their evolution of the blade chassis to Synergy.A few Synergy Frames, some Gen10’s, a 3PAR and a Nimble.   Quite a bit of power in a rack there.That’s it for the VMvillage and the Solutions Exchange.  It wasn’t even 5pm and you could hear drills going in high gear tearing the show floor apart.So this year the group I was with really wanted to check out the VMworld Fest.  I broke my streak of not going to the VMworld Fest the last 3 years.  I decided to go with them.  This year it was at the World Market Center.  Not in the building proper shown below but next door.In these huge popup fabric buildings.There was three of them but only 2 were for VMworld Fest.The projected effects looked interesting.
Huge screens showing different biomes.  This was in the desert biome.  There were nomadic themed tents all around the sides.The Prince cover band wasn’t too bad.There was initially quite a few people here.Another of the screens in the ocean biome.The Prince cover band played for quite a while.A closer shot of the screen in the desert biome.I didn’t quite get this picture area but people seemed to like it.They had several food trucks offering a variety of stuff but the lines were over an hour wait at one point.  The trucks were inside the venue which made the air really heavy and it was hot in there.   As you can see the lines didn’t die down all night.Another screen on the food truck side letting us know where we are. We watched people jump into the ball pit for a while.  It was pretty funny.This side had a beach theme going on.  These hammocks were incredibly unstable.  We saw 3 people fall out several times.  Also really funny.The Royal Machines came on and somehow the bars all started running out of beer.Sebastian Bach is getting up there.Robin Zander from Cheap Trick.Still out of beer.Dave Navarro killing it as usual!  This guy must be a vampire.DMC rocking it out!Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray jumping in with DMC.While the Royals Machines were great for a little while the rest of the VMworld Fest was just a mess.  The shuttles took what would be a 7 to 10 minute cab ride and turned it into a 40 minute shuttle ride on the back roads.  It took entirely too long for them to get there.  They ran out of beer and what food we could get was pretty mediocre.  The crazy long lines at the food trucks were no good either.  The group I was with decided to leave and check out Fremont.Fremont is always fun and they had live music as well.We went to Coney Island Chili dogs and got some real food. We should have eaten here but we were so hungry and didn’t even think about it until we got there and had already eaten.
Fremont East is a pretty fun district.  Cheap drinks and lots of stuff to do.That’s it for Wednesday.  I traveled home on Thursday and had a safe flight, getting home right at dusk.  I’m going to try and do a VMworld wrapup in the next week or two if I can find the time where I hope to cover some of the many announcement and things I learned this week.  Even though the VMworld Fest kind of sucked the rest of the week was awesome,  Really it’s not even about that anyway, The content and the people far outweighed any missteps.  My 4th VMworld in the books.  Thanks for checking it out with me!