Last week, I delivered three sessions at VMware’s VMworld US 2018 event in Las Vegas.

As I was scheduled to present a full-day workshop on Sunday August 26th, I decided to fly in on Friday, so I’d have the entire Saturday to cope with the jetlag that accompanies crossing 9 time zones.

My inbound flight to VMworld brought me from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Salt Lake City in Utah and over the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas McCarran Airport.

I made my way to the hotel where I met with Deji Akomolafe. We enjoyed dinner and then met up with some other VMware folks. We decided to meet the next day to go through the workshop demos, as we finished the slides and flow days earlier.

After a fairly good night’s rest, I worked with Deji on the demos. We also visited Breakers F, the room where we would present the next day.

At around 4PM, I decided to step out before doing the last minute preparations, like placing our scripts and slides on USB sticks for our workshop attendees.

Jim Jones caught up with me, and treated me to a pint of Guinness at Rí Rá’s.

Bright and early the next day, Deji and I started delivering our workshop on virtualizing Active Directory on VMware vSphere. With all resident VMware experts on site, we also invited Mike Foley, Sam Subramanian and Victor Camacho from Hytrust on stage to spill all the information on vTPM, VM Encryption, KMS and Virtualization-based Security (VBS).

As we ended at 5PM, we went straight to the VMworld Attendee Party around the corner. I met a lot of new people and even encountered a couple of guys I knew years ago, like Joep Piscaer.

After hitting the gym the next morning, I went back to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for two more sessions.

After lunch, at 1PM, Matt Liebowitz and I presented a 60-minute break-out session on virtualizing Active Directory the right way.

Then, at 4:15PM, I sat down with a dozen people to whiteboard on Active Directory time synchronization, VM-GenerationID and upgrading their Active Directory to the latest and greatest.

The next morning, after hitting the gym again, I ate breakfast with Veeam, the Veeam Vanguards and analysts, and then caught my flight back to Amsterdam, via Atlanta.

Thank you!

Thank your VMware, for inviting me as a VMworld speaker, to Deji and Matt, and to all the people attending, sitting in on our sessions and, of course, the people who stuck around after these sessions for the interesting discussions. This was certainly a learning opportunity and I’m glad we have al made it work.