My top 15 VMworld sessions for 2016

Every year I post a list of my top VMworld sessions. It is always challenging to go through the list, I figured I would do it straight before the Schedule Builder goes online as that gives people at least the opportunity to register them. I am going to be strict again this year, 15 sessions and in random order. These are the sessions I would sign up for myself, unfortunately as a VMware employee you can’t pre-register for sessions, but I will to try to sneak in. Note that I selected these sessions because I expect them to have deep tech info and have great speakers. There will be many awesome sessions missing I am sure, but than again that is the result of trying to stick to 15. Here we go:

• Evolving the vSphere API for the Modern Era [INF8255] by William Lam & Alan Renouf
  Alan and William are both great speakers and all sessions they present are a must see, what caught my attention in particular for this session was the following sentence in the description:”We will also provide a “Technical Preview” based showing of where we are headed and some of new tools and features that will be available to you to automate and develop against the next generation of the vSphere Platform.”
• An Industry Roadmap: From storage to data management [STO7903] by Christos Karamanolis
  Christos is our CTO for Storage & Availability and his sessions are always great, excellent speaker with great insights of where the industry is heading towards. Seen many of his sessions and always worth attending.
• The Edge is Still Bleeding: A face-melting technical smorgasbord of all things Converged, Hyper-Converged, Cloud Native & Software Defined [SDDC9462-SPO] by Chad Sakac
  The title by itself is enough to attend this. It is going to be 60 minutes of face melting awesomesauce Sakacness. Do I need to say more?
• Advanced Network Services with NSX [NET7907] by Romain Decker
  I am not an expert on NSX, getting a better understanding of what it is / does is never a bad thing and it looks like this is the place.
• Beyond the Marketing: Horizon Instant Clones Deep Dive [EUC8203] by Peter Björk & Jim Yanik
  I just love VMFork aka Instant Clones. If you want to know everything there is to know about Instant Clones for View, then this is the one to attend.
• Cloud Native Buzzwords (Demystified) for Dummies [CTO7964] by Massimo Re Ferre
  This can’t be anything else than just great. Massimo going over Cloud Native and explaining all the buzzwords. Especially good for those who work with developers and hear terms flying around but have no clue what they are talking about, or those just interested in what is new in this space.
• vSphere 6.x Host Resource Deep Dive [INF8430] by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort
  A deepdive in to host resource management going over things like NUMA etc. Apparently these two guys are authoring a book on this topic as well, considering the blog posts Frank recently knocked out I bet this one is going to be a hit.
• vCloud Air Recovery as a Service (RaaS) Deep Dive [HBC8292] by David Hill
  All about data protection and data recovery in and to the cloud, more specifically vCloud Air. If you don’t want to invest in a second location, this is certainly a session worth attending to figure out what the options are for you.
• Tech Preview: Enhanced VM Availability Leveraging vCenter and Partner Hardware Integration [INF8020] by Brian Graf & Maarten Wiggers
  I’ve seen some of this already, very cool what is being worked on and always useful to get a preview.
• Revamped vSphere Storage DRS and SIOC for automating the Data Centers [STO7914] by Ben Meadowcroft & Naveen Nagaraj
  SDRS and SIOC have been revamped… want to find out more about how fight noisy neighbours through storage policy based management, then this is the session to attend. Ben is the PM for SDRS and SIOC and Naveen is the engineering Director, so you will be getting the details straight from the source.
• The Future of VMware Fusion and Workstation [EUC8521] by Bo Fu & Michael Roy
  It says “future”, so hopefully they will be talking about cool upcoming features for these two great products.
• SRM with vRA 7: Automating Disaster Recovery Operations [STO8344] by GS Khalsa & Stefan Tsonev
  I haven’t personally done much with SRM in the past year or two and that is why I have this listed. It is such a valuable product when you are in need of DR capabilities and orchestration. The combination of SRM and vRA is intriguing.
• vCloud Air: Advanced Networking Concepts [HBC9092] by Serge Maskalik & Andy Steven
  Micro-segmentation, dynamic routing, and advanced architectures as part of vCloud Air offerings. Sounds very interesting, and both happen to be good speakers as well, so I am sure this is worth attending.
• Extreme Performance Series [INF8959] & [INF8465] & [INF8108] & [INF8089]
  Yeah I know, I cheated… This is not 1 session, but this is actually 4 different session by different presenters. However they are all part of the same series, and these are all must attend sessions. Whether it is vCenter Server performance with Ravi and Priya or vSphere Compute and Memory by Seong Beom Kim. I promise you, these will go deep.
• Architecting VSAN for Horizon the VCDX Way [EUC8648] by Ray Heffer & Simon Long
  Ray and Simon are both VCDX’s, nothing beats hearing the ins and out of Horizon design from two top experts.

I did not include any sessions of my own, if you are interested in my sessions, look at the below:

• Enforcing a vSphere Cluster Design with PowerCLI Automation [INF8036] Chris Wahl & Duncan Epping
• Software-Defined Storage at VMware Primer [STO7650] Lee Dilworth & Duncan Epping
• A day in the life of a VSAN I/O [STO7875] John Nicholson & Duncan Epping