I do this every year, list my favorite 25 VMworld sessions which you definitely should try to attend in person. Or if you are not going, watch online. Most of these sessions are by folks I know, or folks I have seen presenting, or topics which I find interesting for various reasons. Make sure to register for these sessions as soon as possible, as these are the sessions which tend to fill up extremely fast. I also have couple of sessions, 3 to be precise, make sure to register for those as well. You can find them through this link. HCI1870BU is the HA best practices for vSAN customers, HBI2186BU is the vSphere HA and DRS Hybrid Cloud Deep Dive which I will be presenting with Frank, and HCI3551KU is the HCI Keynote.
Now that I got that out of the way, let’s take a stab at my top 25, these are in random order! if your session is not on the list it is not because I think it was not good enough to be on there, it is because there are simply too many awesome sessions to select from. Here we go!
- 60 Minutes of Non-Uniform Memory Architecture [HBI2278BU] by Frank Denneman
I am sure this session will go extremely deep, everything you always wanted to know (and more) about NUMA and vSphere. I don’t think I need to say much more. - A Practitioner’s Guide to vCenter Server Architecture [HBI2227BU] by Emad Younis and Sandeep Byreddy
Of course, you don’t need to understand the vCenter Architecture to use vSphere, but we are all geeks, right? So this is probably the perfect session to understand more about the internals, services, modules etc. - HCI Management: Current and Future [HCI1207BU] by Junchi Zhang and Christian Dickmann
This is a great session where product management and engineering talk (and demo) new HCI management features. It typically contains at least 2-3 cool demos, and I watched the session previous years and it was well worth it. - “If This Then That” for vSphere – The Power of Event-Driven Automation [HCI1379CU] by William Lam and Michael Gasch
I found the abstract of this session very interesting, event-driven automation is definitely something that should of interest for most of you. And when it happens to have William and Michael speaking, you know you will be in for something good. - Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Present and Future [HCI2733BU] by Vijay Ramachandran
Another forward-looking session, this one by the VP of Product Management, and a bit more generic than the HCI Management session. Previous editions of this session showcased vSAN Data Protection for instance. So expect insights of what the future holds for vSAN/HCI. - VMware CTO Panel: What’s Over the Horizon? [OCTO2899PU] by Ray O’Farrell, Pere Monclus, Greg Lavender and Christos Karamanolis
The CTO panel has always been interesting, typically they will start with a discussion about where VMware stands and where VMware is going, followed by audience questions and deep (forward-looking) answers/statements. Very entertaining and worth the time! - The Virtually Speaking Podcast Live: The Future of Storage [HCI1894PU] by Pete Flecha, John Nicholson, and Ken Werneburg
A VMworld session which at the same time will be a live podcast, by your favorite podcast team. Not only are all three great speakers, I suspect they will have some amazing guests and I suspect it will be very entertaining at the same time. - PowerCLI Deep Dive [HBI1729BU] by Kyle Ruddy and Luc Dekens
These guys are the PowerCLI guru’s, if you want to get your mind blown and learn more about PowerCLI and automation, then this is the session to attend. I can guarantee that you will walk out with new ideas and knowledge. - vSphere Virtual Volumes: Technical Deep Dive [HBI2853BU] by Jason Massae and Thiruvengada Govindan Thirumal
Adoption of VVols is going up fast, and there’s a good reason for it. Find out what is so special about VVols and why you should consider it. Jason and Thiruvengada are experts on the topic, and will be able to go deep! - VMware Cloud on AWS: SDDC Availability Deep Dive [HBI1924BU] by Jeremiah Megie and Glenn Sizemore
VMware Cloud on AWS has some very appealing availability features which you won’t find anywhere else. Want to understand how VMware and AWS are working together to improve your uptime and resource availability? Make sure to attend this one by Glenn and Jeremiah! - Zero to DR in 60 Minutes: VMware Site Recovery DRaaS Technical Deep Dive [HBI1229BU] by Stefan Tsonev and Cato Grace
One of the use cases for public cloud, of course, is disaster recovery, in this session, Stefan and Cato will do a deep dive on the VMware DR as a Service solution. - Extreme Performance Series
Yes, I am cheating as this is actually 5 separate sessions, but these are simply a must attend/watch! I’ve learned a lot about vSphere internals over the past years by watching these sessions, they cover things like persistent memory, schedulers, best practices etc. - How GPU-Assisted ML for Medical Research Proved to Be a Force for Good [HBI1546BU] by Niels Hagoort and Johan van Amersfoort
Very interesting use case explained by Johan and Niels. They will discuss how a vSphere environment is used machine learning and deep learning. Worth attending! - One Storage Platform for Thousands of Cloud Providers [HBI2537PU] by Ari Paul, Rawlinson Rivera, and John Toor
In this session, they will discuss the availability of S3 compatible object storage in vCloud Director based platforms and the use cases. It will feature Rawlinson from Cohesity and John from Cloudian. Hosted by Ari Paul from VMware. - Core Storage Best Practices: Ensuring Your Storage Is Reliable [HBI2751BU] by Jason Massae and Cody Hosterman
This session has been in the top VMworld sessions for the past couple of years. Jason and Cody have a wealth of knowledge to share with you on the topic of core storage (VMFS, NFS, VAAI etc) - Optimizing vSAN for Performance [HCI1757BU] by Paudie O’Riordan
Paudie is one of the most technical guys in our team, if anyone understands vSAN (and performance) inside out it is him. Make sure to attend this one to get a good understanding of how to tweak vSAN to get the best performance out of it. - Showcase Keynote: Hybrid Cloud Architecture – The New Standard from the Data Center [HYB3544KU] by Kit Colbert, Raghu Raghuram and Mark Lohmeyer
I always enjoy these showcases as they discuss what we have today, but more importantly what is coming in the future. Kit, Raghu and Mark are excellently equipped to bring you up to speed! - vSphere Networking in the Data-Centric Future [HBI2136BU] by Sudhansu Jain and Disha Chopra
I am not a networking guy, but this sounds very interesting as in this session the future of networking will be discussed. What are the current trends, where is the market moving towards? - Innovations in vMotion: Features, Performance, and Best Practices [HBI1421BU] by Sreekanth Setty and Arunachalam Ramanathan
vMotion is the most used vSphere feature, and it continues to evolve. Over the years the vMotion innovations/futures session has always been very interesting, and I suspect it will be again this year! - VMware Cloud on Dell EMC: Technical Deep Dive [HBI1975BU] by Mike Hall and Sridevi Ravuri
This session will provide a deep dive on what was formerly called Project Dimension. A very interesting concept where VMware and Dell will join forces to deliver and manage an SDDC as a Service on premises. - Encrypting VMs on Standalone Hosts: Tech Preview [HBI1947BU] by Mike Foley and Samyuktha Subramanian
A session title with “tech preview” always has my interest! In this session they will also be discussing very interesting use cases for this potential future feature. - Diversity and Inclusion Tech Panel: You Can Drive Success for Women in Tech [PD2632U] by Jodi Shely
An interesting topic, and an important topic as well, definitely one I will be attending or watching! - Accelerating Intra-Host PVRDMA Storage Traffic in a Future Dell AMD Server [OCTO2718BU] by Richard Brunner and Shyamkumar Iyer
I’ve attended various sessions by Richard, and they are always excellent and very deep and typically forward-looking. I know this one will also be, and I am sure they will go deep fast! - Edge Computing Innovations in Office of the CTO and Dell Technologies [EIOT2715BU] by Chris Wolf and Daniel Beveridge
This session was one of my favorite sessions last year, although the title has slightly changed, I am sure it will be packed with cool demos, industry insights, and futures! - How to Become the Platform Engineer of the Future [PD2248U] by Martijn Baecke and Matthew Steiner
The last session on this list and I think it is an important one. How do you evolve as an IT practitioner, what kind of opportunities are out there and what types of skills would you need for those opportunities? Martijn and Matt will guide you through a fast evolving IT world.
That was it for now, enjoy the show. (Early bird tickets will end the 21st of June, so get them now!)