It was a strange week for most of us. VMworld is THE event of the year, at least for those who focus on VMware technology and technology from the VMware ecosystem, and this year it was virtual. I spend a crazy amount of time watching keynotes and on-demand sessions. As always I had created this top 15 list, but after watching dozens of sessions I realized that I left out a few brilliant sessions which I would highly recommend watching. Here are the sessions that stood out to me the past couple of days. These sessions were interesting as they either contained unique content or just provided very useful use-cases.
- Choosing the Best GPU Accelerator Approach for Machine Learning [ETML1110] by Justin Murray and Shawn Kelly
- Simplify and Boost Apache Spark with vSphere with Tanzu [HCP2097] by Justin Murray and Enrique Corro
I would recommend watching both of these sessions, as HPC2097 goes over a great use case, especially as Spark can now leverage GPUs as well. Both sessions give you a better understanding of Kubernetes, Cloud Native workloads and GPU acceleration. Combine that with the announcements around Project Monterey, where VMware and NVIDIA have announced to work closely together to provide a new level of integration for the datacenter of the future.
- The Nerdfest VDI Demo: VDI*(AI + ML + Deep learning + GPU) [DWHV2820] by Johan van Amersfoort
Again a session on AI/ML, I just loved the demos that Johan included. It gives you an idea what is possible today with AI/ML. It is a 35-minute session, so you should be able to get through it rather fast!
- Core Storage Best Practice Deep Dive: Configuring the New Storage Features [HCI1691] by Jason Massae and Cody Hosterman
I had the session on the topic of vVols listed as a recommendation, but I just watched the Core Storage session, and I feel it may even be better. It discusses new technologies like NVMe over Fabric, but also discusses things like iSCSI best practices.
- Achieving Enterprise Comfort with VMware Cloud Foundation [HCI2338] by Paul McSharry
The last session I want to plug is by Paul McSharry. This session is full of best practices, design/sizing, and operational guidance around vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation.
Oh, although I already had this session listed on the top 15, make sure to check out Frank Denneman’s 60 minutes of NUMA, that is… if you want to wreck your brain, it is DEEP!