Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

sessions

Must attend VMworld sessions 2014

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Every year I do this post on the must attend VMworld sessions, and I just realized I had not done this for 2014 yet. So here it is, the list of sessions I feel are most definitely worth attending. I tend to focus on sessions which I know will have solid technical info and great presenters. Many of which over the years I have either seen presenting myself and respect very much. I tried to limit the list to 20 this year (edit: 21, 22), so of course it could be that your session (or your fav session) is missing, unfortunately I cannot list all as that would defeat the purpose.

Here we go:

  1. STO3008-SPO – Decoupled Storage: Practical Examples of Leveraging Server Flash in a Virtualized Datacenter by Satyam Vaghani and Frank Denneman. What more do I need to say? Both rock stars!
  2. STO1279 – Virtual SAN Architecture Deep Dive Christian and Christos were the leads on VSAN, who can tell you better than they can??
  3. SDDC1176 – Ask the Expert vBloggers featuring Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, William Lam, myself and moderated by Rick Scherer. This session has been a hit for the last years and will be one you cannot miss!
  4. STO2996-SPO – The vExpert Storage Game Show featuring Vaughn Steward, Cormac Hogan, Rawlinson Rivera and many others… It will be educational and entertaining for sure! Not the standard “death by powerpoint” session. If you do want “DBP”, this is not for you!
  5. STP3266 – Web-Scale Converged Infrastructure for Enterprise. Josh Odgers talking web scale for Enterprise organizations, are you still using legacy apps? Then this is a must attend.
  6. SDDC2492 – How the New Software-defined Paradigms Will Impact Your vSphere Design Forbes Guthrie and Scott Lowe talking vSphere Design, you bet you will learn something here!
  7. HBC2068 – vCloud Hybrid Service Networking Technical Deep Dive Want to know more about vCHS networking, I am sure David Hill is going to dive deep!
  8. NET2747 – VMware NSX: Software Defined Networking in the Real World Chris Wahl and Jason Nash talking networking, what is there not to like?
  9. BCO1893 – Site Recovery Manager and vCloud Automation Center: Self-service DR Protection for the Software-Defined Data Center My co-presenter Lee Dilworth for the previous 2 VMworlds, he knows what he is talking about! Co-hosting a DR session with one of the BC/DR PMs, Ben Meadowcroft. This will be good.
  10. NET1674 – Advanced Topics & Future Directions in Network Virtualization with NSX I have seen Bruce Davie present multiple times, always a pleasure and educational!
  11. STO2496 – vSphere Storage Best Practices: Next-Gen Storage Technologies Chad and Vaughn in one session… this will be good!
  12. BCO2629 – Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication: What’s New Technical Deep Dive Jeff Hunter and Ken Werneburg are the DR experts at VMware Tech Marketing, so worth attending for sure!
  13. HBC2638 – Ten Vital Best Practices for Effective Hybrid Cloud Security by Russel Callen and Matthew Probst… These guys are the vCHS architects, you can bet this will be useful!
  14. STO3162 – Software Defined Storage: Satisfy the Requirements of Your Application at the Granularity of a Virtual Disk with Virtual Volumes (VVols) Cormac Hogan talking VVOLs with Rochna from Nimble, this is one I would like to see!
  15. STO2480 – Software Defined Storage – The VCDX Way Part II : The Empire Strikes Back The title by itself is enough to attend this one… (Wade Holmes and Rolo Rivera)
  16. SDDC3281 – A DevOps Story: Unlocking the Power of Docker with the VMware platform and its ecosystem. You may not know these guys, but I do… Aaron and George are rock stars, and Docker seems to be the new buzzword. Find out what it is about!
  17. VAPP2979 – Advanced SQL Server on vSphere Techniques and Best Practices Scott and Jeff are the experts when it comes to virtualizing SQL, what more can I say?!
  18. STO2197 – Storage DRS: Deep Dive and Best Practices Mustafa Uysal is the lead on SDRS/SIOC, I am sure this session will contain some gems!
  19. HBC1534 – Recovery as a Service (RaaS) with vCloud Hybrid Service David Hill and Chris Colotti talking, always a pleasure to attend!
  20. MGT1876 – Troubleshooting With vCenter Operations Manager (Live Demo) Wondering why your VM is slow? Sam McBride and Praveen Kannan will show you live…
  21. INF1601 – Taking Reporting and Command Line Automation to the Next Level with PowerCLI with Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens, all I would like to know is if PowerCLI-man is going to be there or not?
  22. MGT1923 – vCloud Automation Center 6 and Storage Policy-Based Management Framework Integration with Rawlinson Rivera and Chen Wei… They are doing things with VCAC and SPBM which has never been seen before!

As stated, some of your fav sessions may be missing… feel free to leave a suggestion so that others know which sessions they should attend.

My VMworld San Francisco session recommendations

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Every year I do this blog post with recommendations, I hadn’t yet this year and several people started asking for it so I figured it was about time. People always complain sessions aren’t technical enough, and my answer typically is: then you have been attending the wrong sessions… So if you were one of those folks last year, make sure to include some of the sessions below in to your schedule as I will personally guarantee you will get something out of each of these. These are not the average marketing sessions, but rather sessions by deep technical people, or just plain awesome presenters. Note that I tried to limit myself to just 20 / 30 sessions, so some awesome sessions might be missing, don’t shoot me for that as when going through the list I figured I could easily get to 50… but then I might as well just link the content catalog.

This is my top 30, in no particular order:

  1. VSVC5511 – Deploying vSphere with OpenStack: What It Means to Your Cloud Environment by Scott Lowe and Dan Wendlandt
  2. VSVC5364 – Storage IO Control: Concepts, Configuration and Best Practices to Tame Different Storage Architectures by Sachin Manpathak and Ajay Gulati
  3. VSVC5280 – DRS: New Features, Best Practices and Future Directions by Aashish Parikh and Ajay Gulati
  4. VSVC4966 – vSphere Distributed Switch – Technical Deep Dive by Jason Nash
  5. VSVC4944 – PowerCLI Best Practices – A Deep Dive by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf
  6. VSVC4886 – Innovations in vMotion: A Technical Preview by Jennifu Wu, Gabe Tarasuk-Levin, Sreekanth Setty and Min Cai
  7. VSVC4830 – vCenter Deep Dive by Ameet Jani and Justin King
  8. VCM5477 – Integration Deep Dive: Cloud Service Automation with NSX and vCloud Automation Center by Somik Behera and Thomas Kraus
  9. VCM5008 – vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics by Eric Sloof and Duco Jaspars
  10. VAPP4683 – Maximize Database Performance in Your Software-Defined Datacenter by Mark Achtemichuk and Michael Webster
  11. VAPP4679 – Software-Defined Datacenter Design Panel for Monster VM’s: Taking the Technology to the Limits for High Utilisation, High Performance Workloads by Andrew Mitchell, Mark Achtemichuk, Mostafa Khalil and Michael Webster
  12. STO5638 – Best Practices with Software Defined Storage by Vaughn Stewart and Chad Sakac
  13. STO5636 – Storage DRS: Deep Dive and Best Practices to Suit Your Storage Environments by Mustafa Uysal and Sachin Manpathak
  14. STO5559 – Storage Industry Trends by Alex Jauch and Vijay Ramachandran
  15. STO5027 – VMware Virtual SAN Technical Best Practices by Cormac Hogan and Kiran Madnani
  16. STO4798 – Software-Defined Storage: The VCDX Way by Wade Holmes and Rawlinson Rivera
  17. STO4791 – Just Because You Could, Doesn’t Mean You Should: Lessons Learned in Storage Best Practices (v2.0) by Patrick Carmichael
  18. SEC5891 – Technical Deep Dive: Build a Collapsed DMZ Architecture for Optimal Scale and Performance Based on NSX Firewall Services by Ranga Maddipudi and Shubha Bheemarao
  19. SEC5828 – Datacenter Transformation with Network Virtualization: Today and Tomorrow by Martin Casado
  20. SEC5582 – Multi-site Deployments with Network Virtualization by Pepe Garcia and Kamau Wanguhu
  21. PHC5640 – The Story Behind Designing and Building a Distributed Automation Framework for vCloud Hybrid Services by Nick Weaver
  22. PHC4750 – How to Build a Hybrid Cloud in Less than a Day by David Hill
  23. NET5716 – Advanced NSX Architecture by Bruce Davie
  24. NET5521 – vSphere Distributed Switch – Design and Best Practices by Ray Budavari and Venky Deshpande
  25. NET5184 – Designing Your Next Generation Datacenter for Network Virtualization by Ray Budavari and Ben Basler
  26. EUC5291 – Horizon View Troubleshooting: Looking under the Hood by Matt Coppinger and Pat Lee
  27. EUC5238 – Horizon Workspace: Data Deep Dive by Rasmus Jensen and Marcello Golfieri
  28. EUC4546 – Architecting VMware Horizon Workspace for Scale and Performance by Kit Colbert, Jared Cook and Andrew Johnson
  29. BCO4977 – VMware vSphere Replication: Technical Walk-Through with Engineering by Aleksey Pershin and Ken Werneburg
  30. BCO4756 – VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Technical Deep Dive And Troubleshooting Session by Jacy Townsend and Darryl Hing

 

VMworld Content Catalog live, here are my recommendations!

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First of all, some shameless self-promotion. Make sure to add the following to sessions to your schedule builder:

Traditionally I always do a list of sessions, when the content catalog goes live, that I recommend attending. I tried to make a top 10, and then I figured that would never work. I ended up with 3o sessions. This list is in completely random order and I am sure I missed out on a few really cool and deepdive sessions but here are the ones I recommend. Note that I tend to recommend technical sessions, if you are looking for high level overviews you probably can skip most of these. If you are like me and love to see technical deep subject matter experts… add them!

  1. INF-SEC1840 – vSphere Hardening to Achieve Regulatory Compliance: Better, Faster, Stronger with Charu Chaubal, Davi Ottenheimer, Ben Thomas and James Sullivan
  2. APP-CAP2956 – Inside the Hadoop Machine with Richard McDougall
  3. TEX2158 – Scalable Virtual Networks with VMware’ VXLAN – Customer Deployment Scenarios with T Sridhar and Ravindra Neelakant
  4. INF-SEC1282 – Automating Security and Compliance with Disaster Recovery Using VCM, vCOps, vShield, VIN and SRM with Michael Webster and Shubha Bheemarao
  5. APP-BCA1516 – Virtualizing SQL High Availability with Jeff Szastak and Michael Corey
  6. INF-BCO2155 – vCloud DR for Oxford University Computing Services – Real World Example with Aidan Dalgleish and Gary Blake
  7. INF-VSP2164 – Automation of vCloud Director Disaster Recovery with Alan Renouf and Aidan Dalgleish
  8. EUC2620 – PCoIP – Tuning, Tactics, and Tools with Chuck Hirstius, Banit Agrawal and Lawrence Spracklen
  9. INF-VSP2448 – Automating Bare Metal to the Cloud and Beyond with Alan Renouf, Jake Robinson and Eric Williams
  10. OPS-CSM1167 – Architecting for vCloud Allocation Models with Frank Denneman and Chris Colotti
  11. EUC1357 – Dispelling the Myths of Desktops as a Service (DaaS) with VMware View with Andre Leibovi and David Stafford
  12. OPS-CIM1775 – VMware vCenter Operations Customers Come Forward to “Tell Their Story” with Ben Scheerer
  13. INF-SEC1840 – vSphere Hardening to Achieve Regulatory Compliance: Better, Faster, Stronger with Charu Chaubal, David Ottenheimer, James Sullivan and Ben Thomas
  14. EUC2021 – A View of Hertz: Real World Lessons Learned Designing, Deploying and Managing View in Hertz with Graham Gordon and Simon Long
  15. INF-BCO2982 – Stretched Clusters & SRM; How and When to Choose One, the Other, or Both with Chad Sakac and Vaughn Steward
  16. INF-VSP1353 – vCenter 5.1: A Technical Deep Dive with Justin King, Ameet Jani and Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee
  17. INF-VSP1365 – Understanding VMware ESXi Security with Kyle Gleed and Yatin Patil
  18. INF-VSP1423 – esxtop for Advanced Users with Krishna Raj Raja
  19. INF-BCO1505 – vSphere Replication: Technical Walk-through with Ken Werneburg and Aleksey Pershin
  20. INF-VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure with David Hill, Chris Colotti and Aidan Dalgleish
  21. INF-NET2162 – VXLAN Deep Dive with Arun Goel and Kenneth Duda
  22. EUC2005 – Troubleshooting View: Looking under the Hood with John Dodge and Matt Coppinger
  23. INF-VSP1683 – vSphere Cluster Resource Pools Best Practices with Frank Denneman and Rawlinson Riverra
  24. INF-NET2207 – vSphere Distributed Switch – Technical Deep Dive with Jason Nash
  25. INF-VSP1196 – vCloud Director Networking Deep Dive with Kamau Wanguhu
  26. INF-VSP3221 – VM Scare? Heterogeneous Virtualization’s Impact with Chris Wolf
  27. INF-VSP1475 – vSphere 5 Design Discussions with Scott Lowe and Forbes Guthrie
  28. INF-VSP3046 – Cloud Infrastructure Suite: From Management Application to Integrated Applications and Extensible Platform with Ben Verghese
  29. INF-STO1545 – Architecting Storage DRS Datastore Clusters with Frank Denneman and Valentin Hamburger
  30. OPS-CIM1564 – Troubleshooting Using vCenter Operations Manager with Kit Colbert and Praveen Kannan