Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

VMworld Expert Program, get with it!

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For the last couple of years we had an Expert Program at VMworld. I was designated as an “knowledge expert” in 2012 and 2011 and as part of the expert program I delivered various “Group Discussion” sessions and did 1:1’s with customers. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this program is typically opened up for scheduling after the regular sessions hence I want to inform everyone that the ability to schedule group discussions will be there again this year.

Those of you who were fortunate enough to be able to plan one of the Group Discussions can acknowledge this, Group Discussions are the most exciting sessions there are. Although typically the designated expert (VMware employee)  will guide the discussions and there is a set topic, within those boundaries anything goes. So typically you will hear a lot of “customer problems / solutions / experiences” in these sessions, but also futures…

Just to give an example, for my group discussion I have invited Keith Farkas. Keith is the lead developer on HA and we will be talking HA futures, but primarily looking for your feedback to ensure that what the developers are building actually meets your needs! So if you want the scoop, make sure to sign up for our Group Discussion as soon as it opens up.

But not just my group discussion, there are a whole bunch of other awesome and knowledgeable  guys part of this program, just to name a few: Lee Dilworth, Ken Werneburg, Cormac Hogan, Alan Renouf, Ray Budavari, Massimo Re Ferre and many many others. Make sure to sign up as soon as you can, as these Group Discussions typically fill up fast, and for a good reason!

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

 

See you at VMworld 2013 San Francisco and Barcelona!

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I just received the news that I have sessions accepted for both VMworld 2013 San Francisco and Barcelona.

  • Session ID: BCO4872
    Speakers: Lee Dilworth, Duncan Epping
    Session Title: Operating and Architecting a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster based infrastructure
    Track: Business Continuity
    Presenting at: San Francisco, Barcelona
  • Session ID: VSVC4569
    Speaker: Rick Scherer, William Lam, Duncan Epping, Vaughn Stewart, Scott Lowe
    Session Title: Ask the Expert vBloggers
    Track: vSphere and vCloud Suite
    Presenting at: San Francisco

So if you are planning on attending VMworld, make sure to attend one of these session and make sure to come by and say hi. It is always good to meet the people reading your articles!

VMworld 2013 call for papers open!

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VMworld 2013 Call For Papers opened today. I know many of you are excited about this and hoping to have a session accepted at this top-of-the-bill event. Personally I always submit various sessions and for the last years always had atleast one of them excepted, and some years even multiple. So the obvious question I always get is “do you have tips”?

I guess at the risk of lowering my own chances, here they are, do note that as always there is a limited number of sessions that will be accepted. No guarantee that my tips will help in any shape or form, but these are my rules when I submit a session:

  • Be Original, make sure your suggestion is unique. If there are 10 others submitting the exact same, chances are slim you will get in. (Every year I see at least 5 or 6 community/bloggers panel sessions being submitted, with limited space make sure you work together on this and do not compete.)
  • Think Big, although your 2 host home-lab might be interesting to you VMworld is attended by 20.000+ people. So make sure your session appeals to the broader audience AND to the voting committee.
  • Quality over Quantity, really there is no point in submitting 10 sessions. Rather submit two or three, well thought out and developed submissions. This is what you will be judged on by the voting committee. They will read your title and summary, this will need to convince them!
  • Co-Present! Something I always try to do is to team up with someone. Not only will it make the “delivery” a lot easier, but a second pair of eyes on the submission will help!
  • Theme – Theme – Theme, although the theme for 2013 hasn’t been announced yet all of us can more or less guess what it will be about. We all know VMware has these three pillars they are focusing on, and that the SDDC is a major part of it… Make sure to submit something that hits that theme / fits in to those three pillars!

Now before you start running and submit a session, take a deep breath, sit down, relax and think about what you are going to submit. The Call For Papers will be open until April 12th so no need to rush, start scribbling down those ideas and go take your time to fine-tune them!

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/cfp

Want to do some VMware Hands-on Labs but don’t have the kit?

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Those who have visited VMworld and done a couple of labs know how awesome these are. Recently VMware announced that the VMware Hands-On Labs (HoL) would be made available online. You had the option to register for the beta and last week they announced the public beta was opened! On twitter some early reports are already popping up and judging by the comments people are loving it.

 

 

 

If you want to know more about the HoL portal make sure to read this blog, I played around with it various times… I loved it. Sign up and try it out. There is no excuse any longer for not having hands-on experience with VMware products, you don’t need to own a lab…