Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmworld

My top VMworld session picks

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Every year I post a list of my favorite VMworld sessions, my top picks. There are way too many sessions to see, but these are definitely the sessions I would like to attend personally. That could be because of the speaker, or the content, and preferably both. Yes I know, this list will have some great sessions missing, not because I did not like the abstract or speaker, but simply because I forced myself to limit this list to 10. Before we get started, here are the two sessions I have scheduled, make sure to sign up for those while you still can, as both seem to be at 80+ % capacity right now

  1. The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management [HCI1270BU] – Cormac Hogan & Duncan Epping
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
    The world of software-defined storage moves at a rapid pace, and VMware is one of the biggest enablers. In this session, Cormac and Duncan will guide you through the world of software-defined storage initiatives at VMware and provide a primer to VMware vSAN, VMware Virtual Volumes (VVol), persistent cloud-native storage options (Project Hatchway), the VMware vSphere APIs for I/O filtering, and the binding factor in these cases: storage policy-based management. Be warned: We will bring demos!
  2. vSphere Clustering Deep Dive, Part 1: vSphere HA and DRS [VIN1249BU] – Frank Denneman & Duncan Epping
    Monday, Aug 27, 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
    In this session, Duncan and Frank will take you through the trenches of VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vSphere High Availability (HA). Find out about options to optimize your DRS settings for your specific requirements and goals, such as if you should be load balancing on active or consumed memory, as well as what has recently changed in the DRS algorithm and if it will impact DRS behavior. And for vSphere HA, you will learn about when it restarts virtual machines (VMs), what kind of restart times to expect, and where you can find evidence that a VM (or multiple) have been restarted. You will find out about all of these items and more. Prepare to dive deep, as the basics will not be covered.

Here are my top picks, note that although I picked Ravi’s session from the Extreme Performance Series, all of them are worth attending!

  1. Extreme Performance Series: vCenter Performance Deep Dive [VIN1759BU] Ravi Soundararajan
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
    In this talk, you will get a brief description of the internals of VMware vCenter before going into basic performance troubleshooting and monitoring techniques. Find out about various tools for analyzing resource usage, important metrics like sessions and API calls, and database performance (primarily for the vCenter Server Appliance, but also for vCenter Server for Windows). You will get to understand the differences between vCenter and Platform Services Controller, and consider the impact of linked mode and plug-ins/extensions. By the end of the talk, you’ll understand how your vCenter works, when you may need multiple vCenters, and how Platform Services Controller factors into performance. xPerfSeries
  2. Tech Preview: The Road to a Declarative Compute Control Plane [VIN2256BU] Maarten Wiggers & Frank Denneman
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
    Declarative control planes are becoming increasingly popular in the industry. Instead of explicitly defining configurations, declarative control planes tell the architecture what the desired state should be. The desired state could be high priority, or keep particular VMs or containers separate. Within the software-defined data center (SDDC), VMware vSphere offers two declarative control planes: one for networking and one for storage. However, there is no declarative control plane for compute yet.
    Compute policy provides a framework to allow our customers the flexibility and control of VM placement and resourcing decisions based on the user’s encompassing application needs. In this session, you will learn about the capabilities introduced in the VMware Cloud SDDC as a path to achieve that goal.
  3. Clustering Deep Dive 2: Quality Control with DRS and Network I/O Control [VIN1735BU] Niels Hagoort & Sahan Gamage
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
    In this session, you will go through the trenches of network-aware VMware vSphere DRS and vSphere Network I/O Control. You may ask yourself what these two have to do with each other as, unfortunately, not many people know about the enhancements added to the DRS algorithm around network-aware load balancing. If you want to understand how this can help prevent problems from occurring with network-intensive workloads like NFV, then this is a session you cannot miss!
  4. Project Fractal – The Easy Button for Edge Computing [IOT2593BU] – Dennis Lu & Sridevi Ravuri
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
    Come and learn about how VMware can accelerate your adoption of Edge Computing by dealing with the additional complexity and cost of infrastructure management at the Edge, helping you quickly achieve the cost savings and revenue growth benefits of Edge Computing. This is also a great opportunity to shape the direction of VMware’s edge services to help fit customer needs.
  5. vSAN Deployment Topology and Availability Deep Dive: What You Need to Know [HCI2040BU] Paudie O’Riordan & Mansi Shah
    Wednesday, Aug 29, 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.
    Today, VMware vSAN can be deployed in many different form factors; for example, vSAN 2-Node ROBO, vSAN Fault domains, Stretch Cluster with and without local protection, and more. These deployment models make vSAN quite flexible and unique. This session will help you understand the different trade-offs and focus on the benefits and overheads of the choice you’ve made in your vSAN proposed design. Join Mansi and Paudie as they discuss these topologies in depth from both an engineering perspective and a practical real-world implementation. Paudie and Mansi will take a no-nonsense review of how to approach designing a fault-tolerant vSAN deployment and give real-world examples of how to achieve the best design from both an availability and performance perspective.
  6. Top 10 Automation Requests and How You Can Save Time [VIN2527BU] Alan Renouf & William Lam
    Monday, Aug 27, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
    After working firstly as customers and secondly at VMware, Alan and William have encountered hundreds of ways to save time through automation. In this session, they will take you through the top automation requests and how they were completed, teaching you not only how to reproduce them yourself, but also giving you a framework to enable you to automate your top 10 requests.
    This session will include a number of techniques and languages, such as PowerShell, PowerCLI, Python, Java, .NET, and simple web applications with JavaScript.
  7. Data Lifecycle Management in Hybrid Clouds [HCI1705BU] Christos Karamanolis & Ilya Languev
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
    The focus of IT and DevOps organizations is shifting from storage toward data management independent of infrastructure and locations. This trend is partly driven by a new generation of applications that extract business value from data (big data, analytics, machine learning). Customers need cost-effective data storage but also data mobility, copy management, and on-demand access as business requirements and IT investments evolve. Join Christos Karamanolis (CTO, Storage and Availability) and Ilya Languev (Principal Engineer) as they outline the VMware vision around data lifecycle management that spans private data centers and public clouds. They will discuss VMware’s R&D investments in this space and use real-world examples and demos to highlight the benefits for our customers, both for traditional and cloud-native applications.
  8. VMware CTO Panel: What’s Over the Horizon? [CTO3496PU] Ray O’Farrell, Christos Karamanolis, Chris Wolf, Shawn Bass, Pere Monclus
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
    VMware CTOs spend significant time assessing emerging technology trends, taking a practical look at their potential impacts and opportunities for VMware. This session explores emerging areas, inclusive of edge, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), SD-WAN and network service mesh, distributed data management, and more. There will also be ample time for you to have your most pressing questions answered.
  9. Smart Placement of Workloads in Tomorrow’s Distributed Cloud [CTO2161BU] Daniel Beveridge
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
    This session will offer a look at the evolution of cloud as we move from a nega-cloud-focused experience into a more distributed cloud experience where compute evolves toward a mesh of resources. Find out about a technology project sponsored by VMware’s Office of the CTO that has developed a novel approach to the placement of workloads in a vast marketplace of providers, resulting in a seamless cloud burst experience across a range of providers. You will learn about some cutting-edge cloud technology that points toward a new way of consuming cloud services with an emphasis on reducing cost, improving user experience, and offering increased flexibility and agility in workload management.
  10. Optimizing vSAN for Performance [HCI1246BU] Cormac Hogan & Paudie O’Riordan
    Tuesday, Aug 28, 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
    The VMware vSAN team gets many questions on performance. For example, does adding a second disk group improve performance? Does adding a stripe width to an object make things faster? Does increasing the MTU size matter? Does mixing SAS and SATA make a difference? Join this session for answers to these sorts of questions. Paudie and Cormac will discuss the results of various performance tests they initiated in their labs to reach these conclusions. You will learn about the benchmark tool of choice, HCIBench, as well as all the different nuances that can make a difference to your benchmarking results.

Also note, there’s a long list of “deep dive” session at vmworld this year, do a search and register before it is too late!

Confessions of a VMUG Speaker – the prequel #SpeakerFail

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On twitter a question was asked by Casey West if people had “Speaker Fail” stories and I replied to it with my story. I have told this story to some folks but never shared it on my blog, so I figured I would share it. I already wrote an article about speaking at your local VMUG and what to do and not to do, but these are things I found out the hard way…

So what is the back story? Well, many many years ago I just started working for VMware. I was already doing some blogging and had posted a bunch of articles about vSphere HA. As a result I knew some of the developers and one of them asked me to work with him on the deck. I was terrified of public speaking, actually I rejected other public speaking, but I figured that helping him out develop the deck couldn’t hurt. So I worked with him on the deck and after a while he asked if I wanted to help presenting the deck.

I thought about it for a while and my brain said: SAY NO. I gave it some more thought, and although I was terrified I wanted to go outside of my comfort zone, I didn’t realize though when I said yes that I would go in to the panic zone straight away instead of in to the “learning zone”. I was nervous, extremely nervous. But luckily the developer told me that it would only be a session in front of 100 people.

A couple of weeks go by and I receive an email. The developer told me that due to various escalations/bugs had to fix for an upcoming release he could not fly to the event. I was by myself. You can imagine that my level or nervousness went up with about 10x. I would be on my own in front of 100 people, what now? The VMworld team transferred the session on to my name, and then I logged in to the backend to see the details of my session. This includes the registrations. Hold on, it was supposed to say 100 people, but it says 450. WHAT? 450 people in a single room? And then a day they changed rooms for the sessions, as it was overbooked, quickly after that the registrations filled up to 700 something. I was nervous just thinking about presenting in front of 100 people with a co-presenter, now I was going up on stage by myself in front of 700+.

I rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed and rehearsed. I wanted to make sure I knew every slide inside out before I went up on stage. And I did, I was nervous as hell but I knew my slides by the letter. Unfortunately I was so nervous that I went in to this “hyper sensitive state” and I could hear everything that was going on in the room. After 3 or 4 slides I was explaining a complex diagram and someone’s phone went off, he picked it up and walked out. I lost my train of thought and had to start over again with the slide. Which in its turn made me over more nervous. It took me roughly 5 minutes just to recover from that, but it felt like days. I finished my session and decided I would never ever present again. I am writing this while presenting at a VMUG, no need to tell you that I didn’t give up.

For those who have been in this situation, or are hesitant to present because of these reasons, please read the post Confessions of a VMUG speaker, which was written before this post. I hope it helps realizing people that many people face the same fears, but by practicing your session and doing it over and over again at various events you will become better and it will make it easier. Heck, you may even start to enjoy it after a while!

 

VMworld Call For Papers opened, some tips…

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For the past 8 years or so I have presented at VMworld, I think I have submitted sessions for the past 10 years or so. I probably submitted well over 60 sessions, and I mean “WELL OVER”. Many of course which got rejected. Some for which I understood why they were rejected, others for less obvious reasons as to me the session(s) sounded awesome. Then again, that is part of the problem: to me. I am usually not the person deciding which session is in and which session is out. Plus, it is easy to forget but there are literally thousands of submissions, and most of which sound very similar unfortunately, which also means that the majority of people submitting a session will unfortunately  receive the “rejected” email.

Then there’s the bigger problem: we also have many VMware people submitting sessions, and although it may not sound fair, they usually get picked over community sessions. Unless you are a thought leader in the space you submitted a session for, an example here for instance would be people like Chris Wahl and Jason Nash. They presented on Distributed Switches / VMware networking a couple of times. They are known in the industry and presented at various VMUGs, and killed it at VMworld a couple of times, which was to be expected based on their reputation.

Let’s be honest here for one second, some people may act surprised their session did not get picked and a similar sounding session by a VMware person did, but it makes sense right? Most VMware folks are experienced, have done these kind of events many times, and as such the person picking knows it is the safest bet. Heck, even within VMware there’s some sort of ranking, let’s assume a new version of vSAN is released around VMworld, if a Consultant, Pre-Sales Engineer, Product Marketing Manager and Tech Marketing Manager submit a similar sounding technical session then most likely the Tech Marketing Manager will get the session. Why? Well, that is his job: create and present technical collateral for the product. Safe bet right? However, if the developer submits a session then he/she will most likely get it. Sounds fair right? Now that we got that out of the way, lets focus on your submission. What works, and what does not work? Is there a

First of all: Experience. If you have no experience in public speaking, why are you submitting for the largest virtualization conference world wide? Each speaker will need to provide their experience, I can tell you that when I voted for VMworld submissions this was always something I looked at. If you have no experience whatsoever then you are aiming too high. Go to your local VMUG first, get some sessions under your belt. Start small and work up to some “larger” rooms, at VMworld it is not uncommon to have 700 – 1200 people in your room. Without experience that may end up being a very painful exercise, and it is not a risk which I (as a person who voted) was willing to take.

Secondly: Topic. Come up with a good topic, potentially try it out even at a local VMUG or even test the idea against some colleagues. It needs to be something you are passionate about and (preferably) an expert in. Look around you if you know anyone else who likes talking about the same topic. Can you join forces maybe? Even better, do you know a VMware employee who may be interested in co-presenting? And if so, what can they bring to the table that spices up your session? (Deep dive details for instance.) Try to make sure your topic is “unique”, and as a community member / customer / partner try to add something that we as VMware employees are challenged with: your experience as a “user / implementer / architect”. Make sure this is crystal clear in your abstract, and of course make sure your abstract is catch and does your session justice. Don’t make it too long, if the person voting needs to read for 15 minutes to understand what your 60 minute session will be about you did something wrong.

Thirdly: Title. I was only joking when I said on twitter that the title for my proposed session was “Deep Dive in Artificial Intelligence delivered by Green IoT solutions using Machine Learning in a Blockchain world enabled through the power of containers scheduled by Kubernetes running on HCI provided by VMware vSAN in VMC on AWS“. Although I still may want to submit it, as it is already overbooked according to the VMware twitter account ;). Either way, try to keep it short and make crisp and catchy, and adding a buzzword may help but don’t start buzzword bingo like I did. I usually revise my titles 4-5 times before I submit. It needs to represent the abstract accordingly, and it needs to draw attention if you want your session to be picked from the thousands being submitted.

I hope that helps a bit, in the early years I would always submit around 6 sessions, but my strategy now is definitely: quality over quantity. Work on creating the abstracts and titles for 3 great sessions and submit those, instead of taking a shotgun approach and submitting 6+ half baked sessions… Good luck, and remember: if you don’t end up getting selected, submit the proposal to a VMUG near you instead. They are always begging for community sessions. Good luck.