VMworld is upon us and once again you must pick which sessions you want to try and see. With so many sessions (over 750+) and so few time slots (maybe 25 max) it becomes a real challenge to try and pick the sessions you want to see. In general I choose based on the topics that I’m interested in and more importantly who the speaker is. So below are my top picks, some of them may be full already but you can get on the waiting list or just show up and try and get in. You can also watch them online after VMworld once they are posted. One thing to note any session that has a SPO in the session number indicates a sponsor (paid) session that made it in outside the normal voting process.
Virtual Volumes sessions:
Virtual Volumes is VMware’s hot new storage architecture for external storage arrays and there are a lot of good sessions on this topic. Being slightly biased of course I have to start off with my session. Ken & Patrick are great VMware technical resources for VVols, Howard Marks is always worth a watch and I’m curious as to how backup vendors are integrating with VVols so the Symantec session sounds interesting.
- STO5888 – Top 10 Thing You MUST Know Before Implementing Virtual Volumes (VVols) – Eric Siebert – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
- STO5522 – Virtual Volumes Technical Panel- Ken Werneburg (VMware), Eric Siebert and others – Wed – 1:00-2:00
- STO5822 – Putting Virtual Volumes to Work — Storage Best Practices for vSphere 6 and Beyond – Howard Marks – Wed – 8:00-9:00
- STO4649 – Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive – Ken Werneburg, Patrick Dirks (VMware) – Wed – 11:30-12:30
- STO5844 – Benchmark Testing: Making Backups Better Than Ever Using Virtual Volumes – VMware/Symantec – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
- STO6552-GD – Meet the Virtual Volumes Engineering Team with Patrick Dirks – Wed – 9:30-10:30
- STO6553-GD – Meet the Virtual Volumes Product Team with Ken Werneburg and Ben Meadowcroft – Mon – 1:30-2:30
Virtual SAN sessions:
Virtual SAN has been around for a while now but there is some new stuff being announced that should be interesting. You can probably guess one of the new things from one of the session titles below. Cormac, Rawlinson and Duncan are great technical experts so the sessions should be very good.
- STO6050 – Virtual SAN: The Software-Defined Storage Platform of the Future- Rawlinson Rivera – Wed – 9:30-10:30
- STO5333 – Building a Stretched Cluster with Virtual SAN – Rawlinson Rivera/Duncan Epping – Tues – 11:00-12:00
- STO5336 – VMware Virtual SAN – Architecture Deep Dive – Rawlinson Rivera – Wed 3:30-4:30
- STO6228 – Monitoring and Troubleshooting Virtual SAN, Current and Future- Cormac Hogan – Wed 8:30-9:30
Other sessions:
A lot of these are based on people I know and enjoy seeing such as Chris Wolf, William Lam, Scott Lowe & Mike Foley. I also like deep dive technical sessions so the ones on vMotion and Compute/Memory look interesting. I’m also curious about the emerging container (cloud-native apps) space that should have a big focus at VMworld this year. I also noticed VMware plans on releasing a VM encryption solution so that should be an interesting one. I’m not much of a networking or VDI person so I tend to avoid those but there certainly looked like a number of great sessions in those areas as well.
- STO6631-SPO – GreyHairs on Storage – The Podcast Live on Stage – Howard Marks/Ray Lucchesi – Mon – 2:00-3:00
- INF4528 – vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks- William Lam – Mon – 5:00-6:00
- INF4936 – Insight Into vSphere 6 vMotion: Architecture, Features, Performance and Debugging – VMware – Wed – 2:30-3:30
- NET6606-GD – Container Challenges with Scott Lowe – Tues – 5:30-6:30
- INF4758 – vSphere 6 Security Update – Mike Foley – Tues – 12:30-1:30
- INF5177 – VMworld 2015 – vSphere Security – Fact .vs. Fiction – Mike Foley – Wed – 4:00-5:00
- INF5701 – Extreme Performance Series: vSphere Compute & Memory – VMware – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
- INF5093 – vSphere Web Client – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow – VMware – Wed – 11:00-12:00
- INF5339 – Protect your VM data with VM Encryption for vSphere and vCloud Air- VMware – Wed – 8:00-9:00
- CTO6121 – VMware and the ‘Internet-of-Things’ – Chris Wolf – Tues – 5:30-6:30
- CTO6455 – Future Meets Present: Insights from VMware Field CTOs – Chris Wolf, Paul Strong, Joe Baguley – Wed – 11:30-12:30
- CNA5698 – Building your Next Infrastructure Specifically for Cloud Native Apps – Eric Gray/Michael West – Tue – 5:30-6:30
- CNA6647-GD – Provisioning Containers to vSphere with Benjamin Corrie – Thurs 10:30-11:30
- CNA6649-S – Build and run Cloud Native Apps in your Software-Defined Data Center- Kit Colbert – Mon 3:00-4:00
