Eric Siebert

Years ago I had setup a planet aggregator site for the top 25 vBlogs, it was a fairly basic plug-in and didn’t work all that well. I took it down months ago mainly because it was the last site I had hosted on GoDaddy and I wanted to get off of them completely. This week I built a brand new planet aggregator site from scratch on a hosting server that I wasn’t using. The plug-in I’m using now is way better and I bought some add-on’s for it so I could customize and improve it even more.

The default view displays content from the Top 100 vBlogs, you can change this to either the Top 50, Top 25 or Top 10 if you want to get more granular. I also have blogs sorted by categories so you can see blog posts from only certain categories like VDI or storage. Besides the Top 100 vBlogs I also included VMware corporate blogs as well like the vSphere, PowerCLI and Virtual Blocks blogs. The aggregator only displays links to the source posts, it does not contain any of the actual content. It is setup for long term retention of blog posts, so posts will not roll off quickly, right now I have it setup to capture 10 posts from each source going back up to 180 days.

So head on over there and check it out, if you have any suggestions for improving it please let me know. I made a best guest on categorizing blogs so if you blog isn’t in a certain category let me know and I’ll add it. You can also subscribe to it via RSS at this URL (Top 100 vBlogs only).

Sponsor sessions at VMware events such as VMUGs and VMworld always seem to get a bad rap and with good reason, they are very often sales & marketing pitches. These sessions very frequently tend to be focused on the vendors products and are not very educational to attendees and as a result they are usually not very well attended. Most attendees go to these events to learn about technology and unless they specifically have targeted a certain vendor for a potential upcoming need, they generally don’t want to hear sales pitches in sessions. The audience at these types of events is in the large majority technical and sales/marketing pitches is like kryptonite to them. I wrote about what I thought sponsors should do at events a few months ago when I offered feedback on VMUG events and I wanted to illustrate that here in more detail.

To make my point I wanted to share a real life and recent example that serves as proof that there is a right way and a wrong way to present a sponsor session at VMware events. The company I work for had several sponsor session slots for VMworld, my BU had one of them and I was responsible for putting together the abstract and session content for it. I had originally submitted a new edition of my VVols session from last year’s VMworld that was voted in through the content committee but it didn’t make it through this year. So instead I crafted a sponsor session that was about 3/4 VVols and 1/4 Containers and 100% technical and educational. When I submitted the abstract I did not even mention either a company name or product name in it. Now the other 2 submissions that my company submitted were pretty obvious product pitch sessions, one was pretty blatantly a product session, the other was a bit more subtle. So what do you think happened?

After my session was submitted along with our other sponsor sessions and the Schedule Builder opened, every week I would get the registration numbers for all 3 of our sessions in our weekly VMworld planning meeting. It was no surprise to me that my submission was doing well, registration was in the hundreds a few weeks before VMworld, the other sessions in comparison were in the double digits. The closer VMworld approached my session registration numbers were climbing fast, it hit the max limit of the room it was in several times and as the waiting list grew it was moved to a larger room. I watched as it hit 400, then 500, then 600, in the meantime our other 2 sessions were still stuck in the double digits. My submission eventually was moved into the largest room available that held 1,150 people and ended up with almost 900 people registered, the day of the session almost 600 people showed up for it.

I was frankly astounded that it was that high but not really surprised, I carefully crafted the abstract as a deep dive on VVol & Container technology and I delivered just that. My overall session rating was a 4.22 out of 5.0 which is pretty good in my book, want to see for yourself how I did it, watch the replay here. The final registration numbers of the other 2 sponsor sessions were around 60 and 100 as comparison. Do you wonder why that is? If you have been following what I’ve been saying so far you should know, If you build your session right, attendees will come, if you don’t they won’t come.

So let’s define what right is for a session, it’s a pretty simple formula.

• Knowledgeable, technical speaker + educational/technical content – sales/marketing pitch = great attendance

Let’s cover more specifically some Do’s & Dont’s to make this happen:

• Do write your abstract to be technical in nature, focus on technology, trends, features features, etc
• Do talk about technology in general without getting too deep into your products
• Do have someone technical design your presentation
• Do send a technical SA, evangelist or engineers to deliver your session
• Do use subtle mentions of your product as it relates to the technical content at hand
• Do technical demo’s and examples of your product in action but don’t over do it
• Do make it both interesting and educational so an attendee learns something about technology and your product
• Do leave people curious about your product so people can talk to you afterwards about in more detail
• Do bring people that know the answers to tough technical questions
• Do try and include a customer or industry expert in your session
• Don’t mention product’s in session abstracts, if you have to keep it at a minimum
• Don’t bait & switch by promising technical content and delivering sales content, you’ll be hated
• Don’t send a sales guy with no technical background to deliver a session
• Don’t use any slides from your marketing decks
• Don’t have a marketing guy prepare your deck
• Don’t send someone to the event that’s going to be in over his head and say I don’t know or I’ll have to check
• Don’t use magic quadrant’s or talk about industry trends or metrics
• Don’t have a C-level or VP person in your session (some exceptions apply)
• Don’t have someone pretend to be technical by reading speaker notes verbatim

If you are in doubt about if your content is appropriate for the event ask a VMUG leader, a tech marketing person, a techie customer or someone in the community to review it. Now let’s talk about what’s in it for you, you spent a lot of money to sponsor an event, how do you talk about your products so you get your ROI on the event and make it worth sponsoring.

Talking products and making sales pitches is not completely off-limits at events, just do it at your booth instead of in your session. At the session encourage people to come by your booth, if you delivered a good session people will come. At the end of your session use a slide or two to talk products, if you delivered an interesting presentation up until that point people won’t mind it and will stay and listen to what you have to say. At your booth people expect to talk about your products but again make sure you have some techie folks there as well to engage in deeper technology conversations.

A final thought I’ll leave with you, as a sponsor would you rather have 600 people listening to you in a session or 60? That one should be a no-brainer, if you do it the right way as I described here attendees will respect you more and they will likely come to you when they are ready to talk about products. If you do it the wrong way, you have missed the chance to influence a greater number of attendees and in many cases you will alienate a potential customer. But don’t take my word for it, why don’t you try it yourself and see what happens, you may not get huge numbers of attendees right off the bat but I guarantee if you do it right, they will come and ultimately you will be successful.

I previously did a post before VMworld to highlight the many great VVols related sessions at VMworld this year. Now that VMware has made the awesome decision to make every VMworld session recording available to the general public anyone can watch them. So here’s the full list of VVol’s related sessions at VMworld 2016, enjoy and learn!

VMware VVol Sessions

STO8159 – Snapshots Suck: How VSAN and VVol fix all your operational nightmares (Pete Flecha, VMware – John Nicholson, VMware)
STO7645 – Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive (Pete Flecha, VMware – Patrick Dirks, VMware)
STO9977-QT – 5 Tips for Getting The Most From Virtual Volumes and vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management (Ben Meadowcroft, VMware)
STO7549 – Achieving Agility, Flexibility , Scalability and Performance with VMware Software Defined Storage (SDS) and Virtual Volumes for Business critical databases (Mohan Potheri, VMware – Sudhir Balasubramanian, VMware)
STO7650 – Software-Defined Storage at VMware Primer (Duncan Epping, VMware – Lee Dilworth, VMware)

Partner VVol Sessions

STO9617-SPO – Containers & VVols – a technical deep dive on new technologies that revolutionize storage for vSphere (Eric Siebert, HPE – Charles Tierney, HPE)
STO8422 – Virtual Volumes: Why? (Rajib Ghosh, EMC – Ben Meadowcroft, VMware)
STO8619 – Transitioning to VVols: Partner Panel (Pete Flecha, VMware – 6 partner panelists)
SDDC9726-SPO – Making SolidFire Invisible in your VMware Environment (Josh Atwell, NetApp)
STO8694 – High-Speed Heroics: Array-based Replication and Recovery for VMware Virtual Volumes (Narayan Kumar, Nimble Storage – Julian Cates, Nimble Storage – Rawlinson Rivera, VMware, Inc)
STO8144 – VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes in a NetApp Environment (Rhett Bigler, NetApp – Pete Flecha, VMware)
VIRT8074 – The SDDC: Full Stack on vSphere 6.0 SAP Business Warehouse Powered By HANA, NSX, vRealize Operations, SDS-Virtual Volumes on Hitachi Unified Platform (Gregory Smith, Hitachi – Bob Goldsand, VMware)
STO8840 – Deploy Scalable Private Cloud with vSphere Virtual Volumes (Paul Morrissey, Hitachi Data Systems – Pete Flecha, VMware)
STO9054 – VVol and Storage Policy-Based Management ? Is It Everything They Said It Would Be? (Ben Bolles, Pivot3 – Jeremiah Francis, Financial Advocates)

I tried playing videos in the VMworld smartphone app yesterday and could not find anyway to do it, last year there was a Videos menu option in the app but this year it was missing. I reached out to the VMworld team and they gave me contact info for the developer of the app who promptly responded saying that the video playback option was just launched this morning in the app. So if you close the app completely and re-start it you will now see that option available. I’m pretty sure you have to be a registered VMworld attendee to use the app, I logged out of the app and the Videos option disappeared. Alternately anyone (non-attendees included) can view all the recording via the VMworld.com website. Note the VMworld app only supports portrait playback of the video but if you click the little arrow in the corner it will open in a web browser and rotate to landscape. Here’s how from my last years post:

UPDATE: Looks like VMware had a change of heart this year and made all sessions publicly available like they used to do 5+ years ago. You can access them all on the VMworld.com site. Not sure why they are publishing them to YouTube this year except it might get certain sessions more exposure.

UPDATE 2: The app now supports video playback!

VMware has made a few VMworld 2016 US sessions available to the general public via their VMworldTV YouTube channel. As of  right now there is only 10 sessions available but there should be more coming soon. VMware typically picks these based on session popularity and certain ones that they want to promote. Last year they released about 60 session recordings to the general public with the rest being only available to attendees. As of a few month ago anyone can now access all of the VMworld 2015 sessions.

As far as attendee access to recorded sessions via VMworld.com goes it looks like yesterday they weren’t there yet as it gave a message saying the content wasn’t loaded on mediasite yet. Today I tried it and it did work and it looks like all the sessions are available, you need to login with your email address which is matched up to your VMworld.com login to gain access. You can also go to the VMworld Content Catalog and after you login there will be a Watch Video link you can click to watch any session. Last year there was a Download link available for each session recording but this year it’s missing and you can only Watch (stream) them which is unfortunate if you want to watch them offline.

Now for some reason whoever designed the VMworld 2016 mobile app appears to have left out any way of watching sessions like you could do last year. Last year there was a Video link in the menu of the app to watch recorded sessions and this year it is missing. I have looked all over the app and have found no way to view recorded sessions, the obvious place was the Sessions/Speakers menu item but when I select that I don’t see any recording links when you select a session. So I’m not sure what is up with that, I’m waiting to hear back from VMware on it.

Below are the session that are currently publicly available grouped by category, I’ll be updating this list as more are added.

Current as of 9/7/2016

General Sessions

VMworld 2016 General Session – Monday (Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO – Guido Appenzeller, VMware – Michael Dell, Dell)
VMworld 2016 General Session – Tuesday (Sanjay Poonen, VMware GM of EUC – Ray O’Farrell, VMware EVP/CTO – Kit Colbert (VMware CTO Cloud Platform) – Rajiv Ramaswami, VMware EVP/GM Networking/Security – Yanbing Li, VMware EVP/GL Storage/Availability)

End User Computing

EUC7601 – Advances in Remote Display Protocol Technology with VMware Blast Extreme (Kiran Rao, VMware – Sean Samenfeld-Specht, VMware)
EUC8404 – What’s New with Horizon 7 (Henry Robinson, VMware – Tony Huhn, VMware)

Infrastructure

INF8036 – Enforcing a vSphere Cluster Design with PowerCLI Automation (Duncan Epping, VMware – Chris Wahl, Rubrik)
INF8038 – Getting Started with PowerShell and PowerCLI for Your VMware Environment (Kyle Ruddy, VMware – Chris Wahl, VMware)
INF9083 – Ask the vCenter Server Experts Panel (Adam Eckerle, VMware – Emad Younis, VMware – Blair Fitz, VMware – Dilpreet Bindra, VMware – Ryan Johnson, VMware)

Management

MGT7718 – The KISS of vRealize Operations! (Hicham Mourad, VMware – Chima Njaka, VMware)

Networking

NET9989 – VMware NSX, Network Bridge to Multi-Cloud Future (Guido Appenzeller, VMware)

Storage

STO7645 – Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive (Pete Flecha, VMware – Patrick Dirks, VMware)
STO9424 – VMware VSAN Vision: The Future of HCI (Lee Caswell, VMware – Christos Karamanolis, VMware)

Virtualizing Applications

VIRT7621 – Virtualize Active Directory, the Right Way! (Deji Akomolafe, VMware – Matt Liebowetz, EMC)

Just about 11 months after it was first announced the Dell buyout of EMC and VMware received final approval and is officially a done deal today. How will this effect VMware’s independence and the large open ecosystem that it evolves around it? If you ask Michael Dell he swears that VMware will remain independent but it’s easy to say that now and have things change down the road as the companies get cozy living together under the same roof and relationships start to change. If you check out the end of the Day 1 VMworld General Session he talks about it with Pat Gelsinger stating:

• “The open ecosystem of VMware is absolutely critical to it’s success so we’re only going to continue and encourage that and that hasn’t changed and won’t change”.

Also in an interview on theCUBE at VMworld he kind of dances around some of the questions but also re-affirms that VMware will remain independent:

• “What I see in VMware is an incredibly vibrant ecosystem that is getting stronger, I see VMware remaining independent and we’re obviously the majority shareholder and helping them ensure the ecosystem stays very very strong.”

VMware is definitely not in the same position that it was 10 years ago when it relied heavily on it’s partner ecosystem to enhance it’s core vSphere product. Over the years they have expanded and evolved their product line-up and have branched out into just about every area including storage, networking, management, containers, automation, cloud, backup and more that makes them compete now with almost their entire partner ecosystem. I’ve heard the term “Frenemies” mentioned to describe this relationship as VMware has to be both friendly to it’s partner ecosystem that it can’t completely shun and at the same time compete with it as a rival which makes for a delicate relationship with many of it’s partners.

This relationship has become a bit strained and heated at times, and definitely impacts how partners interact with VMware and now with new leadership over VMware it complicates it even more. Adding further complexity to the mix is that Dell has to play nice with VMware’s competitors such as Microsoft which may actually help VMware to stay independent from Dell. In the end there are no guarantees, words are just words but I definitely think that VMware has a much better chance to thrive and grow by remaining independent and I think Dell recognizes that and will stay true to their word but only time will tell.

I mentioned in my write-up of VMworld 2016 that I heard from an inside source at VMware that VMworld will be back in Vegas for the next 2 years. VMware has already officially confirmed next year via their VMworld 2017 preview page were you can sign up to get news and info on VMworld 2017. I heard this switch of location wasn’t entirely because of the Moscone construction and their were some other variables in play such as venue costs. This is confirmed by Moscone Center stating that their construction timeline is designed to work around existing convention dates.

• Is the timeline for this project sensitive?
  Yes. Given that there are conventions scheduled multiple years into the future at the Moscone Center, setbacks in the timeline of this project will have a signficant impact on when this project is completed. In order to allow for continuous operation, we need to schedule construction periods around currently reserved convention dates.

It’s also further confirmed by both Oracle OpenWorld and SalesForce DreamForce conventions being held at Moscone as usual this month and next. These conferences are double and triple the size of attendees (60,000 & 46,000 respectively) compared to VMworld and if they are able to remain at Moscone throughout the construction VMworld should easily be able to as well.

In case you were wondering the expansion project at Moscone will take place intermittently through the fall of 2018, allowing for conventions and exhibitions. Because Moscone can’t really expand outward they are expanding upward and streamlining the existing space as well to have more contiguous available space in the lower level. The Moscone South lobby is being replaced with a 4 story addition which will add  an additional 305,000 square feet of space. In addition Moscone North & South will be connected by a sky bridge so you don’t have to keep running across the road to get back and forth. Below are some renderings as to what this will look like, overall it looks pretty nice and it is being financed mainly by the SF hotels via a special assessment. Once it’s complete it should serve as a very nice venue for VMworld whenever VMware decides to go back there.