VMworld 2018 Session Recommendations

VMworld 2018 is just a few short weeks away at this point. Many of those reading this post would no doubt have already filled out their schedule, for those of you who have procrastinated however here are a few sessions that I am looking forward to. To make it interesting I’m limiting my recommendations to one per day, while at the show I fully believe you should take advantage of mingling with others in the community and browsing the show floor to get a sense of some of the innovation that is happening around the ecosystem.

Sunday – Demystifying vSAN Management for the Traditional Storage Administrator [HCI1475QU]

As a fan of vSAN and having listened to Pete Koehler on many topics, I’m sure this will be a great session for anyone looking for to get a handle on how vSAN differs from traditional storage.

Monday – Application modernization with VMware Cloud on AWS [HYP2145BUS]

I don’t think I’m going to be able to watch this one live due to other commitments but will be eagerly watching the replay. I’ve presented with Wen before and also watched Aarthi present so I know this will be a great session for anyone attending.

Tuesday – VMware NSX for Service Providers: A Technical View [HYP2406BU]

Service providers networking is an interesting beast. If networking is your thing then this promises to be an interesting session and you can always trust Ray to get into the details and I expect Tina to bring the service provider perspective into the mix.

Wednesday – Confluent Platform: Introduction and Deployment on PKS [CODE5593U]

There’s a lot of excellent sessions happening on Wednesday, one that is a little out of my ordinary area though is this one on running confluent on top of Pivotal Container Services. Should be an interesting change from the usual VMworld topics.

Wednesday Bonus – Ransomware Threat Recovery Using Rubrik Polaris [SAI3712BUS]

I’m going to cheat and share another session on Wednesday just because I know it’s going to be cool and cover one of Rubrik (my employer’s) latest capabilities presented by a couple of excellent presenters. Promises to be enlightening!

If you’d like to learn more about Polaris before this session check out the Polaris announcement blog post

Thursday – Architecting at the Tactical Edge with VMware vSAN and vRealize [HCI1691BU]

I’ve had a bit of an inside view into what has been happening behind the scenes for this session. It’s going to be interesting to hear about some of the more challenging aspects of this project, and how they were addressed. Promises to be an informative and interesting session with some good presenters!

Other Sessions

If the sessions above aren’t enough to fill your schedule there are several more excellent sessions being presented at VMworld this year. Here are a few of my favorite speakers, any of their sessions should be worth your time if you like to skew a bit more technical in your tastes:

  • Rebecca Fitzhugh – has an awesome array of presentations this year, all of which will no doubt be amazing
  • Duncan Epping – let’s just say he knows how to present and is not shy of addressing both the technical details and high level perspectives
  • Christian Dickmann – enjoy listening to his thoughts on simplifying operational management
  • Cody Hosterman – if vSphere storage is your thing, you’ll be at home
  • Christos Karamanolis – always interesting to listen to his forward looking thoughts

There are of course many other great presenters, but hey this list is getting long already!

If you’re attending VMworld this year have a great time! If you want to connect  with me at the conference feel free to reach out to me on twitter @BenMeadowcroft.

VMware Site Recovery VMworld 2017 Session

During VMworld 2017 I shared a tech preview, with GS Khalsa, of the VMware Site Recovery service that’s now available as an add-on to VMware Cloud on AWS. While we’ve already made several enhancements to the service, over and above what you’ll see in the tech preview, I think it still illustrates many of the exciting new options available with VMware Site Recovery today!

Check out the session online

VMworld 2015

VMworld 2015 is about to kick off in a few days and will be a hectic few days up in San Francisco. I’ll be there mostly talking and presenting on a variety of things like Virtual Volumes (VVol), Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM), vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO) as well as covering some interesting work the SRM and NSX teams have been working on together.

As always at VMworld there are far more sessions to see than time in which to see them, having said that here are a few sessions on topics I am interested in that look to be particularly interesting:

Normally I only try and present one session at VMworld but circumstances conspired to pull me into multiple sessions this year. If you want to see me on stage I will be involved with the following, sure to be awesome :-), sessions:

And I will also be taking part in a group discussion with @vmKen about VVols and a meet the experts session.

I’m looking forward to meeting lots of new faces this year! If you are going to VMworld feel free to reach out and connect with me on twitter – @BenMeadowcroft

And We’re Full!

I was checking the attendance number for my VMworld 2013 session today and realized it was completely full! Now that’s intimidating.

Preparing for the session has certainly been taking up a lot more of my time than I originally envisioned. The session is BCO5652 – Three Quirky Ways to Simplify DR with Site Recovery Manager and I am definitely planning on erring towards the more technical content. One drawback to this kind of presentation is that there is always way to much information to fit into a single presentation. A corresponding advantage however is that I have some material for the next few blog posts after VMworld!

VMworld 2013

In 2012 I attended VMworld for the first time. I managed to sneak in a breakout session or two amongst a multitude of customer briefings and prowling the Expo floor to see some of the shiny new things from the ecosystem. It was certainly an exciting event and a great introduction to the excitement and passion surrounding VMware. One of the few downsides to last years events was that I missed a lot of the after-hours activities due to the commute back to San Jose every evening.

Well it’s 2013 now and VMworld is rolling around again. This year I am lucky enough to be presenting a session, BCO5652 – Three Quirky Ways to Simplify DR with Site Recovery Manager. Also I will be taking advantage of San Francisco’s hotels and staying in the city during the conference so I can be closer to the action this year.