VMworld 2011–Session Voting HOWTO and recommendations…

The ink is barely dry on EMC World (which was great – still need to do the vLab HoL and summary blog posts – aiming to have that all wrapped up by tomorrow)… and already VMworld 2011 planning is in full swing!

(it’s amazing to me how much my annual calendar is now built around Cisco Live, EMC World and VMworld – and equally amazing how much work they take…)

One of the things that happens earliest are the major product planning pieces, but RIGHT after comes the session submission and voting cycle.  The public voting closes out on May 18th – SO VOTE NOW.

The way this works within EMC is I beat the bushes for people across the company to make their own submissions – everyone from the field, to the product teams, to the services and support folks.   My rules are simple:

• DO: Remember that this is VMworld: the audience is technical VMware users.
• DO: ALWAYS include a customer, and ideally co-present with a key partner.
• DO: ALWAYS include a demo.
• DON’T: Make it an EMC product commercial – the audience is not there for that.
• DON’T: Use EMC product names in the session title or abstract – and a minimum in the session.   If possible, make it a multi-vendor session.

So – after a lot of work… not in beating the bushes to create demand – loads of people wanted to submit – rather Dave Henry (a great vSpecialist team member) and I helping people make sure they made their proposal the best they could, here’s where we ended up (notably right in the middle of EMC World!)… 

EMC as a whole made a total of 103 session proposals, aligned to the tracks VMware has outlined in the following breakdown.

1. Business Continuity: 14 proposals
2. Cloud Application Development: 2 proposals
3. End-User Computing: 14 proposals
4. Enterprise Applications: 12 proposals
5. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud: 11 proposals
6. Management and Operations: 21 proposals
7. Security and Compliance: 7 proposals
8. Technology and Architecture: 22 proposals

In the end, the selection process is pretty brutal.   Only a small subset will get selected by VMware – so every vote counts.

Here’s my ask and my commit to you in return, dear reader:

MY SIMPLE ASK: please go to the VMworld 2011 session listing here.  Create an account if you don’t already have one and click on the “Vote Now” button on the landing page.  Vote for the sessions YOU want.   IF you want to filter for these EMC sessions, you can filter by hitting “search options” and filtering for the keyword “EMC”.  When you vote for a session, you will see a “thumbs up” icon.

MY SIMPLE COMMIT: In years past, the sessions we have done have gotten quite good attendee rankings (which I follow diligently, and reward and show preference for their submissions the following year).   You have my commit that these sessions I will work non-stop to make sure they are the best possible for YOU. 

If you’re not already using the “Everything VMware at EMC” community here, and following Dave Henry, I would   You can see his post on this topic right here.   If you want a more detailed breakdown on my recommendations from the 103 sessions, read on…

So – through the sausage making, Dave and I honed in on these sessions in particular.

BTW – last year, some EMC competitors complained that there were too many EMC sessions.  You’ll notice that we really make an effort to execute well.   Ultimately VMware’s internal and external voting rule the day.   We just try to do the best we can.

I personally pick my favorites based on the presenter as much as the content itself.   For example, when it comes to PowerCLI, it’s hard to go wrong with Alan Renouf and Luc Denkens.   When it comes to PowerShell, ESXtop and vSCSIstats, and making your own vCenter plugins - Clint Kitson is a superfreak.   I also tend to bias towards people who are known contributors to the community – like Rick Scherer and Simon Seagrave.

In the category of Business Continuity, here are my recommendations.  I’m particularly pumped about the one Lee Dilworth and I would do together.   The blurring topic of where Disaster Avoidance ends and Disaster Recovery begins is changing, and changing fast.

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2479	Understanding vSphere Stretched Clusters, Disaster Recovery, and Workload Mobility	Chad Sakac, EMC Lee Dilworth, VMware	VMware Site Recovery Manager is an incredibly successful Disaster Recovery solution, and Stretched vSphere clusters have provided unique solutions for customers with a specific topology. With the next generation of vSphere, customers will have more options than ever before giving them a broad variety of options for Disaster Recovery, Disaster Avoidance, and planned workload mobility. Come to this session and see various real-world scenarios for each. In each scenario, we'll cover the supported best practices for both vSphere 4.1 and the next generation of vSphere, with an emphasis on the enhancements and new options offered by the latest generation of vSphere.
2180	VAAI: A Critical Component of Data Protection in vSphere Environments	Clinton Kitson, EMC	Array-based snapshots can be a critical and effective first line of defense for protecting virtual environments. However, inconsistency and reliability have limited operational choices around design and scale in VMware environments. See how the latest functionality for VAAI block and NAS introduces new options and allows for the consistent, reliable, effective, and efficient protection of virtual machines via array-based snapshots.

Other Noteworthy Sessions:

Additionally, the following EMC sessions also address Business Continuity:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2539	Enterprise-Level Disaster Restart with Site Recovery Manager: A Customer Experience	Bala Ganeshan, EMC Tom Gregory, Raymond James	In this session we will present methodologies to provide enterprise class disaster restart capabilities for business applications that involve heterogeneous operating systems including VMware virtualization platform, storage arrays and replication technologies. The presentation will discuss how to integrate VMware Site Recovery Manager in such a solution with specific emphasis on storage replication adapter’s capabilities to tightly integrate with enterprise consistency constructs. The presentation will also discuss specific features and benefits of VMware Site Recovery Manager and EMC Symmetrix SRDF that are most relevant to enterprise class solutions.
2236	Business Continuity and Data Mobility Solutions for Tier-1 Applications on VMware vSphere - A Deep Dive	Steve Hegarty, EMC	With improvements to virtualization technologies, more organizations are virtualizing their Tier-1 applications (such as Oracle, SAP, Exchange, etc). This session will identify and profile various methods for data migration of Tier-1 Applications to and within virtualized environments. Methods covered include Storage vMotion (both with and without VAAI support), Site Recovery Manager, EMC VPLEX, and the physical to virtual migration of Oracle RAC. Actual use-case data will be used to profile the configuration and performance of migrations for Tier-1 applications including Oracle RAC, Exchange 2010 and SQL Server 2005, the considerations for these migration solutions, and their related advantages.
2269	Disaster Recover Best Practices for Deploying vCenter Site Recovery Manager in the Cloud	Rick Walsworth, EMC	This session will give the audience a customer’s perspective on the best practices and considerations for using vCenter Site Recovery Manager for business continuance and disaster recovery of their virtual application environments. This session will use real-world customer examples from multiple data centers to provide technical details and best practices for how the customers have improved their recovery-point objectives (RPO) to meet the company’s business requirements. In addition to presenting the real-world lessons learned while implementing these solutions, a demonstration of integration with VMware vCenter and vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) will be provided.
2226	Going Beyond DR - How Disaster Recovery is Evolving into Service Mobility Scenarios	Alex Tanner, EMC	The technologies that have historically enabled Disaster Recovery are transforming into a broader range of capabilities that will facilitate several new service mobility scenarios. Organizations moving towards a completely virtualized infrastructure want to be able to leverage the range of new “Cloud infrastructure options” for hosting their business services cost-effectively. The technologies and capabilities articulated in the term “Service Mobility Scenarios” will facilitate this flexibility, but organizations need to appreciate which of the Service Mobility Scenarios and technologies are pertinent to the specifics of their business now and moving forward. Come to this session and see how you can use these technologies to start your organization’s move to Service Mobility in the cloud.
2335	Accelerate Your Virtualization Journey Through Backup Re-Design	Alex Almeida, EMC Philip George, EMC	The journey to 100% virtualization consists of a series of phases during which you will virtualize (and have to protect) more critical applications using more data, and manage rapidly growing numbers of virtual machines. You need to have a backup and recovery solution designed for VMware in order to harness the benefits of this dynamic computing environment. Using a real-world customer example, we'll show how you can leverage the latest features of VMware's vStorage API for Data Protection and advanced deduplication technology to accelerate your journey to 100% virtualization while reducing costs and risks along the way.
2313	Optimzing Data Paths for Maximum Application Availability in Your Cloud	Brion Stultz, EMC	Your cloud environment uses federated applications, dynamic virtual servers, and tiered storage to provide you with new possibilities for new service models. However, with these new possibilities come challenges in how to best avoid I/O bottlenecks to ensure your application availability. Using real-world customer examples and demonstrations, this session will explore the importance of managing the connections between shifting virtual machines and storage and how to best keep applications running at the levels needed to meet the demands of your business.
2480	"The Easy Button" for Disaster Recovery and Workload Mobility	Chad Sakac, EMC Lee Dilworth, VMware	While there are many options for disaster recovery and planned workload mobility - for the majority of customers, Site Recovery Manager remains the choice that represents the broadest capabilities, with the simplest most integrated solution. This session will be a deep dive into the latest version of Site Recovery Manager and will include demonstrations, customer case studies and real-world guidance on deploying the "easy button" for disaster recovery and planned workload mobility.
2742	Delivering Dynamic vCenter Data Protection with Snapshots	Neil Salamack, EMC	Administrators are always looking for better tools to quickly and reliably recover data in virtualized environments including single-VM restore. Learn how to use built-in APIs in the latest version of vSphere to easily take advantage of storage snapshot technology for data protection. See how replication can provide single-click recovery of virtual machines. In this session, we will cover the technical details including a demonstration on how to quickly recover individual files and virtual machines for improved business continuity.
2847	Building Highly-Available Data Centers with "Stretched" VMware HA	Ashish Palekar, EMC Banjot Chanana, VMware	As customers look to reduce their downtime, VMware HA, with its automated restart and failure recovery features, offers unique capabilities that can be leveraged to enhance the availability of the entire data center. In this session, we will present methodologies that describe how “stretched” VMware HA can be used to build highly-available data centers. Learn how the automated failure restart of VMs both within and across a data center enhances your applications’ availability. This new architecture will allow you to virtually eliminate the data center as a single point of failure. This session will use real-world customer use cases to demonstrate how this stretched cluster architecture can transform your data centers.
2740	Standardized Building Blocks and the Transition to IaaS	Ashish Palekar, EMC	In order to meet the challenges presented in providing Infrastructure as a Service, many customers are looking to create standardized building blocks as a way to scale how IT can add value to their lines of business. In this session, we describe how customers are deploying these standardized elements using technologies from VMware. You will gain an understanding of the architecture elements and benefits of such a solution and learn how it enables Infrastructure as a Service. You will also learn about the changes in operational flow that the move to IaaS causes and how you can address them. Come to this session and see best practices developed and lessons learned through real-world customer IaaS implementations using these building blocks and a demonstration of the technology used to federate the parts into a cohesive whole.
2316	Enabling Mass-Migration of Virtual Machine Compute and Storage Resources	Don Pichette, EMC	Imagine being able to mass-schedule vMotion and Storage vMotion migrations across any vendors’ storage infrastructure. vTeleport is a new technology that will allow for mass migrations of virtual machine resources, including compute, network, and storage, enabling vCenter administrators to move multiple VMs and their associated applications simultaneously from one location to another, including locations which are geographically dispersed, all while the applications are running. vTeleport, and its associated functionality, which is implemented as a Virtual Application (vApp), will enable users to leverage native vSphere functionality to: • Migrate multiple VMs using vMotion • Migrate multiple VMs using SVMotion • Migrate multiple virtual disks at once using SVMotion • Schedule the migrations to take place immediately, or at a future date and time This session will include a demonstration of the technology, which may either be deployed in a local Datacenter, or similarly across an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, being used to migrate workstreams from a typical customer use case.

In the category of Cloud Application Development – we don’t have a lot, but these two are solid.  Two great customer examples of use of Spring and vFabric in the real-world:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2471	A Customer Scenario for Next-Generation Data Manangement with vFabric	Chad Sakac, EMC	While far removed from concepts of virtual infrastructure, data management tools that link disparate data sources together can provide critical business value to customers. Come to this session and learn how a leading healthcare customer used VMware’s vFabric Gemfire to transform their infrastructure to allow them to respond to rapid business changes, answer the question of "what do we do with the legacy mainframe", reduce the TCO of their infrastructure, and achieve and maintain a level of business agility that has improved their competitive advantage.
2467	A Customer Scenario for Re-Platforming Legacy Applications Using the Spring Framework	Chad Sakac, EMC	Customers are realizing that, by using new application development frameworks, they can achieve dramatic business gains and answer the question of "what do to with legacy mainframe applications". Come to this session and hear how a leading financial enterprise leveraged the Spring framework to develop new applications providing dramatic business benefits.

In the category of End-User Computing – our top picks are focused on REAL WORLD deployments.  Most people seem stuck in the pilot/PoC phase (at all sorts of scales).  We also thought it would be good to have sessions that spanned scales.   Scaling past several thousand clients becomes a “building block” approach, and I don’t think there’s enough on smaller scale (100-1000) client deployments.   Here are my favorites using that model (though I haven’t seen it in construction as he just joined the vSpecialist team – session 2185 with Andre Lebovici also looks REALLY good).

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2232	Building the Education Cloud	Jon Owings, EMC Bob Wilson, Core Advanced Technologies	Building the Education Cloud to provide application services, infrastructure as a service, and managed desktops as a service specifically tailored to the needs of the K-12 school systems nationwide. Core Advanced Technologies is using turnkey cloud infrastructure built using VMware vSphere for virtualization, vCloud Director for self-service cloud portals, and VMware View to manage and deploy desktops. This presentation will include an overview of Core Advanced Technologies journey to providing the cloud. Details on lessons learned, road blocks, and solutions to problems faced during this real world deployment of VMware cloud technologies. Included will be demonstrations of the interfaces used to monitor, manage, deploy, and automate Core Advanced Technologies cloud solutions. These real world lessons and demonstrations will assist current and new VMware customers along their way to providing cloud solutions in their business.
1309	Designing a View 4.X Environment (from a POC to Production)	Itzik Reich, EMC Haim Inger, CLABIT	In this session we will show how CLAL Insurance implemented a successful 700 users Proof of Concept (POC) of VMware View 4.6 which scales to 7,000 users.
2901	Best Practices for Medium-Sized VMware View Deployments of Up to 300 Users	Aaron Chaisson, EMC Tommy Trogden, EMC	A Google search on the phrase “VMware View reference architecture” returns nearly 18,000 results (remove the quotes and you’ll get over 250,000 results). A large number of the results that show up near the beginning of the list describe building for thousands or even tens of thousands of desktop clients. They offer advice and best practices for maximizing performance while reducing cost while implementing those thousands of virtual desktops. If you’ve got thousands of desktops, this session is not for you. If, however, your desktop virtualization project is less ambitious, say, up to 300 desktops, this is the session you’re looking for. You’ll see examples of actual implementations. You’ll learn best practices developed through those implementations for getting the same performance and cost-reduction benefits that those larger reference architectures talk about. Lastly, you’ll see demonstrations of tools you can use to quickly and easily configure and manage your View deployment.

Other Noteworthy Sessions:

 

Additionally, the following EMC sessions also address End-User Computing:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
3206	Desktop as a Service - EMC IT and its Journey to Private Cloud	Bala Ganeshan, EMC Srinivasa Maguluri, EMC Dave Sherman, EMC Suresh Thankappan, EMC	This session will present infrastructure technologies and architecture of a virtualized desktop environment that EMC IT has deployed in its quest to offer IT as a service. The presentation will focus on how various VMware, EMC, Cisco and VCE technologies such as ThinApp, View Composer and Vblock accelerate, optimize and improve operational efficiencies of virtualized deployments of desktops using VMware View. The presentation, by presenting performance data from the production environment, will also discuss how the architecture lends to nearly linear scaling starting from 2000 desktops and growing to 20,000 desktops. Time permitting the presentation will discuss the considerations for disaster restart of a large and complex virtualized desktop deployment.
2334	Virtualized Desktops for Small Installations with 100 or Less Clients	Jay Krone, EMC	A virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) is as applicable to environments with 100 users as it is to environments with 100,000 users. The benefits of lower cost and simplified desktop management are particularly attractive to smaller organizations that tend to have less sophisticated users and/or more severe budget constraints than larger enterprises. Come to this session and see a real-world design that takes advantage of advances in storage technology and View management to support up to 100 VMware View users at a reasonable cost per client.
2185	The VMware View Design Mega-Session: Lessons from Seasoned VDI Professionals	Andre Leibovici, EMC Jason Langone, MicroTech	This high-impact session will focus on the technical design aspects of real-life VMware View solutions from industry seasoned VDI experts, Andre Leibovici and Jason Langone. Key considerations will be discussed and analysed, including storage, gold image proliferation and security. This is not the session for academic reference architecture; this is the session for proven solutions in the field. Leibovici, a VMware vExpert and VCAP-DCA/VCAP-DT, maintains one of the most active VDI-related websites (myvirtualcloud.net) and is also the creator of industry-leading VMware View design calculators. Langone, a VMware vExpert and VCDX #54, maintains a VDI-related website (thinkvirt.com) and focuses on US Federal customers. From the financial sector to Federal customers, this session is applicable to anyone preparing to design a VDI solution.
1996	Challenges and Opportunites in Virtualizing Windows 7 for the Enterprise - Live Demonstration and Lessons Learned	Jonathan Desorcher, EMC	In addition to being a strong driver towards VDI adoption, Windows 7 brings to the table a plethora of new features that could either make or break any enterprise VDI rollout.
2214	The Missing Link	Erik Zandboer, EMC	Sizing a View environment that is using linked clone technology continues to be troublesome for many VMware administrators. Very often Proof of Concepts show very different results than anticipated - the numbers just don’t seem to add up. “The Missing Link” is a very graphical presentation given in an almost “Pecha-Kucha“ form and it elaborates on the technical details which connect the IOpS measured in virtual desktops with IOpS on the storage array. Come to this session which will elaborate on the details that connect the dots between virtual desktop linked clones and storage performance, and learn how architects can do better sizing of storage for View environments, allowing for more affordable designs that get the most out of the infrastructure. The final part of the presentation focuses on this sizing of View environments using real-world customer examples.
2206	View Deployment at a Fortune 500 Company	Fabio Chiodini, EMC	Interested in discovering how a Fortune 500 company is halving its costs with desktop virtualization? Join us to find out how to leverage this project to transform your own desktop environment and realize value. Discover the challenges faced, lessons learned, best practices developed, and future plans of a VMware View implementation that has started with VMware View 3 and has evolved with the latest release. Discover how the changes in the latest release of VMware View widened the user scope and helped to the reduce the Total Cost of Ownership. The presentation will focus on key elements of Desktop Virtualization ranging from the cost analysis down to the architecture implemented, encompassing Automated Configuration Management, Two-Factor Authentication, Backup Optimized for virtual desktops and Disaster Recovery.
2097	Accelerating Your View Deployment	Tee Glasgow, EMC Scottie Ray, Liquidware Labs	This session will enable you to accelerate your View deployment by focusing primarily on persona management and application delivery options. Understanding how to develop a strategy to handle both of these elements in a pre-View environment will accelerate and simplify the often difficult image management and infrastructure questions that you are going to deal with at later stages of your View deployment.
2259	Real-World Use Cases of VMware View Deployments	Brian Johnson, EMC	There are many reasons to want to virtualize your users’ desktops: easy disaster recovery for desktops, hardening of the desktop (security), and ease-of-use for mobile workers. Come to this session and see updated joint reference architectures jointly-developed by VMware and partners to help ensure VMware View project success. Using EMC IT’s own View deployment as an example, we’ll show best practices developed and lessons learned for all of the uses cases mentioned.
2160	Scaling for Success: Architecting View 4.6 for the Enterprise	Robert Nourse, EMC	Like the vSphere platform on which it runs, View 4.6 is a robust delivery system that tolerates all manners of sins in smaller lab and sandbox environments but scaling to enterprise level deployments can quickly reveal unstable foundations. This crash course will walk the experienced architect through a 50 minute top down design session based on a representative customer use case drawn from real implementations and leveraging the Vmware View Reference Architecture. An architectural framework will be developed for 5,000+ desktops using the pod and building block system highlighting best practices and common errors resulting in a stable scalable design that can be transplanted to the majority of enterprise class, large scale View deployments.
1866	Advanced Persona Management and User-Centric Desktop Virtualization	Michael Fox, EMC	Go beyond the basics of desktop virtualization by centralizing and virtualizing the user's persona, enabling self-healing, translating user settings across application versions, or even applying security to applications without the use of group policy. Understand the components of the user’s persona and how powerful techniques and tools can be used to enhance centralized control of virtual desktops while at the same time improving the overall user experience. This breakout will introduce the audience to advanced persona management techniques that are based on real-world implementations.
1426	Designing Virtualized Desktops for Success	Tyler Baker, EMC Asif Kahn, EMC Rick Scherer, EMC	One of the hottest topics of 2011 has to be virtualizing desktops. Hundreds if not thousands of VDI proof of concepts have been ran, but truth of the matter is only a small percentage of these PoCs turn into production.

2011 will be a year of a lot of customers starting to virtualize things that are mission critical and come with heavy SLA commitments.   Some have been doing it for a while, but the reality is that it’s still the tip of the iceberg.    The stuff VMware is coming out with (and EMC as well) will help, but as always, it’s as much about WHAT you know as it is about WHO you have.  The EA session groups almost always score highest in the VMworld attendees rankings, as the content is very, VERY useful.   So, without further ado, in the category of Enterprise Applications – our top picks:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2322	Best Practices for Virtualizing Oracle RAC 11gR2 on vSphere	Sam Lucido, EMC	A detailed review of best practices and lessons learned in architecting a virtual Real Application Cluster (RAC) for one of the largest CRM databases in the world. We will review the approach to virtualizing an 8 terabyte database that must support 520 million transactions per day using RAC fault tolerance and VMware for improved agility. This presentation will drill into the physical architecture components calling out key factors in supporting this mission critical database. Building upon our performance discussion we will dive into integrated virtualization storage solutions like the use of PV-SCSI, vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI), RDM vs. VMFS and the latest storage tiering technologies. Finally, we will explore Linux and Oracle configuration recommendations that extend performance for virtualized RAC architectures.
1931	Design, Deploy, and Optimize SharePoint 2010 on vSphere	Eyal Sharon, EMC Scott Salyer, VMware	SharePoint Server is a perfect candidate for virtualization. Physical implementations suffer from many limitations including time wasted waiting for servers to arrive, waiting for software to load, and testing complex HA and DR designs. Virtualization eliminates the dependence of the SharePoint component server on physical hardware. Now you can easily add CPU and memory resources on the fly, move workloads to more powerful machines, deal with planned hardware maintenance with zero application downtime, immediately re-start workloads from failed machines, and recover to a DR site without worrying about maintaining exactly duplicated hardware. SharePoint is supposed to work this way. On VMware vSphere, it does! This session will cover virtual hardware design considerations for SharePoint 2010, guidelines for capacity planning, options for high-availability and disaster recovery, and support considerations.
1704	VMware Zimbra Best Practices for Virtualized Deployments, Availability and Disater Recovery Using vCenter Site Recovery Manager	Mike Lozano, EMC Charles Windom, VMware	VMware Zimbra, a leading email and collaboration solution, is optimized for vSphere. Zimbra has a flexible and scalable architecture that allows deployment on a single server or multi-server environment and can be virtualized with high availability and monitoring through vSphere. An understanding of various configuration options can be helpful in both investigating Zimbra as well as comparing Zimbra’s performance to alternatives such as Microsoft Exchange. During this session, we will walk through Zimbra deployment strategies, typical advantages provided by virtualized Web 2.0 application architectures, as well as real-world high availability and disaster recovery using vCenter Site Recovery Manager.
2324	Virtualizing SAP - Financial Gains and Lessons Learned	Omar Yakar, EMC Sarwat Siddiqi, Callaway Golf Chinh Van, Callaway Golf	Callaway Golf’s Chin Van and Sarwat Siddiqi explain how they converted the spiraling costs and growing complexity of their most mission-critical business application, SAP, into higher availability, higher performance, and an independently verified ROI of 289%. Specifically, they will detail how leveraging best practices such as virtualizing their 5TB SAP database and utilizing advanced storage virtualization techniques enable Callaway Golf to bring the time it takes to generate a system copy from weeks to 90 minutes. Also explored is the use of advanced cloning techniques and a split-mirror backup strategy to provide higher availability and allow the business to move faster and de-risk the environment.

 

Other Noteworthy Sessions:

 

Additionally, the following EMC sessions also address Enterprise Applications:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2988	Best Practices for Delivering Optimized SAP Performance on vSphere	Norbert Guenther, EMC Joakim Zetterblad, EMC	Organizations around the world are looking to virtualize their SAP systems in order to achieve new levels of availability, performance, and cost savings. New technologies including the latest developments in storage tiering, vSphere multipathing, cache strategies, and the expanded VAAI support in the next version of vSphere all combine to remove previous limitations for running virtualized SAP. Come to this session and see the best practices developed and lessons learned through real-world customer implementations of virtualized SAP. See how it’s possible to implement a higher-performing virtualized SAP solution that has a lower TCO.
1602	20,000 Seats of Microsoft SharePoint Deployed: A Customer Example	Izhak Reich, EMC Ronen Ashkenazi, TEVA	Many Customers already realized the benefits of Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications, in this session we will show you how TEVA Pharmaceutical Design and Implemented a 20,000 Seats MS SharePoint solution, this session will include the best practices of the CPU / Storage elements and will also show the VMware vCenter SRM layout of the project.
2478	Dispelling Myths: Oracle 10g RAC at Scale Using the Latest vSphere Release	Chad Sakac, EMC	Changes in vSphere allow for virtualizing even the largest and highest-performing enterprise database applications in ways that allow for greater scale, greater availability, higher performance, and greater cost savings than ever before. By using an in-production implementation as an example, we will present best practices and the lessons learned in virtualizing the 4th-largest Oracle 11i Application production environment in the world.
3058	SAP in the Cloud - Higher Availability with Greater Flexibility	Chad Sakac, EMC Michael Montalto, Accenture	Companies are looking to ensure the success of new SAP initiatives as well as reduce the complexity of their existing SAP infrastructure. Virtualizing SAP with vSphere in a private cloud provides ways to accomplish both these goals cost-effectively. In this session we’ll use real-world customer use cases to show how private clouds for SAP increase infrastructure flexibility and provide the elasticity needed to meet new and changing business requirements.
2184	Virtualizing Exchange 2010 - A Complete Approach	Rafael Novo, EMC	Exchange is one of the most critical applications in current IT environments. Virtualizing IT can bring a huge benefit not only reducing costs but also increasing availability of your environment, providing new and better ways to protect your Exchange environment. More than just best practices to virtualize Exchange 2010, using a real-world example, this session will approach all aspects in virtualizing an Exchange 2010 environment, including proper storage sizing, vSphere cluster design and recommendations, Exchange role sizing and placement, data protection and disaster recovery.
2580	Protecting Mission-Critical Enterprise Applications	Daniel Budiansky, EMC	As organizations continue to virtualize more of their environment in order to achieve increased business productivity, moving enterprise applications into the VMware environment increases the quality of service. Data protection paradigms must change to meet SLAs while offering significant backup performance and more streamlined management. Applying application-specific deduplication accelerates the backup process while maximizing the reduction in data for backup. Using real-world customer scenarios for virtualizing mission critical applications, such as Microsoft SQL or Oracle, this session will provide best practices for data protection. Learn how you can leverage both software and hardware deduplication technologies to provide a scalable high-performance solution for your mission critical applications.
1712	Virtualizing SAP for the Private Cloud	Rick Scherer, EMC Eric Walter, EMC	An in-depth look on how to leverage VMware vSphere virtualization for this mission critical application. We will discuss the basics of building a solid vSphere Infrastructure that will meet your Business Continuity and Disaster Recover needs, along with some best practice recommendations, real world implementations as well as lessons learned and some very cool tips and tricks.
2805	Virtualizing Mission-Critical Tier 1 Microsoft SQL Applications	Craig Stewart, EMC Rod Hope, State Street Corporation	VMware vSphere has proven to be the most robust platform for the virtualization of business applications, yet some organizations remain reluctant to virtualize their mission-critical Tier 1 Microsoft SQL applications. Come to this session and learn best practices for virtualizing MS SQL with vSphere developed through real-world customer implementations. This session will cover analyzing current workloads, benchmarking virtual infrastructure, choosing appropriate hardware, and making the right software configuration choices to ensure the success of your key business applications on vSphere.

Ok, moving on to the biggest buzzword bingo category – and perhaps the most exciting category of them all - In the category of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2994	Getting to Your Own Private Cloud	Chad Sakac, EMC Siki Giunta, CSC	The cost-effectiveness, greater efficiencies, and rapid elasticity offered by cloud architectures make the move to a private cloud very compelling. New tools from VMware, like vCloud Director, are helping to make the transition to an IT-as-a-Service model easier than ever before. Come to this session and see the best practices and lessons learned through real-world customer private cloud implementations, some having taken only ten weeks to go from the decision to adopt private cloud to having workload-ready billable IT-as-a-Service fully deployed.
2265	Government Transformation: A Public Sector Birds of a Feather Session	Lynn Marquedant, EMC Oliver Silberzahn, EMC	There’s a growing movement across the public sector to leverage virtualization and cloud computing technologies. In the US, the Federal government is consolidating datacenters and mandating the movement of applications to the cloud. In national, regional, and local governments around the world, there’s growing interest in virtualization and all things “cloud”. This interactive session will feature peer-led discussions around best practices for government transformation, moving away from silo’d information structures, establishing consistent governance strategies, ensuring the protection of citizen information, and enhancing the delivery of citizen services. Discussions will focus on virtualization and cloud technologies that can be leveraged across multiple agencies and departments.
3110	BlueLock - Building a Real-World Hybrid Cloud	Chad Sakac, EMC Pat O'Day, BlueLock	Come to this session and see how Bluelock is enabling customers to build hybrid clouds today. Technical architecture behind the vCloud-compatible service and economic TCO examples of this will be shared. The session includes customer real-world scenarios and demonstrations of workload moblity between vCloud-compliant internal cloud and the Bluelock vCloud-based service.
2466	Building a Real-World Hybrid Cloud	Chad Sakac, EMC	Come to this session and see how Verizon is enabling customers to build hybrid clouds today. Technical architecture behind the vCloud-compatible service and economic TCO examples of this will be shared. The session includes customer real-world scenarios and demonstrations of workload moblity between vCloud-compliant internal cloud and the Verizon vCloud-based service.

Other Noteworthy Sessions:

Additionally, the following EMC sessions also address Enterprise Hybrid Cloud:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2766	I Can *See* the Clouds From Here - But How Do I *Get* There?	Chris Cicotte, EMC	You’re well down the virtualization path. You realized substantial savings by consolidating your servers.  Most of your Tier 2 applications have been virtualized, and maybe you’ve even started to virtualize your mission-critical Tier 1 applications. Your business has seen the reduced acquisition costs that a virtualized data center brings, and is now demanding even more services from IT while shrinking the IT budget. You can see that the way to get there is the on-going cost-reduction you’d get from making the leap to an IT as a Service (ITaaS) model. The only problem? You’re not sure how to get there from here.   You’re not alone.  Come to this session and learn not only what IT infrastructure changes you’ll need, but also what processes and procedures must transform in order to make a successful transition to ITaaS.  Using real-world customer examples, this session will show how they overcame the challenges of this transition and how the improved IT responsiveness has enabled greater business agility at a lower cost, giving their company a competitive advantage.
3325	Creating an On-Demand Deployment System for Large-Scale Applications with vCloud Director and VMware View	Michael Howard, EMC	Organizations are struggling with large-scale virtualization deployments. Many organizations see the benefits of the hybrid cloud model for their large-scale applications, and while VMware provides tools that help (vShield, vCloud Director, View, ThinApp), the complexity of the hybrid environment combined with the length of time to deploy the new solution can make large-scale projects daunting. Come to this session and see a new model for deploying and managing a multi-vApp environment that can dramatically reduce the time from start of deployment to having the environment available for use. The presentation will include a demonstration of tools for quickly and easily performing this on-demand large-scale deployment, applied to real-world customer use cases.
2391	Best Practices and Lessons Learned for Hybrid Cloud Strategies	Edward Newman, EMC	IT organizations are eager to gain maximum advantage from the agility and cost savings which cloud computing offers. However, it can be a challenge to develop a cloud strategy that consistently translates business requirements across the organization into an optimized portfolio of public, private, and hybrid cloud delivery models. In this session, we’ll use real-world customer cloud implementations from a range of industries as examples to describe an approach to cloud strategy that focuses on determining the best placement of their application workloads in the optimal delivery model based on evaluating enterprise economics, trust, and functionality requirements. We will review what an optimized, balanced portfolio looks like and tangible steps you can take to attain it.
3263	Building Enterprise IT Clouds for Fun and Profit	Dave Henry, EMC	Transition to a virtualized data center using cloud technologies allows for the transformation of IT from a cost center to a value-add partner to your company's lines of business. Come to this session and see an overview of the vSphere and infrastructure technologies, and the process changes that make this transformation to IT-as-a-Service possible, using a real-world customer implementation as an example.
2251	Considerations and Best Practices for Building a Hybrid Cloud	Don MacMaster, EMC	Using a real-world customer example, this session with show how customers can design their infrastructure to develop an ITaaS delivery model across hybrid clouds. Come to this session and see demonstrations of how VMware vCloud Director can be used to help support multi-tenancy in existing VMware vSphere environments, and the best practices and lessons learned in implementing these hybrid clouds.
2804	The Economics of the Cloud - Tools for Justifying the Cloud Investment	Karol Boguniewicz, EMC	The decision to move your organization to a Cloud Computing model requires a business justification, the same as any other IT investment. During this session we will demonstrate evaluation methods, techniques, and ROI/TCO tools to evaluate Cloud investments and chargeback models using uses cases based on real-world customer implementations as examples.

In the category of Management and Operations there are a lot of great bits of content.  Since a lot of stuff around scripting, automation, performance, optimization fall into this category, you really can’t go wrong with many of these session proposals – here are my faves:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2179	Leveraging Powershell to Quickly and Easily Create vCenter Plugins	Clinton Kitson, EMC	Have you ever had an idea for a plugin that would revolutionize a process? There will always be gaps in how we manage virtual environments. This session is going to focus on taking a concept from the drawing board to a vCenter plugin in minutes. We will leverage simple repeatable examples where you can learn how to create a highly functional vCenter plugin to add value to your environment and show your ideas in action to the VMware community.
2182	Simple Troubleshooting, Optimizing, and Profiling of vSphere's Storage with Powershell - Regardless of Storage Vendor	Clinton Kitson, EMC	How many tools do you use to dig into performance? (esxtop? perfmon? vscsistats?) See how Powershell can help to demystify and optimize your virtual storage. This session will show the tools in action that can augment and enhance VMware’s native performance monitoring abilities. Live demos will focus on collecting, processing, viewing, and federating data from heterogeneous collection points in the storage stack. This session is a must see for all vSphere administrators interested in optimizing, troubleshooting, and profiling their storage!
2092	Best Practices for Sizing Storage for Optimal Vitrtualization Performance	Paul Manning, EMC	Configuring storage for VMware vSphere environments presents many choices for both Storage Administration team as well as the vSphere Admin. After many years of people configuring storage for their virtualization environment, several best practices have evolved. Learn what considerations and choices need to be balanced to achieve optimal performance in you vSphere deployments. We will investigate multi-path option, LUN size considerations and distribution across a cluster of ESX servers.
2965	Multi-Tenant Backup and Recovery in Large Scale Environments	Mike Zolla, EMC	Whether you're building your own private cloud or providing cloud services to customers, in order to successfully reach large scales, it is critical to have a sound and reliable backup and recovery methodology for protecting not only the virtual machines, but also the templates they were built from. Using real-world customer examples, this session will discuss a "Best Practices" approach to creating a simple multi-tenant backup and recovery process for your virtual data center, incorporating tools like VMware vCloud Director.

 

 

Other Noteworthy Sessions:

 

Additionally, the following EMC sessions also address Managment and Operations:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2143	Thin Provisioning, Space Reclamation, and VMware Storage Layers: Get the Most From Your Storage in a VMware Environment!	Fabio Chiodini, EMC	Have you ever wondered about the best way to save space in your Cloud environment? Are you finding yourself engaged in the "thin on thin" debate? Come to this session for a deep dive on all the layers that build up the storage stack in VMware: learn how each layer can be optimized to get the best savings and performance from your storage environment. The session will deep dive on the key elements of VMware storage layers (Operating system Filesystem, VMDK, VMFS, LUN, NFS), space reclamation, thin on thin, and filesystem alignment to build a clear picture of the technologies involved and the possible improvements achievable. Learn about upcoming technologies that can help overcome limitations with current technologies and change the way you save space in your future VMware infrastructure.
2123	Escape the Tyranny of Gold, Silver, and Bronze: vCloud Director Tiering Strategies that Work in the Real World	Jeremiah Dooley, VCE	With more ways than ever to abstract hardware resources and present end-users with self-service infrastructure, questions remain about how to structure those tiers to be most effective. As IaaS business models continue to evolve, both in the Enterprise as well as in the Service Provider space, something more relevant than “Gold, Silver, and Bronze” is needed to maximize the value. This session will detail real-world examples of three different ways to escape the tyranny of Gold, Silver, and Bronze, matching the tiering strategy to the needs of both the business and the consumer.
2181	Recording and Replaying Storage Workloads with Powershell, IOmeter, and vscsistats	Clinton Kitson, EMC	By being able to use Powershell to record, and then later reproduce storage workloads (using free performance tools), you can easily provide a consistent test to assist in optimizing the performance of your storage in a vSphere environment. Come to this session and learn how to collect a “workload profile” with vscsistats and then mirror it with IOmeter for consistent automated performance simulation, creating your own customized suite of performance tests.
1883	PowerCLI Best Practices	Alen Renouf, EMC Luc Dekens, Eurocontrol	This session will show you all the tips and tricks that Alan and Luc collected over the years, to work with PowerCLI.
2839	Best Practices for Protecting Large Scale Virtual Environments	Mike Zolla, EMC	How do you cost effectively deploy and protect large-scale high-density virtual machine deployments? Customers are deploying virtual machines in larger numbers and larger densities than ever before and are concerned about how to protect them. This session will use demonstrations and performance test results from real-world customer scenarios to show how you can use converged infrastructure to deploy and protect these high-density environments.
2912	vCloud Director, VMware View, and Sitre Recovery Manager - Use Cases for Accelerating Internal IT Efficiency	Josef Adams, EMC Rich Barlow, EMC Jase McCarty, EMC Jim Sanzone, EMC Jeremiah Dooley, VCE	VMware administrators see immediately how these three key VMware virtualization products can be used in internal IT to reduce both environmental complexity and TCO while accelerating internal IT business processes, but it isn’t always as easy for people who don’t use vSphere every day. Ease of use demonstrations of vCloud Director, VMware View, and Site Recovery Manager can show the value proposition of implementing these technologies in ways that make it clear to the decision-makers in your organization, regardless of their level of fluency with virtualization technology. Come to this session and see live on-stage demonstrations of how these products make common tasks easier based on real-world customer use cases. The demonstrations will walk through the exact technical steps involved in each scenario.
2440	Customer Panel Exploring Deduplication Options for Specific VMware Backup Use Cases	Senior Analyst, ESG	Customers of all sizes, from all industries, and from all geographies have been backing up and recovering their VMware environments for years. Come to this session to hear directly from three customers who have met and resolved backup challenges in VMware environments. Moderated by industry analyst [Name TBD], in this customer panel you’ll hear what these customers have accomplished and what pitfalls to avoid. And you can engage in an open dialogue with the panel and with industry experts during an extended Q&A period.
1435	Building Blocks for a 100% Virtualized (And Protected) Data Center	Itzik Reich, EMC Haim Inger, CLALBIT	A fully virtualized Data Center including best practices of Tier 1 Applications.
1882	Manage ESXi with PowerCLI	Alan Renouf, EMC Luc Dekens, Eurocontrol	The session will show how to manage all aspects of your ESXi server with PowerCLI. With the disappearance of the COS, the way we work with the hypervisor has changed. The session will show you how, and more importantly what, you can do with PowerCLI for the management of your ESXi servers.
2997	Virtual Disk Alignment: The Small Detail That Makes a Huge Difference in VMware vSphere Storage Performance	David Robertson, EMC Vaughn Stewart, NetApp	The layers of abstraction that separate virtual servers from the physical hardware are what allow for the benefits that virtualization brings. However, these layers can allow problems to enter the environment if they aren’t configured optimally.  Improper alignment of your virtual disks (VMDKs) can cause degradation in your storage performance, regardless of your storage vendor. Come to this session to get a deeper understanding of what virtual disk alignment is, how it can affect storage performance, and how you can ensure that you have it set up correctly in your environment.  You’ll not only learn how to create templates that allow for the creation of VMDKs that are correctly aligned from the start, but also how to detect misaligned VMDKs you’re currently using, along with tips and techniques for realigning them for optimal performance. We’ll also provide a brief bit of background as to how this situation came to be and how it may impact other areas of your infrastructure such as storage savings saving technologies like compression or deduplication.
2976	Your Own VMware vSphere Home Lab - An Installation Guide	Simon Seagrave, EMC Tommy Trogden, EMC Kendrick Coleman, VCE Jay Weinshenker, Luminex Rob Peglar, Xiotech	Are you thinking about getting your VCP, VCAP, or VCDX certification? Maybe you just want to improve your familiarity with various VMware or partner products, or you’re wondering how some crazy configuration idea you’ve had would actually work. The best way to learn is by doing and what better place to learn (or to test new ideas without putting your production environment as risk) than the comfort of your own home? Come to this session to get tips and tricks on building your own VMware home lab. Using their own hands-on experience and actual home labs as examples, the presenters will cover: hardware options, vSphere installation and configuration lessons learned the hard way, tips for getting the most for your money, how to get software licenses, where to get free Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs), and mistakes to avoid.
2771	Using Analogies to Explain the Value of VMware Tools to the Non-Virtualization Fluent	Dave Henry, EMC Jase McCarty, EMC	It can be fairly straight-forward to convince your organization of the value of the base virtualization tools like vSphere and View. Once you've virtualized, the value of other VMware tools like ThinApp, AppSpeed, Distributed Resource Scheduler, and Configuration Manager is immediately obvious to the VMware administrator, but not necessarily to others within the organization. Come to this session and see how simple analogies can be a useful tool for helping you convince the non-technical folks in your organization that the whole of the VMware software suite can provide greater value than the mere sum of the parts. Multiple analogies and organizational scenarios will be explored.
2171	All You Need to Know to Design Your Datastore	Rafael Novo, EMC	Proper sizing of the storage environment for the virtual environment can be the key to the success or failure of a virtual infrastructure deployment. Many factors need to be taken into account, and this is a deep dive with all the information you need to proper size your datastores and your storage, including some new technologies such as VAAI, Storage IO Control and Enterprise Flash Drives. Come to this session and learn how to design your storage for capacity, performance, and service level agreements. At the end we will have some scenarios with examples and recommendations.
3146	Achieving Management Operational Excellence in the Virtualized Data Center	Barry Weinstein, EMC	In this session, learn why efficient and effective management and operations of any virtualized data center require a thorough understanding of the network that links your virtualized applications and services, virtual machines, and their hosts. See a demonstration of how to troubleshoot and resolve problems on affected virtual machines faster, ensure the availability of mission-critical virtualized applications and services, increase management operational efficiency, and transform management operations from being reactive to being proactive using tools that are automated, unified, and integrated with vCenter.
3332	Nine Ways to Ensure the Failure of Your Virtualization Project	Anton Zhbankov, EMC	There are many reasons a virtualization project can fail and only some of them are technical mistakes. Sometimes project failure is caused by poor processes or faulty thinking. Come to this session and learn nine common mistakes people often make in virtualization projects - both technical and otherwise - and learn how to fix them before the project fails, or, better yet, avoid them altogether. This session will use actual mistakes seen real environments with real stories behind them.
2433	Managing Investments in Virtual Platforms to Improve Service Levels and Reduce Costs	Kevin Gray, EMC	VMware and virtual storage technologies improve resource utilization by providing dynamic and adaptive infrastructure. However, these technologies can introduce new management challenges in maintaining end-to-end visibility and control. Fortunately, new software tools are being introduced to simplify the management of these environments that will enable customers to confidently expand their virtualization investments to mission-critical applications. This session will provide an overview of both the benefits and management challenges introduced when combining VMware with new virtual storage technologies. Using real-world customer implementations as examples, we will show demonstrations to review new management capabilities being introduced to help IT organizations improve visibility and control as they extend virtualization to production business applications.

 

Security is proving to be simultaneously one of the biggest barriers to advanced virtualization/cloud and one of the biggest opportunities.  Some (not all) of the security and compliance challenges can be fundamentally simpler if addressed as a core part of virtualization, rather than something “layered on”.   Lots of goodness here, so in the category of Security and Compliance – some real doozies:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2873	Delivering Enterprise Security to Cloud Access: A New Paradigm and System for Security	Nirav Mehta, RSA Vijay Pawar, VMware	This session will discuss how the RSA Cloud Trust Authority provides a unified platform for managing security controls and gaining visibility to prove compliance across multiple cloud providers. Incorporating technologies from RSA and VMware, the Cloud Trust Authority will deliver a core set of functions required across a wide variety of clouds, including identity management, data security, and security and compliance reporting.
3180	Trust in the Cloud: Case Studies and Best Practices in Trusted Cloud Computing	Robert Griffin, RSA	The IT industry is facing an opportunity to use the cloud to transform IT infrastructures, applications, and information management. But before we can believe that the cloud is safe for real business, we need a secure foundation of dynamic controls and trustworthy measurement. With this capability, a provider can report on the configuration of the virtual infrastructure used by the customer VMs and tie this to a verifiable measurement of trust in the physical and virtual infrastructure. This session explains the key issues, best practices in enabling secure, compliant and trusted cloud computing, drawing on case studies in cloud deployments to illustrate and validate those best practices.
2187	The Top Ten Virtual Desktop Security Best Practices	Erin Banks, RSA Tommy Trogden, EMC	So you’ve made the decision to explore virtual desktops – or are already in the process of deploying them. It’s critical to not lose sight of the importance of desktop security in your implementation in order to ensure its success for your organization. Come to this session for a walk-through of the top ten virtual desktop security best practices developed through actual real-world implementations. Each best practice will include a real-life situation from a customer deployment and a demonstration of implementing that practice.

 

 

Other Noteworthy Sessions:

 

Additionally, the following EMC sessions also address Security and Compliance:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
3092	Drama in the Data Center: Using Virtualization to Enhance IT Security	Michael Foley, RSA Dana Wolf, RSA	While virtualization brings many benefits, security threats from outside (and inside) remain a problem regardless of how much of the data center you’ve virtualized. Recent events have shown the rise of newer, sophisticated attacks like Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Come to this session and see how virtualization itself and other products designed for virtual environments can be used to provide additional layers of defense against these threats.  Using examples of real-world security scenarios, the session will use role-play to show how to protect your organization’s information.  Join “IT Virtualization Guy” and “Security Girl” as they react to various threats and show how to use their skills together to create a Defense in Depth strategy and save the day.
3176	Best Practices in GRC for the Cloud: How Cloud Drives Governance, Risk, and Compliance	Robert Griffin, RSA	Clouds, virtualization, VCE - all of these technologies have a large direct impact on what an organization as a whole and IT in particular needs to do to manage their governance, risk, and compliance efforts. Drawing on experience of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) for the cloud in real deployments, this session explores practical techniques and real-life deployments that integrate policies, processes, and technologies with virtualized enterprises. We'll discuss the impact of changes in information infrastructure on IT risk, IT policy, configuration management and business continuity. We'll also discuss factors that impact your approach to GRC and best practices for a centralized, automated approach to GRC.
2914	Managing Risk and Compliance for US Federal Government Agencies	Erin Banks, EMC Sharon Isaacson, EMC	The ability to comprehensively manage security, risk, and federal regulatory compliance as a way to incite trust in the virtualized datacenter is a daunting task for most customers. Additionally, traditional IT operational security concerns are a large part of the predominant delaying factors in virtualizing Tier One applications. Federal CIOs will continue to remain cautious about total immersion into a virtualized operation until there is a way to manage and demonstrate compliance with regulations like FISMA, NIST, NERC, and FedRamp that provide the same, if not better, levels of assurance than is currently available in physical data center environments. Come to this session and learn best practices (developed through real-world Federal implementations) for meeting current Federal Government compliance regulations through the use of VMware, third-party products, encryption, and disaster recovery as the virtualized datacenter evolves into a Private Federal Cloud.
2229	Case Study: Implementation of the CloudAudit Protocol and Integration into a Compliance Management Solution	Robert Polansky, RSA	Conflicting compliance reporting goals put cloud customers and providers at odds. Customers want detailed, up to date information regarding compliance posture with respect to multiple regulations. Providers want to provide “one size fits all” security practice and certification information so they can scale their operations efficiently. CloudAudit is a protocol that helps to resolve this conflict, providing a standardized method for automated reporting of current and detailed compliance information. Attend this session for a deep dive into a CloudAudit implementation and a demonstration of how to integrate compliance information from multiple providers into an enterprise's existing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) processes.

 

In the always popular Technology and Architecture category where we will be deep-diving left right and center (from lots of the inevitable results of future vSphere release features and all other sorts of goodies).   Some that landed just below our priority cut have awesomesauce potential (the multivendor panel on what we think the future of storage will look like as one example).

So much coolness, so little time (and so few sessions which will be accepted) – here are my votes:

 

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2879	Benchmarking the Benefits of Storage Array Offloads	Clinton Kitson, EMC Paul Manning, EMC	Taking advantage of the VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) provides many benefits to enhance the performance of vSphere deployments. Each of the features enabled by VAAI offer varying methods for increased performance and people debate just how much effect these offloads provide. Come to this session and see how you can measure the benefits of the VAAI offloads. This deep-dive session will cover how to benefit from VAAI offload features, how to provide exact metrics to determine the exact performance increase the features are causing, and benchmark results comparing the VAAI performance enhancements of vSphere 4.1 with those provided by the latest version of vSphere.
3043	Super-Size Your VMware Datastores - Best Practices for Scale-Out NFS with vSphere	Ian Breitner, Isilon	Some applications’ data needs are not measured by Terabytes, but instead by Petabytes. Working with vSphere datastores at this scale presents new challenges. Using real-world customer installations as examples coupled with the changes in how NFS datastores are handled in the latest version of vSphere, this session will cover best practices for and lessons learned in implementing and managing multi-petabyte NFS datastores in vSphere environments.
1926	Getting Started in vSphere Design	Scott Lowe, EMC	This session will focus on high-level topics around vSphere design. There are lots of decisions that need to be made in a typical vSphere design, and VMware vSphere users who do not have experience in vSphere design might not be aware of some of these decisions and the impact these decisions can have on the final implementation. This session aims to help provide some high-level guidance on designing a VMware vSphere environment, with information taken from real-world experience.
3046	Real-World Big Data Use Cases Made Possible by VMware vSphere Clouds	Ian Breitner, Isilon Jay Chitnis, Isilon	The cloud architectures enabled by vSphere are opening up new models for use cases that were not practical (or possible) without virtualization. In this session, we’ll show two vastly different real-world cloud implementations of cloud-enable big data applications: a multi-terabyte high-performance database and a cloud service managing and serving over 12 million files. Using these as examples, we’ll cover best practices developed through experience as well as the VMware and underlying infrastructure technologies that make these implementations possible and practical.
2820	Real-World vStorage API for Array Integration Effects, Design, and Planning with VMFS and NFS	David Roberston, EMC Rick Scherer, EMC	A deep dive into the VMware storage array integration API’s such as the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) as well as vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). Learn how VMware's latest open API stack allows storage vendors to offload common data migration tasks to the array, which increases overall performance and reduces load on your virtual infrastructure. See the performance benefits and design considerations in this technical deep dive.

 

 

Other Noteworthy Sessions:

 

Additionally, the following EMC sessions also address Technology and Architecture:

Session ID	Title	Presenter(s)	Abstract
2481	A Multi-Vendor Panel: "What Does Storage of the Future Look Like?"	Chad Sakac, EMC Lee Dilworth, VMware Mike Kopenen, HP Vaugn Stewart, NetApp Mike Laverick, RTFM	vSphere has had a huge impact on how vendors build servers, networks, storage, and other infrastructure elements. This panel will provide a forward-looking view of how several leading storage vendors are investing their advanced research and development in the 2013-2015 window to create next-generation storage platforms and storage models for the world of applications and infrastructure that is being evolved by VMware and VMware customers.
2751	How SMBs Can Successfully Transition to the Cloud	Simon Seagrave, EMC	There is often a perception that implementing a Cloud-based infrastructure is limited to larger businesses with their associated larger budgets. The reality is that organizations of all sizes can benefit from the efficiencies and cost savings found with implementing a virtualization and Cloud-based infrastructure. This session will take the attendees through the various steps involved in implementing a successful SMB virtualized/Cloud-based infrastructure which will include many useful real-world examples, useful tips, and best practices which will focus on how SMBs can successfully implement their own VMware-based Cloud infrastructure.
3088	Block vs. File - The Eternal Debate	Ben Dunning, EMC Dave Henry, EMC Sheetal Kochavara, EMC Chris Mancini, EMC	One of the great things about VMware is that it offers so many connection options for storage for your virtual servers. Sometimes this freedom of choice can seem overwhelming when deciding which one to use. Each storage protocol has its own advantages –- which is the right one to use for a given VMware vSphere implementation? Come to this session and hear a panel of storage and virtualization experts debate the merits of the different protocols applied to real-world customer use cases. Learn how to determine the “right tool for the job” for specific virtualized workloads.
2491	Storage Efficiency with VMware	Sheetal Kochavara, EMC	This session looks at storage efficiency use cases, where features such as thin provisioning, automated storage tiering of data, compression and path management software for block and file storage are applied to the VMware environment. In addition, this session will outline how VMware technologies like thin provisioning, vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) both block and file, Storage I/O control (SIOC) function and also work with these storage efficiency technologies.
1863	vStorage APIs - What Has Changed Since the Introduction / How Does it Help Me in Real Life?	Bas Raayman, EMC	The session is wrapped around the introduction of the vStorage APIs, and is targeted around giving the audience an overview of how the implementation of these APIs has matured, and tries to give the audience real examples of where these APIs are being used, and how the audience benefits from these APIs each and every day in real life.
2248	Advanced Load Testing of the VMware Storage Stack with Powershell	Clinton Kitson, EMC	Finding strengths and weaknesses in a storage stack before implementation is critical for ensuring SLAs in a virtual environment. This session will focus on leveraging Powershell and IOmeter to simplify and expand the possibilities of testing and stressing a virtual storage stack. See how Powershell can help to breakup performance data by characterization of workload and automate the processing of data collections to allow for rapid and standardized view of results across a storage stack.
2699	Scalable Backup and Recovery for Your Cloud Infrastructure	Thomas Martin, EMC	There have always been a variety of ways to architect and manage backup and recovery solutions for IT infrastructures, but as you migrate your applications to a scalable virtual platform, it becomes imperative to find a similar data protection approach that can scale easily and cost effectively to keep up with the demands of a fast-growing Cloud Infrastructure. Explore how deduplication dramatically improves backup by reducing backup windows and making more efficient use of CPU and memory resources. Using real-world customer examples, we'll show how combining different deduplication algorithms enables the most scalable high-performance backup and recovery for image-level backup.
2170	A Day in the Life of a Virtual Infrastructure Administrator: Comparing VMware and Hyper-V	Rafael Novo, EMC Andre Andriolli, VMware	Let’s compare the jobs of two administrators: one of them using vSphere 4.1 and the other using Hyper-V R2. In this session, we’ll use demos to offer a fair side-by-side comparison of how common daily tasks are performed in each environment.
2177	Hyper-V R2: Features Comparison and Integrated Management	Rafael Novo, EMC	The new Windows 2008 R2 release brought new features to Hyper-V, including resource reservation and memory overcommitment. This session will provide a passion-free, detailed technical comparison between the new Hyper-V R2 and vSphere 4.1 and help you choose the best platform for your cloud infrastructure. Including a demo of the new XVP Manager plugin for vCenter, for managing a Hyper-V environment from inside vCenter.
2312	Top 10 Tips for Installing & Running Successful VMware vSphere Labs!	Simon Seagrave, EMC	With more and more businesses and individuals now running their own VMware vSphere lab for test and development, pre-release or educational purposes the topic of vSphere labs has become a very popular one. With VMware vSphere now able to be run on entry level hardware there has been no better time to run your very own lab. Planning, installing and running your own successful VMware vSphere lab environment can be confusing and often something of a minefield if the lab is to be fully utilized and configured to its maximum potential. This educational and entertaining session will cover a Top 10 list of the most useful real-world tips covering the areas of installation, configuration and running a successful vSphere lab that can be taken away and applied to your own lab or production VMware vSphere environment. The format of this presentation is designed to be punchy and semi-fast paced with plenty of engaging (and sometimes humorous) images & screenshots designed to hold the audience’s attention. Each of the tips will cover up-to-the-minute information based on the latest VMware products and will be backed up with real world examples, considerations and useful information on why and how to implement the tip supplemented by the lessons learned through the speaker's own experience in building vSphere labs.
2330	Tools and Resources That Accelerate Your Journey to the Cloud	Josh Mello, EMC Mason Uyeda, VMware	VMware and partners have worked together to develop joint reference architectures that eliminate uncertainty in your deployment. Come to this session and see jointly-developed solutions for rapid deployment that take advantage of the latest vSphere technologies. Using real-world examples, we’ll show how using these solutions can reduce configuration time by up to 66 percent and deployment time by up to 50 percent.
2278	A Deep Dive into Storage Technologies for the Latest Version of VMware vSpehre	Dave Boone, EMC	This session will review the new storage technologies for the latest version of vSphere, including VAAI2 and VASA. This session will also demonstrate how customers can leverage these new technologies to accelerate their journey to the cloud.

 

Again, regardless of where you cast your votes – THANK YOU for voting!

Comments

[Brian Gracely]

Ouch, no love for - "1604 Cisco "Cloud-Ready" Infrastructure - Infrastructure Design Beyond the VM". I'll forgive you, you've been busy lately :-)

[Keith Norbie]

that's a mega post. I voted for you and I'd add my session; 2765 (Carver County fighting flood w/VDI)

Go Bulldogs!

[Chris Kranz]

Lots of good sessions to vote for this year. Too many!!! Here are some of my recommendations: http://www.wafl.co.uk/vmworld-2011-session-submission/

[Joe Cupano]

No love for "2110 Truth in Multi-Tenancy" either