OK – with VMworld 2011 rapidly approaching (10 business days left!) I’m doing a “My Top 10” list of things to do, see, participate in, vote on, win prizes, etc… Each day, I’ll do the next in the “top 10 list”.
Today – #10 – a set of my personal session recommendations.
Obviously- sessions are a huge part of a conference, and also just as obviously – they are very personal choices. Just because I think something seems compelling (or not), doesn’t make it so – by any means. That said – here’s my personal recommendations for the week…
| Session # | Title | Why I’m recommending it | Date/Time |
| Keynote | Paul Maritz Keynote | Paul Maritz’s opener sets the overall tone for every year’s VMworld – and more importantly, I’ve found that what he discusses tends to be the talk of industry 1 year later. | Monday 3:00pm |
| Keynote | Steve Herrod Keynote | Steve Herrod’s keynote is always a “must see”. This year, there’s a bit of a twist – not only where be a lot of the “making it real” that Steve always doesn, there will be even more tech previews than normal – and trust me, some of these are NOT TO BE MISSED. | Tuesday 8:00am |
| SUP1006 | Accelerate the Journey to Your Cloud | This is the EMC Supersession. Pat is always awesome, and this is where we are putting the “pull out the stops” demos. Many are high risk facemelters – Pat always pushes the whole team hard (in a good way). There will a crazy set of guests, and YES, it will contain a live “Chad’s World” episode. W | Tuesday 10:00am |
| SPO3977 | Next Generation Storage and Backup for your Cloud | In general vendor sponsor sessions are… risky (for being a commercial). But, I have placed firm rules on the EMC sessions – we must be marketing free, technical, do demos, and have the customer voice present. I’m holding myself strictly to these rules. This session is going to be a monster. I guarantee it. I’ve got some demos in store for this session that will blow peoples minds. hints: 1) there are some neato under the hood changes in NFS behavior in vSphere 5 that are… handy; 2) here’s where we will show vCD and backup/recovery done right; 3) Want the scoop on the worlds records for vSphere 5 storage? Trust me – and if I’m wrong, call me on the carpet publicly :-) | Tuesday 2:30pm |
| VSP1425 | Ask the expert vBloggers | The best part of this session will be the fact that we’ve (Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman, Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer and I) all agreed (me included) in advance that I need to be muzzled. Come and see that in action! | Tuesday 12:00pm |
| SP1956 | The ESXi Quiz Show | This could be good, could be bad – but will be epic either way :-) | Monday 1:00pm |
| SP1926 | Getting Started in vSphere Design | This is an interesting idea Scott had – with all of us jumping to the deep dive topics of what’s new, what’s big, what’s face-melting – we shouldn’t lose sight that folks still need the core high level guidance. | Monday 9:30am, Wednesday 9:30am |
| BCO2479 | Understanding vSphere Stretched Clusters, Disaster Recovery, and Planned Workload Mobility | Lee and I are working hard on this one. With the ever-expanding universe of possible “stretched cluster” use cases, and the simultaneously expanding Site Recovery Manager use cases and capabilities – this is becoming a popular (and confusing) venn diagram discussion. We’re hoping to make it a useful, blunt discussion on the use cases and the technologies. | Tuesday 4:30pm and Wednesday 1:00pm |
| BCA1931 | Design, Deploy and Optimize Sharepoint 2010 on vSphere | Itzik is one of our strongest vSpecialists – and this is a great joint session with Scott Salyer from VMware. The best part – it’s not only technical, and practical, but rooted in a real-world customer project. | Tuesday 4:00pm, Thursday 12:30pm |
| CIM2343 | Building a real-life high-performance financial services cloud: NYSE Technologies | A very, very cool story. Glad to see it got picked through the voting process. While the number of vCloud service providers is legion at this point – this is a unique, community cloud. The NYSE example is targeted at not the “lowest common denominator” cloud compute use cases – but at the high performance, high scale, high availbility financial community. It uses VMware, EMC, Cisco and HP technologies – and is a great story. The best part – the customer is there presenting. | Wed 9:30am |
| BCA2329 | VMware vSphere 5: Best Practices for Oracle RAC Virtualization | Those of you that know me, know that I’m passionate about this topic :-) Sam and Jeff are two of the guys at the center of a lot of VMware/EMC/Oracle stuff – and this session has killer content. It covers all the usual topics here in one dense little sandwich: licensing, support, performance. This will help a ton of customers. | Wednesday 9:30am |
| VSP3205 | Technology Overview: vStorage APIs for VM and Application Granular Data Management | Satyam Vaghani and Vijay Ramachandran from VMware have something cool in store in this session. Come and prepare to have your face melted. The other thing is that the demos for this are really coming down to the wire. Ergo – collosal train wreck probability during demo = +1 | Monday 11am |
| VSP1682 | vSphere Clustering QnA | Duncan, Frank, Chris Colotti – authors of one of the authoritative books on the topic (I have my copies) presenting on the topic. I’ll be there with books in hand to get signed :-) | Monday 8am |
| VSP1700 | vSphere 5.0 Storage Features | Nathan Small and Cormac are great presenters, and I’ve seen the content for this session – very solid. | Tuesday 1pm, Wednesday 2:30pm |
| GD10 | Site Recovery Manager Group Discussion | I’m a big fan of the group discussion format – it’s more intimate and interactive than a breakout session. Plus, I think the world of Lee. He rocks, and is, in essence, “mr. SRM” at VMware (and a good dude too). | Monday 11am, Wed 3:30pm |
| CIM2916 | What’s new in VMware vCloud Director | IMO, it’s very important to stay close to vCD – In the future, we’ll all be spending more time there. | Tuesday 11:30am, Wednesday 3:30pm |
| GD32 | vSphere and vCloud Director Group Discussion | I’m a big fan of the group discussion format – it’s more intimate and interactive than a breakout session. Plus, I think the world of Massimo. He’s been involved in a lot of the vCD projects I’ve seen in Europe, so brings a lot of real-world experience. | Wednesday 2:00pm |
| EUC2846 | View Enterprise Architecture Design | I’m a believer in presenters as much as content – Tommy Walker and John Dodge are experts. Plus, this content is hot – View Enterprise architecture and design is very important for succesful PoC, Pilot, and scaled up deployment. | Monday, 11:30am, Tuesday 5:30pm |
| CIM2452 | vCenter Operations Technical Deepdive | There are VERY exciting things going on in vCOPS land – and Kit Colbert is one of the guys at the living beating heart of VMware. Expect a nerd-a-thon (in every possible positive way) | Tuesday 4:00pm, Wednesday 2:00pm |
| TEX4062 | vCloud Roadmap | The roadmap of vCD is very ambitious – and is accelerating, and I think the world of Eddie Dinel. He loves vCD, it’s his baby. | Tuesday 11:30am, Thursday 11:30am |
| EUC1987 | PCoIP Performance and Best Practices | I don’t know what it is, but I expect lots of neat new stuff in this session :-) I also have a lot of respect for the presenters – so high expectations indeed. | Tuesday 12:00pm, Wednesday, 1:00pm |
| VSP2376 | Performance and Scalability enhancements in VMware vStorage VMFS-5 | Again – the content will rock, but so will the presenter. Mostafa is a senior support escalation engineer – so has the battlescars and lessons to share. He has presented at VMworld for years, and people like his content. I find I end up using Mostafa’s content for subsequent years. | Wednesday 8:00am |
Go to www.vmworld.com, register, and then use the schedule builder to build your schedule.
Reminder – you can still get the early bird rate (which is $400 off) if you click on the below.
Register! Sign up for the sessions! Next in the “Top 10 list” = #9: Some ways to influence content…
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