In my role as a VMware Technical Account Manager, I like to provide my recommendations for the upcoming VMworld 2014 sessions. Here is a list of 41 sessions that I think are worth checking out!
TAM - VMworld 2014 Session Recommendations
1. HBC2708 - Customer Case Study & Demo on Application Mobility: How to seamlessly move applications and stretch networks to vCloud Hybrid Service
Hear firsthand from customers on how they have seamlessly extended their Data Center to vCloud Hybrid Service.See a live demo that showcases the experience of application migration to vCloud Hybrid Service. In the session we will demonstrate how to move VM templates, applications, networks and policies from your data center to vCloud Hybrid Service. The session will include customers talking about their experience with moving applications and stretching their Layer 2 networks on to vCloud Hybrid Service. We will show their use cases and how they truly extended their data center to vCloud Hybrid Service. The live demo will include - Connecting a vSphere environment to vCloud Hybrid Service - Selecting and moving applications to vCloud Hybrid Service - Selecting and stretching L2 networks from your data center to vCloud Hybrid Service.
Allwyn Sequeira, VMware
Serge Maskalik - Sr. Director of Engineering, VMware
2. HBC1533 - How to Build a Hybrid Cloud - Steps to Extend Your Datacenter
This session will help attendees understand the various steps to build and extended datacenter to vCloud Hybrid Service. Generally, speaking customers find it easier to view the vCloud Hybrid Service cloud as just another datacenter. However instead of being physical it is all software defined and available on demand. We will leverage examples and use cases from current customers, as well as, review a specific setup the vCloud Hybrid Service Technical Marketing team has built in a “Customer” Lab. We will also explore the networking specifics, considerations, and other options to truly build a hybrid cloud.
David Hill - Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Chris Colotti - Principal Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
3. HBC2577 - Hybrid Sandboxing – Create the Ultimate On and Off Premises Test/Dev Factory
The ability to do test/dev and sandboxing projects on throwaway cloud resources is well known. But the ability to add cloud to your existing software development lifecycle and application architectures that you currently deploy on premise is a game changer. This is the reality of the enterprise. And these are the things that people now realize is possible only in a true hybrid model. In this session, we will look at four different models for using vCloud Hybrid Service as the ultimate landing spot for your test/dev workloads. From legacy packaged applications to custom developed next generation applications, vCloud Hybrid Service gives you all of the stability and necessary control over the application infrastructure, while still getting all of the agility and “on demand” processing that the cloud brings. Attendees will walk away with a solid grasp on how to implement a hybrid cloud into their existing environment to augment their application deployment needs.
Jay Marshall - Senior Technical Solutions Architect, VMware
4. HBC2609 - Smells Like Team Spirit: Achieve Hybrid Operations Nirvana with vCloud Hybrid Service
VMware Staff Automation Specialist Gary Coburn and Senior Technical Solutions Architect Jay Marshall bring their renowned “ Gary and Jay Road Show” to the big stage at VMware. Gary is an infrastructure guy. Jay is a developer. In this session, they will build a basic web application from scratch, architect the corresponding application blueprints in Application Director for repeatable deploys, and publish everything into vCloud Automation Center to illustrate control over who gets to deploy what, where, and when. Ultimately they will show the complete software development lifecycle of making changes to applications, pushing them to vCloud Hybrid Service-based test environments, and then publishing to on premise production environments on vSphere. Attendees should walk away prepared to implement a Hybrid Cloud “application factory” in their own organization. Developers get all of the agility they need while IT gets all the control they need. Meanwhile, the business gets their applications better, faster, and cheaper.
Gary Coburn - Staff Automation Specialist, VMware
Jay Marshall - Senior Technical Solutions Architect, VMware
5. OPT1572 - Accelerate Your IT Transformation: How to Build Service-based Cost Models with VMware IT Business Management (ITBM)
What is the #1 challenge in IT financial management? In a recent VMware webinar, fully 75% of 118 worldwide IT decision makers indicated that it was the lack of understanding of the true cost of IT services, which causes lack of visibility into IT costs can actually slow down your IT transformation initiative. As more business leaders recognize the integral role the IT organization plays in the overall success of the enterprise, they have higher expectations of IT's performance and its ability to show its value. Today's service managers/owners must be more than tech-savvy; they must also be financially savvy. The ability to quickly re-engineer the cost model to align to a service-oriented and customer-centric model is a critical step in the IT transformation journey. So ask yourself: Are your service managers involved in managing their service financials? Is your current cost model based on expense codes, cost centers, cost by department or cost by customer? Do you do arbitrary cost cutting or allocation? Are you challenged by cost optimization goals? Can your service managers and IT leaders defend their numbers? Would you like to be the strategic partner of your organization's CFO and CEO? To accelerate your efforts to align business goals with IT capabilities, you must provide cost transparency both internally and back to the business, and that means your organization requires an in-depth understanding of the costs associated with delivering IT services. This session offers insights and guidance from experts.
Gary Roos - Operations Transformation Architect, VMware
Khalid Hakim - Operations Transformation Architect, VMware
6. OPT1983 - Case Study: Implementing Operations Transformation Using vCenter Operations and vCloud Automation Center
Many IT organizations prominently display dashboards within their operations offices, making it easy to identify and respond to issues and outages. The dashboards also help the IT organization understand the overall health of the software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure. But what their customers really care about is not just health and availability but the performance and speed of delivery of services against agreed service level agreements (SLAs). A true operations transformation requires not just passive monitoring but also proactive monitoring of the automated provisioning of the services deployed on the SDDC infrastructure. However, this creates technical challenges —not just in the integration between provisioning and monitoring tooling but also in adapting the operating model of the IT organization. These challenges were addressed by one of Europe's largest telecommunications providers. The company needed to migrate from a siloed IT infrastructure that was becoming costly to maintain, to a flexible architecture that could meet growing business demand, cut provisioning timeframes from weeks to minutes, and reduce operating expenses while continuing "business as usual"; during the transition. This session shows how VMware helped translate these complex requirements into a real-world solution, and how that experience could help your company address similar needs. VMware experts will walk you through the modular approach implemented by this customer — tackling the senior management challenges of operational transformation, adapting the organization structure and its operating model while also addressing the technical delivery concerns of the IT engineers and administrators looking to integrate VMware vCloud products. The presentation showcases how the VMware solution allowed service owners to proactively monitor KPIs of the overall service provisioning process and how the customer more closely aligned service owner teams to the SDDC infrastructure teams, allowing for more effective collaboration and improved service delivery.
Nick Moore - Technical Operations Architect, VMware
David Crane - Operations Architect, VMware
7. MGT2525 - Chasing the White Rabbit all the Way to Wonderland: Extending vCloud
Automation Center Requests with vCenter Orchestrator
As any IT professional knows, being able to provision systems in a consistent manner, reliably, is the holy grail. Most organizations have tasks they are performing during various stages of provisioning, but these things are, in many instances, manual. While that can be a great starting point, this approach does not scale and routinely falls victim to human error. However for environments that leverage vCAC, there is a way to scale, be consistent and to automate all aspects of the Cloud life cycle. We will explore the symbiotic relationship between vCAC and vCO, and how the information being stored in vCAC can be used to power workflows within vCO in a production environment to eliminate the guesswork and dramatically reduce errors in provisioning and life cycle requests.
Naomi Sullivan - Group Product Line Manager, VMware
Steve Kaplan - Principle Infrastructure Architect, Defense Contract Management Agency
8. MGT3042 - Cloud Automation – Tales from the Trenches
Join four leading industry IT experts while they share their unique cloud automation journey with vCloud Automation Center. Each panelist will present a lightning session on their real-world implementation covering their company’s cloud automation expectations and requirements; how they went from zero to deploy, the tips and tricks they learned along the way, and life after automation. This session is interactive, and you will have the opportunity to ask the panelists questions that can help you accelerate your cloud journey.
Steve Kaplan - Principle Infrastructure Architect, Defense Contract Management Agency
Adrian Woodward - IT Manager, Medtronic
Paul Popplet - IT Architect, Qualcomm
Mariano Maluf - Cloud Computing Architect, Integration and Technology, Coca-Cola
Naomi Sullivan - Group Product Line Manager, VMware
9. SDDC2556 - Customer Panel: Journey to Software Defined Datacenter
Hear firsthand from customers who are starting to implement a software defined datacenter. Panel discussion will cover an introduction to each customer's environment, VMware solutions currently used (vSphere with Operations Management, vCloud Suite, Site Recovery Manager, etc.), use cases/IT outcomes achieved, roadmap, followed by Q&A. Panelists represent different sized organizations and industries.
Julia Lee - Sr. PMM, VMware
10. INF1469 - Extreme Performance Series: Monster VM Performance
Mission-critical applications represent the last hurdle to organizations looking to migrate their data centers to a private cloud. Although IT administrators realize the benefits of virtualization, they may be hesitant to virtualize these mission critical applications because of their resource demands and an inexplicable fear about the underlying hypervisor preventing the infrastructure from meeting the SLAs of these applications. vSphere, the industry's leading hypervisor platform, has been pushing the boundaries of infrastructure resources it can manage over various releases. Through its superior resource management capabilities, vSphere can easily scale horizontally to support many virtual machines (VMs) or vertically to support large VMs. Recently, vSphere extended the resource management envelope to such a level that even extreme resource-hungry applications such as databases can be run in VMs. In this talk, the speakers will give an overview of key vSphere features such as CPU and NUMA schedulers, and memory managers that propel monster VMs. The speakers will share their experimental results, experience gained, and lessons learned. A deep dive into SQL Server scalability results on vSphere 5.5 on a large, multi-core physical host (4 CPU, 1 TB RAM) will be presented. Finally, the speakers will provide best practices to the audience for undertaking such an exercise. This talk should alleviate any hesitation to migrate the resource hungry, mission critical applications to a private cloud.
Seongbeom Kim - Staff, Performance, VMware
David Morse - Performance Engineer, VMware Inc
11. SDDC2190 - Introduction to IT Outcomes Delivered by the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Have you ever wondered what IT problems can be addressed with the SDDC? What IT outcomes can be delivered with SDDC technologies? What does it mean to operationalize SDDC to achieve the IT outcomes? Are there deployment stages and maturity levels that you can go through? In this session we will provide an overview of 6 specific IT outcomes that can be delivered with VMware SDDC products and technologies. The IT outcomes we will cover are: 1) Data Center Consolidation and Standardization, 2) Capacity Optimization and Performance Monitoring, 3) Policy-Based Security and Compliance, 4) High Availability and BCDR, 5) Faster Delivery or IT Services with Policy-Based Governance, and 6) Simplified IT Financial Planning and Forecasting. This session will paint a picture of how life for an IT organization transforms with adoption of SDDC technologies while delivering against these outcomes and walk through the deployment stages and customer examples.
Arun Lal - Product Line Marketing Manager, VMware
Gopal Ashok - Product Line Manager, VMware In
12. SDDC1767 - Simplify / Automate IaaS Workload Deployment with VMware-Powered Converged Infrastructure (VMCI)
As data center operators struggle to make many pieces of the infrastructure (storage, computing, and networking) work together to offer cost-effective and agile service, Converged Infrastructure (CI) solutions promise to eliminate the challenges by offering customers a set of products that work together easily with minimal installation and operations overhead. The CI products include a pre-integrated and optimized bundle of hardware and software across networking, compute servers, and storage typically combined with virtualization, management, and other software (DR, load balancing, etc). However, integration of different components from different vendors (across compute, storage, and networking) leads a complex environment consisting of disparate tools for management, provisioning, and deployment. The session will outline the VMware view of the CI requirements and an architecture inspired by the SDDC suite augmented by software components. One way to simplify the CI environments is via a VMware-powered Converged Infrastructure solution (VMCI) that ties together hardware and software components under a single virtualization umbrella to offer a single point of-entry for a Software Define Data Center (SDDC). We will tie together VMware (and partner) assets spanning virtualization (compute/storage/networking), management (vCenter, VCAC), and operations/analytics (vCOPS, vCAC, etc) with hardware management, to offer a single point of SDDC entry with a tightly integrated automation for SDDC. We will offer benefits of reduced cost, faster time-to-value, and operational ease when it comes to SDDC instantiation, workload provisioning, deployment, and operations. This session focuses on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and provides an in-depth description of a simplified, automated approach to IaaS workload provisioning and deployment using VMCI.
Thirumalesh Reddy - Sr Director, SDDC R&D, VMware Inc
Raj Yavatkar - Chief Achitect, Converged Infrastructure, Vmware
13. STO3162 - Software Defined Storage: Satisfy the Requirements of Your Application at the Granularity of a Virtual Disk with Virtual Volumes (VVols)
In this session VMware and Nimble Storage will give a demo of the latter's implementation of Virtual Volumes and Storage Policy Based Management to show how the above mentioned benefits can be easily achieved. vSphere's Virtual Volumes (vVols) allows for a much more granular control of virtual disks. Its Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) ensures that you don't have to manage each setting on each virtual disk thus avoiding a monumental effort. This session will show how these vSphere features, along with innovations in storage files systems (CASL) and storage hardware (flash disk) can enable you to achieve the following: Manage by Policy Set a policy on a virtual disk at time of provisioning. Change the policy. Check to see if the virtual disk is compliant with its policy. Protect Very Frequently and Retain for Long: a. Protect VMs with aggressive RPOs and retain months-worth of backups on primary storage by using new kind of efficient point-in-time array snapshots on a VM-by-VM basis. Further, quickly and reliably restore a VM from such backups. b. Ensure business continuity with efficient array replication on a VM-by-VM basis by transferring only changed blocks of compressed snapshot data. 51% of workloads run on Nimble Storage arrays are protected for DR as compared to an industry average of 10% Provision VMs instantly, space efficiently and in auto-optimized volumes: By using array-based cloning technology made possible on a VM-by-VM basis by vVols, provision a VM with no CPU overhead. Further only changed blocks take up additional space offering considerable space savings. Lastly, Nimble Storage's innovative Performance Policies and VMware's SPBM ensure that storage is provisioning for the VM with the most optimal settings, automatically. E.g. with the correct block size and caching options. Secure VMs using VMDK Encryption Gain deep Insight into VMDK health and performance Leverage data sciences to gain storage operational efficiencies via a cloud-based portal. See causes of performance issues instantly, eliminating days-worth of manual troubleshooting and on-site professional services. Receive alerts based on the monitoring and deep analysis of system parameters.
Cormac Hogan - Storage Architect, VMware
Rochna Dhand, Nimble Storage
14. INF1349 - Software-Defined Data Center and vCloud Suite Roadmap
Come to this session to learn about the roadmap for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) and the vCloud Suite. The session will start with the product roadmap for each of the key areas of the SDDC: compute, storage and availability, networking and security, cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business. We will then discuss the vCloud Suite and the key areas where VMware is planning to innovate over the next few years to make the SDDC a reality for all of our customers. You will walk out of this session with a clear understanding of the components of the SDDC, how they come together in the vCloud Suite, and how they will evolve in the future.
Fausto Ibarra - Sr. Director of Product Management, VMware, Inc
15. NET1786 - The Business Case for Network Virtualization
The value of the agility and speed offered by the software defined data center broadly, and network virtualization more narrowly, is not lost on IT organizations. Agility and speed, however, doesn’t always make a great numbers-bound business case. IT organizations have found several ways to justify implementing network virtualization, across a variety of audiences. This session will explore the key elements from several organizations’ business cases, and detail the types of returns on investment that they have seen. This session will explore justifications across 3 audiences: • Business and IT executives • Operations teams • Infrastructure (networking and security teams) By the end of this session, attendees will have a solid approach for justifying network virtualization, and it’s ability to improve the agility, speed, security, and efficiency of the data center.
Chris King - VP, Product Marketing, VMware
Rod Stuhlmuller - Director, Product Marketing, VMware
16. OPT1313 - Transformation Best Practices for the Software-Defined Data Center
Transforming an IT organization requires changes in technology, process and people. Technology tends to be the easiest part, but the people and process transformation is what makes the organization successful. Join us to learn some of the best practices and lessons learned by firms already down the transformation path. You will also hear from a VMware customer and some of their successes along the automation journey.
Kathy Maher - Technical Manager, Allstate Insurance
Brian Martinez - Accelerate for Financial Services, VMware
17. STO2462 - Virtual SAN - Customer Panel
This session is a panel discussion comprised of several customers that have deployed Virtual SAN in their environment. They will discuss their experiences with Virtual SAN, specific use cases that were relevant to each customer, and answer any questions that are posed to them.
Chuck Hollis - Chief Strategist, VMware
18. STO1279 - Virtual SAN Architecture Deep Dive
This session will cover the architecture of Virtual SAN (VSAN) and the technical details of the various functional components of the product. You will learn about VSAN's clustering and scalability properties; about the algorithms used to distribute data across the cluster so as to meet the availability and performance requirements of applications; about the distributed protocols utilized to guarantee data availability and integrity under any combination of component failures. You will hear how VSAN achieves all that while consuming very low CPU and memory resources on ESXi hosts. The session will also highlight the integration of VSAN with the rest of vSphere, including features such as HA, DRS, (s)vMotion, vSphere Replication and many more.
Christian Dickmann - Staff Engineer, VMware
Christos Karamanolis - Principal Engineer, VMware
19. SDDC2311 - vCenter Server Architecture and Deployment Deep Dive
Join us for an in-depth discussion of VMware's future directions for vCenter Server, emphasizing changes to the vCenter Server architecture and deployment models. It will cover VMware's best practices and recommendations for installing, configuring, and upgrading vCenter Server to best fit your environment based on size, scale, and future needs. We will consider both Windows and appliance-based deployments and address the pros and cons of each. Administrators attending this session will acquire deep insight into why vCenter Server is structured the way it is, the implications of different deployment options, and the background to make informed choices when deciding how to deploy vCenter Server. This session will be of interest to administrators of all levels of expertise.
Justin King - Sr Technical Marketing Manager, VMware Inc
Robert Perugini - Sr. Product Manager, VMware
20. INF1522 - vSphere With Operations Management: Monitoring the Health, Performance and
Efficiency of vSphere with vCenter Operations Manager
See how to use vCenter Operations Manager to monitor the health and performance of your virtual workloads, to optimize the efficiency of your physical server infrastructure and to perform capacity planning for your vSphere environment. This session will introduce you to the features and capabilities of the vCenter Operations Manager Standard Edition, which are available as part of the vSphere with Operations Management (VSOM) product. This session also includes a sneak peak at several new features and capabilities planned for future releases of vCenter Operations Manager to include a new scale-out architecture, a new converged UI, built-in out of the box dashboards and health alerts with recommendations.
Ryan Johnson - Staff Technical Account Manager, VMware, Inc.
Kyle Gleed - Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
21. EUC1970 - Architecting View on VSAN
VMware Horizon View is a proven Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution that has been deployed by customers around the globe. However a common design challenge is achieving the required desktop performance at the lowest possible cost. Often a Horizon View deployment requires shared storage solution such as SAN to host the virtual desktops. SAN Arrays can be expensive which affects the Capital Expenditure required. The release of VMware Virtual SAN has provided architects with a new weapon in the battle for desktop virtualisation. VMware Virtual SAN provides a shared storage solution by aggregating server disks into a disk cluster, eliminating the need for a SAN. By utilising a combination of Solid State and Spinning Disks, VSAN can achieve high performance and an effective cost point. This session will provide an overview of how to architect your VMware View solution to make best use of VSAN to achieve the required levels of performance and manageability whilst keeping the cost of your virtual desktop environment low.
Travis Wood - Consulting Architect, VMware
22. EUC1759 - Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) Technical Deep-Dive
Cloud Pod Architecture (CPA) allows customers to easily scale Horizon 6.0 deployments as well as deploy Horizon 6.0 across multiple physical locations/sites. With this new feature it becomes possible to go above and beyond 10.000 sessions as well as use Horizon 6.0 in advanced geographical dispersed deployments that can allow for 24/7 desktop availability as well as greatly simplify implementations for Disaster Recovery that spans across multiple sites. In this sessions you will learn the architecture behind CPA how it simplifies both user access as well as administrative tasks by using Global Entitlements and single namespace for access. The most common use-cases for CPA will be detailed and we will dive deep into the architecture and deployment and detail how global load-balancing can be used to enhance the solution. Live demonstrations will be used to show you how CPA actually works to better understand the workflows and brokering logic.
Rasmus Sjørslev - EUC Architect, VMware
Frank Taylor - Senior Staff Engineer, VMware
23. EUC1297 - Engineering EUC Solutions Behind the Scenes - A Deep Dive into the
Technologies VMware's Own EUC Teams Use to Create Our Technical Solutions
Historically, lab, education and development environments go through a constant rebuild cycle, most of which are redundant tasks. Manual, complex and time-consuming tasks makes the management of these types of environments a nightmare and inefficient for the end-users. Utilizing VMware’s Software Defined Datacenter concepts with the latest suite of VMware products makes this daunting task easy for admins, seamless to the end-user and efficient overall. This presentation will address the how-to aspects of building a highly efficient, completely automated and easy to access lab environment. We will also discuss the integration gotchas and pitfalls to be aware of and explain how we used the latest VMware products to make the magic happen. Finally, we will discuss the modular approach we used to build End-User Computing vPODs. Take this journey with me, lets walk through this exciting innovative design and cutting edge concepts that will help you re-define your datacenter.
Kaipo Batoon - Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware Inc
24. EUC3100 - Future of Work: Beyond Social Technologies
Social, mobile, cloud, Big Data/analytics and the Internet of Things are all having a dramatic impact on the way employees get work done. The move to the "sense and respond" business model and the cultural changes associated with customer experience strategies are putting pressure on businesses to eliminate organizational, application and data silos. In this session Vanessa will explore the growing productivity gap where traditional automation is reaching its upper limit and employees are seeking new and more effective ways to get work done.
Vanessa Thompson - Research Manager, IDC
Joan Bodensteiner - Sr. Director Marketing, VMware
25. EUC1653 - Horizon 6 Hosted Applications Technical Deep Dive
VMware continues to innovate and evolve with Horizon 6 and the introduction of Hosted Applications based on RDSH. Come join our session to learn what's new with Horizon 6 Hosted Applications, understand the architecture that drives Horizon 6 Hosted Applications while providing sizing guidance along with tips and tricks. During this session we will discuss the following: - Integration with RDSH (Remote Desktop Session Host) - Providing a seamless remoted app experience - Integration across Horizon 6 - Enhanced Management
Warren Ponder - Director, Product Management, End User Computing, VMware
Andrew Johnson - Sr. Manager / Staff Architect, End User Computing, VMware
26. EUC2219 - Quanitifying the Business Value of VMware Horizon (with View)
VMware Horizon (with View) can provide significant cost savings and IT manageability improvements by consolidating a vast number of supported end points onto a centralized service providing platform. According to Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) primary research, more than 70% of organizations that have implemented desktop virtualization have seen real, measurable costs savings with roughly a 60% reduction in hardware, software, and administration costs. When selecting a VDI solution, organizations must understand the total infrastructure and management costs to make the right investment decision. They must also implement a robust framework for HVD solution assessment and deployment. This session will cover the infrastructure costs and the tangible business benefits of the VMware solution, and help you understand how you can lower your desktop total cost of ownership. Hear it from a customer like yourselves!
Ridwan Huq - Group Product Line Manager, Enduser Computing, VMware
27. EUC2551 - Re-Imagining VDI Design: Architecture for Next-Gen Desktops
Virtual Desktop architecture continues to move forward as new developments like VMware Virtual SAN, layering, and application remoting enable exciting new options. Learn how powerful new technologies in Horizon 6 come together to drive a more efficient low cost desktops with uncompromising user experience. This sessions explores new design options that leverage vSAN and application layering for a dynamic assembly desktop. We’ll look at several new emerging hardware technologies including GPU, Protocol accelerators, and FlashDIMMs that can drive the best user experiences. Putting all these new software and hardware innovations together doesn’t need to be complex – this session looks at several easy to implement designs that capture the new innovation and turbocharge your next-generation desktop design.
Daniel Beveridge - Sr. EUC Architect, Office of CTO, VMware
John Dodge - Director, End User Computing Technical Enablement, VMware
28. INF1601 - Taking Reporting and Command Line Automation to the Next Level with PowerCLI
They are back ! Faster, higher, stronger. After delivering last year’s #1 session, Alan and Luc have a new collection of tips, tricks and best practices. If you are into Software Defined Automation, you can’t afford to miss this session. You will take away a bunch of ideas and scripts to implement in your environment and save you time to move onto more interesting challenges. From tags to vCHS, from SRM to the latest PowerShell features, for each of these you will see how PowerCLI is the easiest way to automate your Software Defined Datacenter. And there is of course much, much more!
Luc Dekens - Systems Engineer, Eurocontrol
Alan Renouf - Product Manager, VMware
29. OPT2668 - DevOps Demystified! Proven Architectures to Support DevOps Initiatives
DevOps is the most demanded use-case architecture by VMware customers. Numerous VMware engineers conducted and reviewed a field validated DevOps architecture and best practice methodology in early 2014. This session highlights key findings from the VMware field exercise and provides highly detailed architecture diagrams and a step-by-step methodology for supporting the DevOps initiatives through the vCloud Suite and open standards such as OpenStack. Attendees will leave the session with detailed integrations for common DevOps tools and everything needed to fully support DevOps initiatives using VMware technologies.
Paul Byrne - Sr. Director, Systems Engineering, VMWARE
Chris Wolf - CTO, Americas, VMware
30. OPT2465 - VMware IT’s Tranformation: An Update on How VMware IT is Moving to IT-as-a-Service as Told by the People on the Frontlines
VMware IT continues to transform itself as it continues to move towards IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS). We’ll discuss the results of our use of technologies and service-centric delivery methods such as Cloud Computing and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) in that journey. We’ll also discuss our initiatives in SDDC, SDLC, Cloud Automation, and Cloud Operating model organization transformation so that IT professionals such as yourself can borrow from our experiences and develop insights on ‘how-to’ move your organization forward. The panelists are directly involved in the day-to-day work of transforming VMware IT so their comments are based on recent, real experiences in dealing with the practicalities of responding to the IT challenges of today.
Venkat Gopalakrishnan - Director, IT, VMware Inc
Anees Iqbal - Director, Tenant Operations Group, VMWare Inc.
Brian Smith - Director, VMware’s OneCloud Group, VMware
Job Simon - Vice President, IT Architecture and Strategy, vmware
31. STO2496 - vSphere Storage Best Practices: Next-Gen Storage Technologies
This VMware Technical Communities Session will present a technical best practices with emerging storage technologies for vSphere. The storage industry is experiencing a high level of innovation that will influence your next datacenter refresh. Storage industry experts present this session in a vendor neutral perspective on best practices with storage infrastructure technologies spanning host-based acceleration, all-flash, and hyper-converged. Vaughn and Chad focused on delivering a deep technical session and have invited Rawlinson Rivera of VMware to join and expand the knowledge transfer. This session will present best practices that span connectivity, performance, availability and failure domains, data protection and automation.
Chad Sakac - SVP, Global Systems Engineering, EMC
Vaughn Stewart - Chief Technical Evangelist, Pure Storage
32. SDDC1600 - Art of IT Infrastructure Design: The Way of the VCDX - Panel
This session covers IT Infrastructure Design Methodology as practiced by VCDX certified architects for all certification technology tracks (SDDC, Desktop, Cloud, and Network Virtualization). The session covers the what, how, and why of the methodology. Examples are provided and the panel discusses their experience as panelists reviewing and validating hundreds of designs. Case studies are presented for designs with customers. One example demonstrates design success. The other example demonstrates design failure. The panel discusses and contrasts the approaches of both. Questions from the audience will be covered. If you have suggestions please provide to @vcdx001 on Twitter.
Mostafa Khalil - Technical Support Director, VMware
Michael Webster - Sr. Solutions and Performance Engineer VCDX-066, Nutanix, Inc.
chris mccain - Director of Technical Certification, Networking & Security VCDX-079, vmware
Mark Gabryjelski - Virtualization Practice Manager, VCDX-023, Worldcom Exchange, Inc.
John Arrasjid - Principal Architect VCDX-001, VMware
33. STO2480 - Software Defined Storage - The VCDX Way Part II : The Empire Strikes Back
Storage is one of the key pillars within every datacenter. Leveraging software-defined storage is key to unleashing the full benefits of the software-defined data-center. But as with any new technology, one must understand how software-defined storage fits into their current datacenter architecture. VMware Certified Design Experts utilize an architectural methodology that eases the adoption of new technology to meet your business needs. Join us to learn how to design, implement and integrate the latest VMware software-defined storage technologies into your existing datacenter, the VCDX way.
Rawlinson Rivera - Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc
Wade Holmes - Senior Architect, VMware
34. INF3014-SPO - Scriping and Programing Cloud Automation - How To Power Hour
Presented in an un-conference format and driven by audience entries on a whiteboard and live via Twitter, 3 experts in managing large scale VMware-related clouds will answer *your* questions on how to approach managemt using automation and tools. We'll cover topics ranging from controlling backups with PowerCLI, deploying servers with tools like Puppet and vCenter Orchestrator, building performance collection with Python, and whatever else the audience can think of. This breakout will include both discussions of approaches, as well as recommendations for specific resources, toolkits, modules and the like to solve your problems. Be prepared to take notes and pictures as we whiteboard and discuss live.
Magnus Nilsson - Senior vSpecialist, EMC
Clinton Kitson - Integration Director, EMC
Matt Cowger (@mcowger) - Global Architect, EMC
35. OPT1662 - Are You Lost in the Cloud? Technology May be the Easy Part – It’s the People Issues That Are More Difficult
Cloud computing is rapidly becoming mainstream as companies lean on the capabilities of this technology to respond to business demands for IT functional agility, flexibility, on-demand services and cost transparency to continuously improve business performance. However, cloud implementations often yield results that are below expectations because companies treat the projects as simple system upgrades, with limited attention to the underlying impacts to the operating model, organization structure and culture. To maximize the benefits from cloud implementations, organizations must simultaneously address all technology and organizational impacts, including changes to the operating model, driving organizational effectiveness and evolving talent needs to a higher level. Existing talent may not possess skills to operate in the new IT business model and the current state organization structure may not support the new business strategy.
Judy Pennington - Director, Deloitte
Tom Simmons - Director, Deloitte
36. MGT2658 - Close Tickets Faster: Making Log Management your Secret Weapon
Are you being held hostage by your Service Level Agreement? Having your bonus tied to “Customer Satisfaction” ratings beyond your control or thinking, “Why are there so many dashboards on my single pane of glass?” This case study asks and answers the question “What’s really going on here?” by examining how VMware’s vCenter Operations Manager, Log Insight and vCloud Hyperic unlocked the operational truth for a Fortune 200 company. Along the way we’ll examine the critical choices made by the technology company; executive management; systems engineering and the professional services provider and highlight the end-to-end engagement that turned a contentious relationship into an award-winning reference customer.
Eli Katz - Practice Lead, Cloud M&O, Synnefo Technology Solutions
Leila Tudury - Product Line Manager, vmware
37. MGT3110 - Get the Cost of Your Private Cloud in Minutes. VMware Customer Case Studies!
Do you know the fully loaded cost of a VM in your environment including the cost of servers, storage, facilities, network and labor? If your customers asked - could you compare the cost of your private cloud with the cost of similar offerings from Amazon or Azure? Infrastructure stakeholders are challenged with determining the true cost of their infrastructure - such as the loaded costs of VM, CPU, MEM, Storage and Network. While the need to cost out infrastructure is increasing, the ability to do so quickly and easily is non-existent in most organizations. This session will explore how several fortune 500 companies are leveraging VMware IT Business Management solutions to address these core concerns within their Private Clouds. Using VMware IT Business Management Standard Edition, these companies can implement a cloud costing solution that within minutes allows them to understand the total cost of their virtual infrastructure and the cost of their virtual machines (including all supporting infrastructure) by application and by the consuming organization. The same solution also allows them to compare the cost of their infrastructure services with alternative services available from cloud providers such as Amazon and Azure. Armed with this insight, these companies are now capable of continuously optimizing their private cloud environments and effectively engaging their line of business customers in a dialogue around the cost and benefit of the infrastructure services they deliver. Join this session to learn what these companies did, how they did it and the benefits they now receive by leveraging VMware IT Business Management.
chandra prathuri - Senior Product Line Manager, vmware
38. MGT3109 - Journey to IT Financial Transparency – Important Lessons Learned by EMC and VMware IT
With the adoption of cloud computing more and more companies are embarking on a journey to achieve IT financial transparency. For over four years, EMC IT has been putting in place the systems, policies and relationships to make IT financial transparency a reality. More recently VMware IT began that same journey. In this session both companies will address why IT Business Management is a critical part of the transformation these companies seek in the way they deliver IT services. The session will also examine what each company has achieved so far, and what key lessons each can share with you to help make your journey more successful.
Neil Thibodeau - Senior Director, IT Management, EMC
Michael Bender - Sr Finance Director, IT and Corporate Functions, VMware
39. STO1809 - Virtual SAN 101 and Building a Business Case
Come learn about Virtual SAN, a disruptive product that gives customers a new approach to managing storage in virtual environments. Virtual SAN is radically simple shared storage product delivered as software through a hypervisor-converged architecture that can deliver a simple and high performance storage tier to provision and manage storage while dramatically reducing the total cost of ownership. We will also discuss how to you can structure a business case around Virtual SAN. We will deep dive on the value proposition of VSAN and how it applies to the different use-cases in specific, as well as go into a detailed analysis of where the capital and operational cost savings are coming from.
Joseph Russell - Product Marketing - Software-Defined Storage, VMware
Rafael Kabesa - Product Marketing Manager, VMware
40. INF1192 - Ask the Experts : Design Advice for Small and Midsize Business
Join several industry experts to talk about the considerations that come into play for small and midsize organizations. IT administrators at small and midsize businesses wear many hats, which requires a breadth and depth of knowledge of not just the technology, but the business as well. In this interactive design workshop, we'll go through some of the most common challenges we see customers facing when moving towards the next generation of virtualization. Considerations will be made including management, backups, storage, & networking. Designing virtualization solutions for small and midsize business requires a depth and breadth of knowledge of not just the technology, but the business as well. VMware and vSphere provide the foundation for companies to grow their technological offerings with greater agility. Leverage the management and operational tools included with Essentials Plus and vSphere with Operations Management (VDP and vCenter Operations Manager). The software-defined data center is not just for large enterprises, VMware Virtual SAN can reduce management and operational overhead for all organizations. In this interactive design workshop, we'll start by laying the foundation for virtualization. Whether your organization is new to virtualization or looking at your next steps, we'll discuss how to gather requirements and design a robust solution. We'll talk about properly sizing the solution based on the gathered requirements. We'll further discuss how to protect your environment from failure and where you can most efficiently allocate your budget when doing so is a constraint. Specific consideration will be made to topics of discussion initiated by the panel and audience. Designing virtualization solutions for small and midsize business requires a depth and breadth of knowledge of not just the technology, but the business as well. Performing a proper discovery and analysis of the infrastructure and business will serve just as important as the foundation that your VMware based virtualization solution will.
Jason Gaudreau - Senior Technical Account Manager, VMware
Brian Atkinson - Sr Enterprise Engineer, Varrow
Mike Laverick - Senior Cloud Infrastructure Evangelist, VMware, Inc
Harley Stagner - Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Sean Crookston - Technical Marketing Engineer, VMware Inc.
41. NF2336 - Separating Fact from Fiction - ESXi Hypervisor Security
VMware ESXi has been developed from the ground up to run virtual machines in a secure manner. ESXi addresses the security concerns of the most demanding datacenter environments for enterprises and government organizations. Get a better understanding of exactly how!
Yuecel Karabulut - Product Line Manager, vSphere Platform Security, VMware
Mike Foley - Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
