“Ready for Any”
That’s the theme for this years massive technology industry conference, aka VMworld. I say technology conference because VMworld has grown to be much more than just a virtualization forum, it’s a week that’s jam packed with technologies that cover every aspect of the common datacenter… and more importantly, it’s a week to learn and network with some great people. It’s a week full of education, networking, giveaways, fun and opportunity! VMworld really packs it all in, and I’m proud to be part of it again this year.
Below is my itinerary for the week, the sessions I’m planning on hitting, the parties and TweetUps I plan to visit. I also throw in some other must-see sessions and some cool vendors to check out.
I look forward to seeing all of my friends out there in San Francisco. If you’re going to be in SFO next week, find me, say HI, give me a hug… it’s always great to put a face with a name.
Also, don’t be shy… the virtualization community doesn’t bite and we’re all super humble and happy to chat with you about anything. This is an open invitation, if you see me, come say Hi!
BTW, the parties/events listed below are just a small fraction of what’s going on. These events are where you’ll most likely see me, but be sure to check out the full list here http://www.vmworld.com/en/gatherings.html
Safe travels, see you all next week!
Legend
VMworld Session
VMworld General Session
Party/Event
vTweetUp
Sunday, August 30th
1:00pm
#VMunderground Opening Acts 2015
City View at Metreon
135 Fourth Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103
A special event put on by the #VMunderground and #vBrownBag peeps. Take your chances, come to VMworld earlier than usual and have some fun!
3:00pm
EMC Annual #v0dgeball Charity Tournament 2015
SoMA Rec Center
270 6th St and Folsom St
San Francisco, CA 94103
If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball! This event should be great fun for a great cause. Come see 16 teams battle it out on the court.
A $5 donation fee is suggested and appreciated. All proceeds go to The Wounded Warriors Project. If you cannot attend but would still like to donate, click here to donate.
4:00pm
#VMworld 2015 Welcome Reception
Food, Drinks and Networking….all inside the Solutions Exchange.
8:00pm
#VMunderground Party 2015
City View at Metreon
135 Fourth Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103
In its ninth year of existence, the VMunderground Party is the largest party out of all of the festivities all week.
Put together by guys who love virtualization and some great sponsors that are down for the cause. This is the Mother of All vBeers, a party not to be missed.
Monday, August 31st
10:00am
General Session
We live in a world where digital transformation is disrupting traditional businesses by enabling innovative new business models and constantly raising customer expectations for convenience, cost and speed. Agility is vital for survival and growth. The cost of acquiring technology is no longer a barrier to change and innovation. A startup doesn’t have to build a data center nor does an enterprise have to make new infrastructure compatible with its installed base. At the nucleus of the revolutionary transformation of our time, is the app. It is enabling growth and disruption – from your device to the data center. And, cloud is the equalizing force for all types of customers providing the competitive edge your business needs to succeed. VMware’s One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device architecture enables IT organizations like yours to operate on- and off-premises clouds as a single, unified environment.
12:00pm
CNA5379 – Enterprise Arch for Cloud-Native Apps
There are tectonic shifts happening in the enterprise, particularly in how applications are developed and operated (e.g. DevOps), how they’re architected (e.g. micro services and 12-factor apps), and how they’re deployed (e.g. Docker and containers). We call these applications “cloud-native” as they’re designed for the mobile-cloud era. VMware launched Cloud-Native Apps at the beginning of the year to address the shift that is currently taking place how applications are developed today. This session will provide you with a dive into that world of Cloud-Native Apps. In this panel discussion, lead by VMware CTO for EMEA Joe Baguley, we will discuss all the topics surrounding Cloud-Native Apps and walk you through the vision that VMware has for next generation application development and hosting. The panel will include VMware subject matter experts that will provide insight into what can be achieved with containerization, micro services and DevOps. They will provide you with examples and real-world scenarios from field experience. And of course we encourage everybody to come and join in the conversation. This session is meant to be interactive and open discussion around the topic of Cloud-Native Apps. We welcome everyone’s input and questions to learn and share with one another.
1:30pm
SDDC6442 - The Bleeding Edge: A face-melting technical smorgasbord of Private, Hybrid and PaaS
As enterprises are furiously competing to maintain relevancy in the market, innovation and business agility are essential aspects of their long-term success. To support that, IT must provide agile, secure, and cost effective services. This is not an easy task, it is critical that you understand the different cloud models and how they correlate to application and business requirements, these are basic fundamentals for your continued success. In this session, we will discuss the Managed Cloud model and how the EMC Federation with Virtustream solutions will complement vCloud Air’s Public Cloud offerings. We will guide you thru the key dimensions you must consider in choosing the right cloud model for your applications. In this session you will also hear about how EMC will enable Cloud Native Apps, the container ecosystem as well as transforming storage and replication through Virtual Volumes and IO Filters. In typical Chad fashion, we’ll get our hands dirty with tons of live demos and we’ll also provide a sneak peek on how Software-Defined Storage solutions are evolving to accommodate these new application and business requirements, from extreme high performance and low latency applications to huge object repositories. You’ll see how you can start using Software-Defined Storage solutions in your environment with just a few simple steps and with no out of pocket cost, by leveraging EMC’s open source offerings.
3:30pm
STO5877 – What’s New in Virtual SAN
Come learn what’s new with the latest release of Virtual SAN. Some of the most exciting features in VMware’s first software-defined storage product will be discussed, and we will explain how they further enhance the value of Virtual SAN to your business.If you heard the buzz around VMware Virtual SAN, but still didn’t get a chance to get familiar with it, this session will also cover all the basics. We will explain functionality, business benefits, features, use-cases and customer case studies. We will also touch on how to purchase and size Virtual SAN for your environment.VMware Virtual SAN is 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 that can deliver a simple and high performance storage tier to provision and manage storage while dramatically reducing the total cost of ownership.
6:30pm
Virtually Anything is Possible, an EMC VIP Event
The Village
470 Stevenson Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Tuesday, September 1st
9:00am
General Session
We live in a world where digital transformation is disrupting traditional businesses by enabling innovative new business models and constantly raising customer expectations for convenience, cost and speed. Agility is vital for survival and growth. The cost of acquiring technology is no longer a barrier to change and innovation. A startup doesn’t have to build a data center nor does an enterprise have to make new infrastructure compatible with its installed base. At the nucleus of the revolutionary transformation of our time, is the app. It is enabling growth and disruption – from your device to the data center. And, cloud is the equalizing force for all types of customers providing the competitive edge your business needs to succeed. VMware’s One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device architecture enables IT organizations like yours to operate on- and off-premises clouds as a single, unified environment.
11:00am
INF4853 – Docker Containers on vSphere: Performance Deep Dive
Many enterprise users might prefer to run Docker containers in VMs because they need the security and isolation guarantees, and they want to leverage the existing infrastructure and management tools that vSphere provide. In this talk, we characterize the performance of running Docker containers on vSphere. We also show that in many applications by running Docker containers in VMs you can get up to 30% better than native performance due to better vSphere scheduling and isolation. We also provide detailed results across a wide variety of micro- benchmarks covering all aspects of the system (CPU, memory, IO and network) and real world workloads like Redis, Web2.0 applications like NGINX web server with MySql and OLTP benchmarks like DvDStore with Postgresql. Finally we share our performance best practices on how to configure Docker containers and VMs for the maximum performance. We also present the results of management operations and show that leveraging VMFork (project Fargo), VMs can provide similar performance in terms of provisioning time and memory overhead when compared to containers.
12:30pm
INF4535 – 5 Functions of Software-Defined Availability
In this session Duncan and Frank will discuss 5 functions of Software Defined Availability, which are part of vSphere 6.0. For each of these functions certain scenarios will be discussed to explain how vSphere can help improving availability of your workloads. This ranges from “how Site Recovery Manager and Storage DRS are loosely coupled but tightly integrated” with vSphere 6.0 to “how vSphere HA responds in the case of a certain failure”. Be prepared to get in to the trenches of workload availability…
2:00pm
EUC4561 – Application Lifecycle Management with VMware Horizon
VMware Horizon® offers a number of ways to containerize, provision, manage, and deliver applications to a user. It is important to understand which technology to use and when. This session aims to explain each methods pros and cons. When to chose what.
4:30pm
#VMworld Hall Crawl
Open to all attendees, no sign-up needed. Enjoy a refreshing beverage while you see the latest products and services from over 250 exhibitors in the Solutions Exchange.
5:00pm
SDDC5113 – Everything You Need to Know About VMware + OpenStack (and VIO 2.0!)
VMware’s engagement with OpenStack is evolving rapidly. We have contributed comprehensively to the Open Source community, ensured that OpenStack is fully functional on VMware products – vSphere, NSX and VSAN and recently launched our distribution VMware Integrated OpenStack to market. Our goal is simple and clear – We want to make sure our customers are successful in running OpenStack on VMware. And in this session, we will provide details our strategy, execution and vision to achieve the goal of VMware + OpenStack. We will also briefly introduce the new capabilities of VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0
6:00pm
EMC Converged Infrastructure Advisory Council and CTO Panel Party
54 Mint
16 Mint Plaza
San Francisco, CA 94102
7:00pm
#vExpert Private Party
Hope to see all my fellow #vExpert and #VCDX members there.
8:00pm
vBacon TweetUp
Location TBD
9:00pm
Trace3 VMworld Party
Clift Hotel
495 Geary Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
Wednesday, September 2nd
8:30am
CNA4725 – Scalable Cloud Native Apps with Docker and Mesos
The Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel creates large-scale cells across all types of Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings and lends itself to building high-performance, on-demand clusters for developers and system engineers. As momentum builds around Docker and Apache Mesos within engineering teams, it is evident the infrastructure and operations teams need a strategy for offering Apache Mesos internally on a VMware private cloud environment.Combining Apache Mesos with Docker as a cell offering within your existing private cloud environment, you are able to leverage a dedicated HDFS data warehouse to leverage against the elastic and on-demand nature of analytic processing jobs. The transient nature of Apache Mesos allows engineers to be more agile in their consumption of physical resources within the private cloud infrastructure.One of the largest challenges to offering Apache Mesos within a private cloud environment is rapid deployment and standardized configuration. This presentation will help system architects understand how to utilize existing Open Source projects to customize a framework to offer a dedicated HDFS data warehouse and a preconfigured Mesosphere stack with Apache Mesos, Marathon and Chronos. The automated approach will allow an organization to become more agile in their Platform-as-a-Service offerings within a private cloud environment.The presentation will demonstrate similar functionality within a private cloud environment as the Mesosphere offerings for automated deployments into various public cloud environments. Utilizing intelligent cluster deployments, resource are deployed as a single Apache Mesos entity. The ability to rapidly deploy cells will help to decrease adoption time by customers.
10:00am
CNA5520 – Run your Stateless and Stateful Apps in Containers on VMware infrastructure
The past 2 years we’ve seen the container ecosystem grow into a huge business, and we’re betting you’re interested to understand how it works. If you already have a VMware infrastructure, do you need to rip out everything and replace it with bare metal servers and containers? Of course not! In this session we’ll show you with LIVE DEMOS of tech like VMware Photon, CoreOS, Lattice.cf and Docker how you can eat the cake and have it too, by merging the concepts of virtualization and containers to a great platform for both traditional and new apps, and discuss the difference between managing stateless and stateful apps when it comes to persistence of data.
12:30pm
SDDC4593 – Ask the Expert vBloggers **A MUST SEE**
Top industry bloggers, Duncan Epping, Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac, Chris Wahl and Rick Scherer are on stage answering your questions. No Holds Barred!
2:00pm
SDDC4595 – Ask the Expert Industry Titans **A MUST SEE**
Top tech industry titans, Kit Colbert, Chad Sakac, Vaughn Stewart, Nick Weaver and Rick Scherer are on stage answering your questions. No Holds Barred!
3:30pm
STO6327-SPO – The vExpert Storage Game Show
The vExpert Storage Game Show is an entertaining and informative showdown between two teams of vExperts and bloggers in a “Family Feud” style battle where each team must confront questions and answers provided by you, the VMware community. Any storage related topic is fair game, including all-flash arrays, VVols, SPBM, SIOC, containers, OpenStack, app & VM backup, SRM and much, much more. The Pure Storage VMware community survey provides crowd-sourced answers to questions around real-world use cases, challenges and technology adoption – we will test the vExperts on the survey results to see how well they know their business and how clearly they can explain some of these important topics to the audience! Join us to meet some of the most widely read vExperts and bloggers in the community in what is sure to be the most talked about session of VMworld 2015.
5:00pm
Red Hat Happy Hour
Restaurant Lulu
816 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
7:30pm
Official VMworld 2015 Party
Neon Trees & Alabama Shakes at AT&T Park
10:30pm
#vStogies 2015
Cigar Bar and Grill
850 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
Thursday, September 3rd
9:00am
General Session
Can you wake up early enough to check out the final General Session of the week? I hope to see you there!
10:30am
SDDC5094 – A Technical Deep Dive into VMware Integrated OpenStack
You may have tried deploying OpenStack either from Operating System package managers or from OpenStack distribution vendors. You heard that VMware has a formal offering in this space, and you want to find out more. This session will begin with an architecture review of the latest OpenStack release and then progress into a deep-dive of VMware Integrated OpenStack internals. We will round out our discussion by covering how VMware’s solution simplifies “Day 2” OpenStack operations.
12:00pm
INF5432 – Infrastructure as Code – Ban Snowflake Deployments
Manually configuring infrastructure such as servers, network and storage will lead to “snowflake” deployments and failures that could have otherwise been avoided. How are your apps supposed to live and run safely on top of this house of cards? In this session we’ll do LIVE DEMOS of how you can get rid of those worries by deploying, configuring and managing your infrastructure and applications in an automated way with DevOps-style components such as Puppet, Docker and VMware Photon.Tons of other great parties:
1:30pm
CNA5860 – Containers without Compromise: Persistent Storage for Docker Containers with VMware
Containers are showing rising interest in the enterprise world for cloud-native applications, but there remain significant roadblocks to adoption. For example, containers have had significant issues in using existing storage for interacting with persistent, stateful applications and data.VMware is developing new features that leverage vSphere to help provide persistent storage and data lifecycle management for Docker containers. In this technical session, we will go over use cases for container-based storage, describe how VMware is providing solutions for storage pain points, and showcase a demo so you can see some solutions in action.Come see how VMware provides Containers without Compromise.
Don’t miss these other great events/parties happening the week of VMworld 2015:
Monday, August 31st
6:00pm – SolidFire Community Party @ ThirstyBear
6:30pm – VM Turbo Party @ Drake
7:00pm – vFlipCup Party @ Mezzanine
Tuesday, September 1st
5:00pm – Hytrust Party @ Press Club
6:00pm – AppSense Party @ Thirsty Bear
8:00pm – Veeam Party @ City View at Metreon
There are a ton (literally) of other great parties this week, I obviously cannot attend them all (but I’ll try), and I may have left some off of my calendar.
Andreas did a great job of collecting data on all of the parties/events going on during VMworld, check out his blog for more fun.
Other Must Watch Sessions at VMworld (remember, everything is recorded so check out all of those sessions you missed after the conference ends!)
CTO6659 – Ask the Experts – Cloud Native Applications
INF5060 – What’s New in vSphere?
STO5605 – What’s New in Site Recovery Manager
STO5336 – VMware Virtual SAN – Architecture Deep Dive
SDDC4955 – VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) on Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
SDDC5839 – vRealize Automation or OpenStack? Uncovering the Right IaaS for Your Business
STO5522 – Virtual Volumes Technical Panel
EUC4561 – Application Lifecycle Management with VMware Horizon
CNA6261 – Internals: How We Integrated Kubernetes with the SDDC
SDDC5566 – Successful DevOps for the Hybrid Cloud with vRealize Automation & VMware Integrated OpenStack
INF5229 – Docker and Fargo: Exploding the Linux Container Host
STO5571 – What’s New in Virtual Volumes
STO5333 – Building a Stretched Cluster with Virtual SAN
NET5836 – OpenStack with NSX Architecture Deep Dive
OPT5069 – Enterprise Hybrid Cloud – Federal Case Study
SDDC4797 – EVO:RAIL 2.0 Deep Dive
INF5750 – VMware API Introduction – Performing Common Tasks with the APIs
Must See Vendors at VMworld
Last year Mirantis, MidoKura, SaltStack, Docker and PLUMgrid really caught my attention at VMworld, this year I have a new list of vendors that have sparked my interest and I will definitely be checking them out.
From what you’ll see, it’s all about Cloud Native Applications…how to deploy them, manage them and also do some really cool things. There’s also some cool cloud based labs out there too!
CloudGenix
StacksWare
ZeroStack
Rancher
Platform9
Qstack
Cumulus Networks
ClusterHQ
Cloud Physics
Ravello Systems
So there you go… A week full of events, sessions, general sessions, parties, vTweetUps and more. This is going to be an amazing week. I can’t wait to see some old friends and to meet some new ones!
Be sure to find me while at the show, I love meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends, so be sure to keep an eye out on Twitter for my live tweets.