It’s that joyous time of year again! VMworld is fast approaching and Public Voting is NOW OPEN.  This year I’ve submitted three different Ask the Expert sessions with focus on different topics, so there should be an Ask the Expert session for you! I’ve also submitted a great session on integrating two great technologies, vSphere Metro Cluster and VMware Horizon View, you should definitely vote for it if you’re planning on building a geo-clustered View environment. These sessions won’t be picked up unless you vote for them, I’d love to see you all in these sessions so please, vote early and vote often :)

• 4569 – Ask the Expert vBloggers – Duncan Epping, William Lam, Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer, Vaughn Stewart 
  One of the highest rated sessions at VMworld is back for it’s sixth year! We got the top Virtualization Bloggers in the industry and put them on stage answering your questions in a wide array of topics.
• 4570 – Ask the Expert VCDX’s — Chris Colotti, Matt Cowger, Jason Nash, Rick Scherer, Chris Wahl
  Come get interactive with a panel of five VMware Certified Design Experts, they’ll answer your questions live.
  Experts in Cloud, Application Modernization and End User Computing are here to help.
  Working on becoming a VCDX? Ask you questions about our panel members journey to becoming a VMware Certified Design Expert.
• 4571 – Ask the Experts – Storage Leaders — Jason Boche, Chad Sakac, Rick Scherer, Eric Siebert, Vaughn Stewart
  Come get interactive with four huge names in the storage industry. Ask your questions to leaders from EMC, NetApp, Dell and HP. How do you build a scalable storage infrastructure to match your vSphere compute deployment? What’s the best storage protocol for your Private Cloud deployment? Should I be using Round Robin or Fixed pathing? What is a SATP or PSP? Come find out!
• 4572 – Building a vSphere Metro Cluster for VMware Horizon View — Rick Scherer
  Learn how you can leverage the vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) reference architecture to stretch a cluster used for End User Computing. Say Hello to Always-On Follow-Me Computing.

Remember, the Ask the Expert sessions are driven by the audience… no script, no presentation, just a panel of experts hungry to answer your questions live! Please be sure to vote for these great sessions to ensure they’re scheduled at VMworld 2013!

Thanks for taking the time to vote, but please don’t stop once you’ve voted for my sessions. There are a number of other excellent sessions from people like Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Chris Colotti, Kendrick Coleman, Jeremiah Dooley, a number of them from the EMC vSpecialists as well as a  joint session between Chad Sakac (EMC) and Vaughn Stewart (NetApp) which shouldn’t be missed!

Thanks again and I hope to see you at VMworld US and Europe!

Created on April 23, 2013 by Rick Scherer

Posted under VMworld.

This blog has 56 views and no responses.

Tags: ask the experts, horizon, horizon view, vdi, view, vmsc, VMware, VMworld, vspecialist, vsphere metro cluster

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Attention all VMware Junkies!  For those of you that were unable to attend VMworld 2012, here is your chance to get access to all of the content available from VMworld 2012!  Valued at $699 I’m giving away one voucher that will provide FREE access to all of the sessions and their content, including associated MP3′s and PDF’s! Experience all presentations online just like actually being at VMworld!

Sessions and labs are available on-demand at your own convenience in the following formats:

1. Videos (general sessions and super sessions)
2. Flash presentations w/ audio over slides (all breakout sessions)
3. PDF downloads (all sessions and labs)
4. MP3 podcats (all sessions)
5. Demo videos and scripts (select sessions and labs)

No gimmicks to win, just submit an easy to enter entry form! That’s it!  Winners will be announced on November 2nd!
Just a final note, attendees to VMworld 2012 already get full online access but if you didn’t attend here’s a chance to get a full access pass!

Congratulations to Nikola Bravo of New York! They’ve just won a free pass to the VMworld Online content.

Created on October 27, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Good Reading, VMworld.

This blog has 269 views and 3 responses.

Tags: contest, online, VMworld

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Hello and Welcome to VMworld 2012 in San Francisco! I’m going to try something a little different these next few days. I’ve created this aggregated page that will serve as a central repository for some live updates (mainly around keynotes, and sessions) as well as a live feed from my Twitter profile as well as my Instagram profile (for pictures). For my up to the minute VMworld 2012 Schedule please visit this post.

As you may have (or not) seen on Twitter, I’m participating in the #vHunt this year and I have some great things (books, stickers, etc) to give away! Just find me at #VMworld, take a picture with me and post it to Twitter with the #vHunt hashtag and you’ll be entered to win some other great prizes (think iPad, etc).

This is going to be an amazing week! I can’t wait for the fun to start (in about 7 hours!) and ingest all of the great information that we’ll be delivered. I also hope to see all of you at INF-VSP1504, our Ask the Expert vBloggers session which is on MONDAY at 2:30pm!

So that’s it for now… let’s switch on the live blogging and hope this all works out! Have a Great Week!

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Created on August 27, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Conferences, VMworld.

This blog has 788 views and 2 responses.

Tags: blogging, instagram, san francisco, SFO, tweet, twitter, VMworld

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Here we go again! 2012 marks the 9th VMworld Conference (I remember Steve Herrod, then Senior Director of R&D, giving a technical overview of ESX and explaining what a VMM was) which is only 23 days away, but for some the planning started months ago. This is by far the best IT conference on the planet, it all started with a little love for virtualization and has grown by the need for next generation computing. There isn’t one event that captures everything from core infrastructure components and software all the way up the stack through application development and end-user computing devices. One full week filled with education, networking, entertainment and awesome technology!

The networking opportunities have to be the best piece of VMworld, never will you be able to meet with other people as passionate about a single thing as you are. This year I believe we’ll learn a lot more about where the direction of VMware (as a company) is going. Hopefully we’ll be able to put somethings together about their recent acquisitions, DynamicOps and Nicira to name a couple. And perhaps Paul Maritz will put a little more content to why he’ll be joining EMC as their Chief Strategist. This is still all in addition to the great breakout sessions that you’ll find at VMworld, including (shameless plug) INF-VSP1504 – Ask the Expert vBloggers :).

So here is my schedule, full of great sessions, fun networking opportunities, awesome parties and completely slammed from morning to evening….boy I love VMworld! I’ll keep this schedule up to date as I add new events, so please keep this bookmarked! At the bottom of the page I’m going to include some “Interested” sessions and Vendors, these are sessions that I wasn’t able to schedule due to conflict but that I’d still very much like to watch perhaps on-demand after the conference.

If you have an event that your hosting/sponsoring and you’d like it added to my schedule, please let me know!

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Created on August 3, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Conferences, VMworld.

This blog has 540 views and 3 responses.

Tags: chad sakac, conference, EMC, networking, party, tweetup, VMware, VMworld, vstogies, vtweetup

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It’s that time of year again, and for the 5th year I’ll be hosting Ask the Expert vBloggers at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco!  This is really a great session, the audience gets to ask the questions that matter to them and get them answered by experts in the industry.  If you haven’t registered already, I strongly suggest you lock in your ticket to VMworld by clicking here.

Once you register, be sure to add INF-VSP1504 – Ask the Expert vBloggers to your agenda!

If you’re not attending VMworld 2012 US, or want to make sure your question gets answered I invite you to fill out the following form and submit it. All questions submitted will be reviewed by the panel and answered on-stage at the conference as well as via e-mail to the requester.

We all look forward to meeting you all at VMworld 2012 and can’t wait to share vStories over some drinks!

Created on July 23, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Conferences, VMworld.

This blog has 158 views and 3 responses.

Tags: ask the expert vbloggers, ask the experts, chad sakac, duncan epping, frank denneman, inf-vsp1504, rick scherer, san francisco, scott lowe, SFO, VMworld, vmworld 2012

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As many of you know I’m currently on my honeymoon and I certainly shouldn’t be blogging, but this is too important to pass up! VMworld 2012 Session Voting is now open and I could use all of your help in getting my sessions approved for VMworld US and EMEA. That’s right people, I’ve submitted my sessions for both conferences and this would be the first time I’ve made it to VMworld Europe. So please, vote early and vote often :)

• 1504 – Ask the Expert vBloggers - Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Rick Scherer, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac
  One of the highest rated sessions at VMworld is back for it’s fifth year! Come meet four VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX) on stage answering your questions. We get the top Virtualization Bloggers in the industry and get them on stage answering your questions in a wide array of topics.
• 1506 – Designing a  Geo-Clustered VMware View (VDI) Environment – Rick Scherer, Tyler Baker
  Does your organization have multiple sites with a traveling workforce that may work in different locations? How does this put a damper on your VDI design and deployment? Wouldn’t it be nice to design a solution that can offer follow-me computing regardless of the location your employee is in?
  In this session you’ll learn from a real life customer deployment on how to design a VDI environment that offers multi-site replication as well as load balancing which allows the employee to connect to the desktop in the datacenter closest to them which ensures the highest levels of performance and availability.
• 1507 – Accelerate Your Journey to Your Cloud with Application Modernization – Rick Scherer
  Truth be told, IT as a Service (ITaaS) is not the end of the Journey to Your Cloud. Although IT Automation and Orchestration is critical to a successful ITaaS deployment, you need to modernize your applications to make your business truly cloud ready.
  Application mobility is going to be a critical piece to creating business agility, simply virtualizing your existing J2EE stack isn’t going to take you all the way, you must modernize your applications for mobility as well as in consideration for the influx of the massive amounts of Big Data our organizations can leverage.
• 2715 – How to Ensure a Successful Cloud Implementation – Rick Scherer, Craig Chapman
  There are a multitude of sessions that are addressing the technical needs of ensuring a successful cloud implementation. In this session the goal is to provide IT professionals strategies and methodologies to engage and service the business. By engaging the business IT professionals can gain an ally outside of IT in the implementation. With allies outside IT we gain valuable insight into the success of a cloud implementation.
• 2790 – Ensuring Governance, Mitigating Risk while Maintaining Compliance in a Cloud Infrastructure – Rick Scherer
  In this session you’ll learn how companies are deploying Cloud First models to Hybrid Cloud infrastructures while setting a solid GRC foundation.
  Learn the steps require to deploy your applications securely to the Cloud, protect your data, virtualize more assets and reduce the amount of infrastructure needed by leveraging vSphere-aware security products.

Thanks for taking the time to vote, but please don’t stop once you’ve voted for my sessions. There are a number of other excellent sessions from people like Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac, Scott Lowe, Chris Colotti, Kendrick Coleman, Jeremiah Dooley, a number of them from the EMC vSpecialists as well as a few joint sessions between Chad Sakac (EMC) and Vaughn Stewart (NetApp) which shouldn’t be missed!

Thanks again and I hope to see you at VMworld US and Europe!  As a gift, here is a picture from the beautiful Na Pali Coast on the island of Kauai in Hawaii.

Na Pali Coast, Kauai, Hawaii

Created on June 1, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under VMworld.

This blog has 240 views and one response.

Tags: ask the experts, cloud, egrc, EMC, emea, grc, itaas, vdi, VMware, VMworld, vspecialist

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If you haven’t noticed I’ve been lacking in the content department for VMwareTips.com and for that, I apologize. Most of my readers and friends in the industry know that when I joined EMC I’ve had some fundamental issues with content due to my new job. Frankly it was way easier to talk as a customer and end-user with tips, tricks and issues that I found when using the products on a daily basis. As an employee I’m doing a lot more evangelizing than hands-on, and the time I do spend in the lab is doing very specific projects with lab equipment..which means I either cannot discuss what’s happening or there just isn’t enough data to talk about. I did find a little niche where I was creating instructional videos on specific topics, my readers seem to like this and I really enjoy putting them together.

So why haven’t I put something together in the past couple months?  Well, some of you may know this but to the others that do not, I’ll be getting married on May 19th! This has been in the works for quite some time now, but for those of you that are married you know the last months/weeks are when the bride and groom are running around with their heads cut off doing those last minute things.

With that I thank you all for continuing to be avid readers, followers and more importantly friends in the industry. As soon as the wedding fiasco is over and we return from our tropical honeymoon I’ll be right back in the office thinking of content for the blog and awesome new things to talk about. There are some amazing new things with VMware View and vFabric that I’d love to write posts about!

On another note, we have some big events coming up including EMC World and VMworld. I unfortunately will not be at EMC World but I highly recommend you attend, we’ll be showing off some mind blowing technologies (like some of the stuff Chad showed on the latest Chad’s World episode).  For VMworld I’ll be submitting four (4) different sessions, including the always popular Ask the Expert vBloggers, hopefully it will be picked up for US as well as EMEA (first time submitting for Europe!).  The Ask the Experts session is by far one of the most popular sessions at VMworld, you’ll be able to ask your questions to four of the top virtualization experts, Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman, Scott Lowe and Chad Sakac, with me moderating the madness! That’s right, four VCDXs on a single stage..it’s a great time!

That’s about it for me, I’ll most likely be off the radar until my return the week of June 11th, which actually is the week of Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego,  I’ll be speaking at a couple sessions there and if you’re planning on attending I’d love to meet at the EMC booth to chat about what you’re doing with VMware, Cisco and EMC technologies.

Look for some random tweets, perhaps some wedding photos and random chat via my Twitter page. Cheers!

Created on May 8, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Conferences, EMC, Good Reading, VMworld.

This blog has 186 views and no responses.

Tags: EMC, emc world, marriage, VMworld

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144 Bottles of Water, 48 Cans of Monster Lo-Carb, 50 Bags of Single Serve Chips, 270 Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers, 144 Bottles of 5-Hour Energy and 300 Oreo Cookies (unfortunately there has been no accurate count of alcoholic beverage)… that is how VMworld started for some of the members of the vSpecialist Organization within EMC on Thursday.

Actually, Über teams within the vSpecialist organization at EMC started months ago with a strategic plan to cause peoples minds to literally explode from all of the awesome-sauce VMware and EMC will jointly deliver the week of VMworld 2011. This includes a huge EMC core booth with 13 VDI enabled workstations showing the latest and great products, there is also a separate EMC vLabs booth that will have 15 workstations that will allow attendees to use and abuse 11 different products within the EMC family. This is all in addition to the EMC focused lab, which is located within the official VMworld Hands on Labs (which by the way are powered by EMC technology) inside the Solutions Exchange.

Needless to say, there have been endless hours already spent by the team (of absolute rockstars) to ensure the best experience possible for the attendees of VMworld 2011. The sessions, labs, solutions exchange, TweetUps, parties and ability to network with your vPeers makes this show undoubtedly the best information technology show of the year.

There are about 20 of us here, from around the global, working diligently on getting everything up and running as well as testing for usability/stress and for an overall great experience. The countdown officially started yesterday afternoon and we have until Sunday afternoon (3 full days) to make sure everything is 100%. So, what about after Sunday? Will we get to just sit by the pool, sipping on some tasty margaritas? Well, I’m hoping to have at least 30 minutes of that sometime this trip, but what about the other 107.5 hours of VMworld?

So here is my schedule, full of great sessions, fun networking opportunities, awesome parties and completely slammed….boy I love VMworld!

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Created on August 26, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Conferences, VMworld.

This blog has 368 views and one response.

Tags: EMC, party, the killers, v0dgeball, VMware, VMworld, vodgeball, vspecialist, vtweetup

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This year at VMworld I have the extreme honor to be moderating a panel discussion with some fellow bloggers that in my opinion are experts in virtualization, Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, Scott Lowe and Chad Sakac. For those of you attending VMworld be sure to register for VSP1425 – Ask the Expert vBloggers today!

So now here is your chance to be part of this great session!  Do you have a question that you’d like the experts to answer? Simply fill out the form below and your question will be added to the queue! We’ll be answering some of these web-submitted questions live on stage and will be responding to all questions on the VMwareTips.com blog! So, get your question answered and we hope to see you in Las Vegas!

Questionnaire has been removed. Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you at VMworld 2012!

Created on July 27, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under VMworld.

This blog has 250 views and one response.

Tags: ask the experts, blog, bloggers, chad sakac, duncan epping, frank denneman, las vegas, scott lowe, VMworld, vsp1425

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We’re just at a month to go until VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, NV and the official countdown has started within the vSpecialist compound! Boy do we have a lot of great things that we’re going to show you this year, face-melting awesome-sauce things.

Join Chad Sakac (@sakacc) tomorrow morning (Thursday 7/28 at 8:00am PT) as he gives a sneak peak of the latest technology integrations, essential sessions, hands-on lab experience, product demos, must-have giveaways, and fabulous parties!

Click here to register for this session. Don’t miss out!

Created on July 27, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under VMworld.

This blog has 124 views and no responses.

Tags: EMC, VMworld

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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