“Turn Down for What?!”

That’s pretty much how the week goes at VMworld, and here we are, encroaching on what will be my 11th VMworld conference. 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 TweetUp 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 vHomies out in San Francisco, for those attending in EMEA I’m sorry to say that I will not be joining this year, we’re expecting our twin boys in early November so flights for me are grounded around that time. Perhaps next year!  If you’re going to be in SFO next week, find me, say HI, give me a hug… you might even get a cool VMwareTips gift ;)

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://bit.ly/vmworld2014parties

Safe travels, see you all next week!

Legend
	VMworld Session
	VMworld General Session
	Party/Event
	vTweetUp

Sunday, August 24th
1:00pm	#VMunderground Opening Acts 2014
	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 2014
	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 2014 Welcome Reception
	Food, Drinks and Networking….all inside the Solutions Exchange.
8:00pm	#VMunderground Party 2014
	City View at Metreon 135 Fourth Street, 4th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103
	In its eighth 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 25th
9:00am	General Session
	Learn what’s possible in a Software-Defined Enterprise and the latest on how this new approach is exploding old limits with new possibilities from the enterprise to the data center and from a unified user environment to the hybrid cloud. VMware customers also share their real-world success, transforming their businesses with software-defined architectures and solutions. Be the first to hear new announcements about VMware strategies and innovations from cloud services to the data center.
12:30pm	STO2996 – The vExpert Storage Game Show
	Think you know storage? The vExpert Storage Game Show will pit 2 teams of vExperts in a jeopardy style game discussion the latest in storage technologies with vSphere and adds a level of audience participation never experienced at VMworld! Duncan Epping, Cormac Hogan and Rawlinson Rivera represent team VMware who will go head-to-head with team Pure Storage comprised of Vaughn Stewart, Cody Hosterman and Craig Chapman to see who knows more about FlashArray, VSAN, and vSphere Storage Configurations. Each team will be joined by a player drawn randomly from the audience – this could be you, so don’t arrive late! This session is over the top – John Troyer (TechReckoning) will be the master of ceremonies and the show will be judged by Amy Lewis (Cisco Systems) and Friea Berg (Splunk). In addition, some of the questions will be for the audience, which could earn some the adoration of their peers, the respect of the vExperts and a fantastic prize! The categories for the game show are: FlashArray, VSAN, and vSphere Configurations. Questions will span architectural considerations, configuration limits, supported designs, best practices, interoperability and more. Join us for what is sure to be the most talked about session of VMworld. The winners will be adorned in accolades and awarded trophies.
1:00pm	NET2747 – VMware NSX: Software Defined Networking in the Real World
	Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers a great deal of flexibility and agility for many organizations but often network and virtualization administrators are unclear on how it is actually implemented and leveraged. This session will take attendees through the real world use cases for SDN and what they need to know before VMware NSX is implemented in their environment. The different functions of VMware NSX will be shown. Attendees will gain a firm understanding of how to utilize the components such as distributed firewall, distributed routing, load balancers, edge services, and 3rd party security integration. Also covered in detail are the technical requirements and steps to implement the SDN framework in to the physical networking and virtualization environment along with best practices and deployment recommendations.
2:00pm	TEX1991 – vCenter Orchestrator – What’s Next?
	vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is no more the Best Kept secret of VMware. Join our session to get to know the recent updates around the product. Let’s review the overall vCO strategy and RoadMap.
3:30pm	NET1949 – VMware NSX for Docker, Containers & Mesos
	This session will provide a recipe for architecting massively elastic applications, be it big data applications or developer environments such as Jenkins on top of VMware SDDC Infrastructure. We will describe the use of app isolation technologies such as LxC & Docker together with Resource Managers such as Apache Mesos & Yarn to deliver an Open Elastic Applications & PaaS for mainstream apps such as Jenkins as well as specialized big data applications. We will cover a customer case study that leverages VMware SDDC to create an Open Elastic PaaS leveraging VMware NSX for Data communication fabric.
4:00pm	VAPP1807 – Best Practices of Virtualizing Hadoop on vSphere – Customer Panel
	Come hear VMware customers discuss their experience of running Hadoop on the vSphere platform. Hadoop is the fastest growing enterprise workload in the datacenter today and customers are looking for cost effective, simple and scalable architectures that make it easy to run, monitor and provide data access to their internal customers. Come here customers from Fidelity Investments, Fedex, Optum and others talk about how they are building out next generation Big Data platforms using VMware vSphere. Hear about the differences between using shared and local storage, self-service tools to offer Hadoop-as-a-Service, and the ability to run Hadoop on existing hardware to reduce costs.
5:30pm	SDDC1176 – Ask the Expert vBloggers — THIS IS A MUST SEE
	Back for it’s 7th year at VMworld, Ask the Experts is back with an awesome panel of the industries top bloggers. In this session there are no powerpoints, no sales pitches and no rules! Experts in the industry are here to answer YOUR questions while having some fun in the process. Bring your topic, anything from Software-Defined Data Center, to End-User Computing to 3rd Platform Applications… Storage, Networking, Security. No question is off limits.
7:00pm	#vFlipCup VMworld Community TweetUp
	Folsom Street FoundryEpic community tweetup, flipcup tournament and a chance to donate to a great cause!
8:00pm	vGeekfest Party
	620-Jones 620 Jones Street San Francisco, CA 94102
Tuesday, August 26th
9:00am	General Session
	VMware’s CTO, and a supporting cast of VMware technology evangelists will show just how today’s software-defined architectures can be deployed to transform your business. You’ll see innovative uses of VMware technologies across a wide range of use cases – from the Data Center, to the Hybrid Cloud and in End-User Computing. The session will include an overview of End-User Computing business strategy and announcements across an expanded enterprise mobile platform. We will share interesting ways that IT is delivering value to the business. This session is geared to be highly engaging and to open your eyes to the new possibilities in a mobile-cloud world.
12:30pm	STO3161 – What Can Virtual Volumes Do For You?
	Come find out what EMC is doing with VMware to deliver on the more granular management and service differentiation capability. Virtual Volumes has been talked about at several VMworlds now and as it is finally coming out next year, you may be wondering: Is it real? What can it do for me? Virtual Volumes (vVOLs) will change how we think about storage management in customer environments, including private and hybrid cloud configurations. In this joint EMC and VMware session you will learn about unique use cases in which storage management is much more streamlined & powerful. Find out how EMC is implementing Virtual Volumes across the broad range of storage offerings and how its integrated storage management portfolio. Learn about details on new storage management policies abstractions and specifications. For example, learn how feature like EMC FAST are better able to optimize application performance when used with Virtual Volumes. We will also talk about how VPLEX will be able to manage VM availability and placement more optimally using VVOLs. Finally, VVOL provides ease of management, increased flexibility and greater resilience by leveraging a more granular storage provisioning to enable new agile and available storage infrastructure. In this session, EMC and VMware will share what all these means to you.
2:30pm	SDDC2370 – Why OpenStack runs best with the vCloud Suite
	In this session, we will provide a comprehensive overview of how vCloud Suite components are integrated to greatly simplify deployment and operations of OpenStack. We will explore how vSphere, NSX and VSAN provide an enterprise grade foundation for the OpenStack cloud. Additionally, we will learn how management tools such as vCenter, vCOPs and LogInsight are integrated with OpenStack to greatly simplify daily operations such as diagnosis, monitoring, patching etc. We will highlight how customers can leverage existing VMware investments and expertise to not only deploy but also easily operate OpenStack without additional expertise.
4:00pm	STO1965 – Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive
	Virtual Volumes (VVols) is VMware’s new storage paradigm for external SAN/NAS storage arrays. In this session, we will walk you through key technical concepts of Virtual Volumes, in depth. We will also compare in detail some of the existing features in VMFS/NFS with VVols. In addition, You will also get an overview of some of our partner solutions and their approach with VVols.
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	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.
7:00pm	#VCDX / #vExpert Party
	E&O 314 Sutter Street San Francisco, CA 92108Closed Party to VCDXs and vExperts
8:00pm	vBacon TweetUp
	Ferry Building 1 Sausalito San Francisco, Ca 94111You spoke, we listened. Welcome to the newly expanded #vBacon! More bacon, more space, more themed beverages with a side of tech! Come join @CiscoDC for the community party where everyone knows your Twitter handle.
9:00pm	Trace3 VMworld Party
	Infusion Lounge 124 Ellis Street San Francisco, CA 94102
Wednesday, August 27th
8:30am	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.
11:00am	MGT3095 – vCloud Automation Center and Pivotal Cloud Foundry – Better PaaS Solution
	vCloud Automation Center provides powerful capabilities for policy-based orchestration of complex infrastructure and application deployments. A Platform as a Service (PaaS) such as Pivotal CF, built on the open-source Cloud Foundry, presents a set of abstractions and capabilities that focus on the application implementation and the run-time services it will leverage.
1:00pm	STO1153 – Performance best practices to run virtualized applications on Virtual SAN
	Server-local storage has made a comeback in recent years, motivated by the popularity of large-scale distributed computing environments and made viable by the large storage capacities built into today’s servers. VMware’s VSAN allows us to aggregate all local storage in a cluster into a single datastore and present it for use by VMs running on any server in the cluster. Applications can use this clustered storage without any knowledge of the underlying storage hardware or the physical location of data objects within this storage. Needless to say, this shift in storage paradigm demands that we re-assess application performance.
2:30pm	INF3037-SPO – How to Build and Deploy a Well Run Hybrid Cloud — THIS IS A MUST SEE
	Find out what is a well-run hybrid cloud and why you should care. Learn how you can leverage best practices to assemble intelligent components to rapidly deploy a hybrid cloud that delivers on-demand services in a multitenant, fully functional, integrated VMware and EMC solution stack.
4:00pm	SDDC1176 – Ask the Expert vBloggers — REPEAT SESSION — THIS IS A MUST SEE
	Back for it’s 7th year at VMworld, Ask the Experts is back with an awesome panel of the industries top bloggers. In this session there are no powerpoints, no sales pitches and no rules! Experts in the industry are here to answer YOUR questions while having some fun in the process. Bring your topic, anything from Software-Defined Data Center, to End-User Computing to 3rd Platform Applications… Storage, Networking, Security. No question is off limits.
7:00pm	VMworld 2013 Party
	The party of the year! This year VMware brings everyone to the Yerba Buena Gardens for The Black Keys.
8:00pm	#BeerTweetup
	Location TBD, Check the Website
10:30pm	#vStogies 2014
	Cigar Bar and Grill 850 Montgomery Street San Francisco, CA 94133A staple of VMworld. End the week with a relaxing stogie and sip of your favorite bourbon.
Thursday, August 28th
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	MGT2487 – Built to be Extended: vCloud Automation Center
	Are you tired of being told to throw everything away and start over? Does it seem “too lucrative to be true” for the consultant(s) you’ve been paying? Do you want make use of your existing investments in a rational way; as you build up your datacenter’s capabilities? Perhaps you are a solutions architect wanting to offer competitive bids by not re-implementing (and re-deploying) every wheel in the shop. Legacy does not mean broken! VMWare’s vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) was designed from the ground up to be extended. vCAC allows you to orchestrate, coordinate, and govern the services and building blocks of your existing and planned data center as it evolves to meet tomorrow’s changing business needs. In this Deep Dive, we’ll show how you can make use of existing appliances and investments when deploying Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) with vCAC. We will elaborate on how we’ve built our orchestration platform to interoperate with existing assets. Many of our customers employ management solutions to plan, track, and manage internal Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) processes. We will show how you can seamlessly integrate with already-deployed management solutions, demonstrating vCAC’s innate and flexible extensibility mechanisms.
1:30pm	NET1589 – Reference Design for SDDC with NSX & vSphere
	Networking & Security remained the last bastion of hurdle realizing the benefits of SDDC until the advent of NSX architecture. The NSX enables ground breaking innovations, redefining the data center networking and security architecture. This reference design session enables VMware customers and partners realizing fully automated, flexible and secure data centers with the design approaches utilizing virtualization of essential networking and security components over hardware agnostic IP transport. And how those design choices enables the on demand deployment of the multi-tiers application stack. The specific referance design covers three essential topics 1) Properties of NSX components 2) Design consideration with NSX components such as distributed routing, distributed fire wall, interaction with physical networking for routing and bridging and 3) Orchestration/Automation using vCloud Automation Center with NSX.

Tons of other great parties:

• 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.

  Check out the official VMworld Gatherings page for full details on all the parties this week.

Other Must Watch Sessions at VMworld

• STO2521 – Virtual SAN Best Practices and Use Cases
• INF3014-SPO – Scripting and Programing Cloud Automation – How To Power Hour
• INF1864-SPO – Software Defined Storage – What’s Next?
• STO2754-SPO – New Kids on the Storage Block, File and Share: Lessons in Storage and Virtualization
• INF1736 – Designing Next Generation Software-Defined Data Centers: A Panel with VMware Certified Design Experts
• NET1861 – Automating Networking and Security Services with NSX for vSphere and vCenter Orchestrator (vCO)
• NET1592 – Under the Hood: Network Virtualization with OpenStack Neutron and VMware NSX
• INF1552 – SDDC: Buzzword to Reality. Discussions with SDDC Architects that Goes Well Beyond Markitecture

Must See Vendors at VMworld

Last year Puppet, PernixData and Pivotal 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, stuff on automation, configuration management and OpenStack have my interest right now:

• Mirantis
• MidoKura
• SaltStack
• Docker
• PLUMgrid

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 vFriends and to meet some new ones!

Be sure to find me while at the show, I love meeting new people and reconnecting with old vFriends, so be sure to keep an eye out on Twitter for my live tweets.