VMworld 2015 Preview: Top 5 Sessions

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Dee Abson
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3 min read

VMworld 2015 US is almost upon us, and many of you attendees likely have your schedules pretty well sorted by now. Just in case you're looking for a few extra sessions to squeeze in, here are my Top 5 most anticipated sessions this year (in no particular order).

1. STO4525 - Architecting Disaster Recovery of Tier 1 Applications (SAP, Oracle, SQL & Exchange) using Site Recovery Manager and vSphere 6

  • Kannan Mani - Staff Solutions Architect – Data Platforms, VMware
  • GS Khalsa - Senior Technical Marketing Manager, VMware

Most enterprises already take great care to virtualize Tier 1 applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SAP and Oracle Database. I'm looking for this session to show the architectures available for designing DR for these apps. Expect to see VMware Site Recovery Manager and maybe some vSphere Replication. The session brief also mentions native application replication, presumably replication Microsoft, SAP and Oracle bring to the table for their respective products.

2. MGT4801 - Using Configuration Management Tools (Puppet, Chef, Ansible Etc.) with VMware Automation

  • Pradnesh Patil - Product Manager, VMware

Containers may be getting a lot of attention these days, but config management still has a lot of rows to sow in companies around the world. The brief suggests that the audience will be told how vRealize Automation can be integrated with your pick of popular configuration management tool (or tools) to deploy, manage and maintain your VMs. I'll be looking for approaches and options that can be leveraged on-premises in a vSphere or vCloud environment, with some vCloud Air options for information's sake.

3. INF5116 - A Practical Introduction to DevOps for VMware Administrators

  • Josh Atwell - Cloud Architect, SolidFire
  • Trevor Roberts Jr - Senior Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
  • Chris Sexsmith - Sr Manager of Field Enablement, Cloud-Native Apps, VMware
  • Egle Sigler - Principal Architect, Rackspace
  • Yvo van Doorn - Manager, Solution Architects, Chef Software

With a panel like this expect as comprehensive and interesting a discussion on DevOps (with a VMware context) as you can pack into an hour. Also, live demos!

4. STO6327-SPO - The vExpert Storage Game Show

  • Vaughn Stewart - Chief Strategist, Pure Storage

Vaughn's hosting a lively group of contestants for this year's vExpert Storage Game Show. Expect to see folks such as Howard Marks of DeepStorage, Dr. J Metz from Cisco, Rawlinson (@PunchingClouds) Rivera of VSAN & VVOL fame, VMTurbo's Eric (@discoposse) Wright, and Chris (@ChrisWahl) Wahl of Rubrik. I was able to attend last year's session where fellow vExpert Dan McGee joined Team VMware and went home with the Golden Duncan!

5. SDDC4595 - Ask the Expert Industry Titans

  • Kit Colbert - VP & CTO, Cloud-Native Apps, VMware
  • Rick Scherer - Field CTO, EMC
  • Chad Sakac - President, Global Systems Engineering, EMC
  • Vaughn Stewart - Chief Strategist, Pure Storage
  • Nicholas Weaver - Director, SDI-X, Intel Corporation

Another promising panel discussion, this session promises that there are "no powerpoints, no sales pitches and no rules" and that "no questions are off limits". If the audience pitches some questions that end up testing those claims, it should be very interesting indeed!

Enjoy the Show!

Regardless of which sessions you're attending at VMworld this year, I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself and learn loads of new things. As always, if you see me out and about at the conference, stop and say hi! Featured image photo by Cydcor [](creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 "Attribution License")