VMworld 2016 Preview: Recommended Sessions

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The first full, official day of VMware Explore. I managed to attend a few sessions, as well as the traditional Welcome Reception and a couple after-hours events. In between I met folks both familiar and new. That's what a conference like this is abou...
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Welcome to the VMware Explore US 2022 General Session live blog! General Session Only one general session this year, let's see what's up! Note: To view the live blog you need to read this post on https://teebeedee.org. If you read it some other way, ...
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"See you next year San Francisco!" That's how my last post on this blog ended. It was August 2019. Simpler times. Needless to say I didn't see San Francisco in 2020. Or 2021. Two Gather(ings), Apart VMworld was held completely online those years. It ...
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The bittersweet last day of VMworld. This year I'm doing something a little different and attending VMware's Future:NET. Future:NET is a sister conference to VMworld that focuses on networking. The day was broken down into sessions that alternated be...

Wednesday at VMworld. Full out sessions, last day of the Solutions Exchange. Let's check in. Swing and a Miss I had a breakout session booked early in the morning this morning. Early enough that I had to skip breakfast to get to it. No problem, I tho...

Here are my top five recommended sessions, if there are any stragglers still looking to round out their VMworld schedule. These are sessions that I'm most looking forward to, in no particular order.
Pete Flecha and Patrick Dirks dig into VVOLS. I've had my eye on Virtual Volumes for a few years, since I attended a session at VMworld 2014. Now that VVOLS has had time to mature and forces have aligned where I work, I'm hoping to put VVOLS into practice sooner than later. I'm looking for this session to bring me up to speed on what the current generation of Virtual Volumes is up to as well as polish up my current understanding.
Continuing in the vein of the technical deep dive, this session's brought to you by Duncan Epping and John Nicholson and follows an "I/O" through the VSAN solution. Expect to get right into the low-level VSAN details.
The concept of this sessions sound like it'll be interesting. Right this way my little I/O… BLAM! de-duped! SPLAT! compressed! Muwahaha! Ahem. Uh, at least that how I hope the sessions goes. With Batman '66 style Bat-Fight captions and all.
Chris Wahl and Duncan Epping take us through the journey of defining our vSphere Clusters via PowerShell declarative configuration files. Learn to use PowerCLI to bend your clusters to your will. Auditing, tracking and enforcing consistent settings as you go. Basically by the time the sessions ends, you should be a wizard.
As an architect myself, I'd be remiss if I didn't include an architecture session. Daemon Behr presents a deep dive into how risk affects infrastructure design. Following VCDX methodology to identify criticality, probability and likelihood of success or failure of a particular design. If these sorts of things keep you up at night, this session's for you.
Not a lot of information about this feature yet, but the security nerd in me is curious. Mike Foley and Salil Suri introduce us to this Technology Preview as we get a glimpse at encryption for virtual disks and vMotion. Encrypt all the things!
For the past couple years the fine folks at #VMunderground have put on Opening Acts, a series of panel discussions. The volunteer panelists will cover a variety of topics of interest to the virtualization community: career advice, DevOps, automation, storage, networking, etc. Hosted free, thanks to sponsor support, you can catch these sessions on the Saturday preceding VMworld. Don't forget to register. For a few dollars you can also have a delicious lunch served up by the vBrisket crew.
Hopefully this list provides you with some options to consider, if you have any room left on your VMworld dance card. Regardless, there are plenty of quality sessions as well as other venues and activities to occupy your time at VMworld 2016. While I'll strive to hit these sessions (sometimes "stuff" just happens at VMworld) if you attend them as well and spot me, stop and say hi!