Folks,
We are extremely excited about our plans for VMworld Hands on Labs 2013 and wanted to give you a preview of what to expect. This year we will be in the Moscone South Esplanade Ball Room with over 45,000 Square Feet of space dedicated to Hands on Labs.
New Content for VMworld 2013
We will have tons of new labs around fresh topics for VMworld 2013 – with over 3,690 minutes of lab content (2.5 days @ 24 hours a day)
– Software Defined Data Center
- vSphere, Networking, Storage, Performance
– End User Computing
- VMware Horizon View, Workspace,
– Hybrid Cloud
- Explore VMware’s new Hybrid Cloud Service in a virtual lab.
(We will be posting a link to our lab descriptions / details shortly)
New way of looking at Labs – Lab Topics and Modules
This year we are introducing the concept of Lab Topics and Lab Modules. The goal here is to provide more of a structured learning experience and help make finding labs content as easy as possible – This effort was brought to us by Andrew Hald who has worked on this for the past year – a huge thanks.
What is a Lab Topic?
Lab topics are very much like a book on a specific subject – so, for example, if you are interested in networking we will have a Lab Topic on VMware’s latest networking solutions.
What is a Lab Module?
A lab Module is very much like a Chapter in a book or Lab Topic. We have a wide range of modules in each topic. Some will be beginner level and some more advanced.
Here is a breakdown of our lab content.
32 Lab Topics
– Total Modules – 101
– Hybrid Cloud – 14
– Mobility – 19
– Partner – 7
– Software Defined Data Center – 61
– 25 VMware Use Case and Feature Labs
– 62 Lightning Lab Modules (15 or 30 min)
– 39 Full-length Lab Modules (45 or 60 minutes)
We are also very proud to have our Partner participate in creation of labs.
- NetApp
- Cisco
- Infoblox
- IBM
- EMC
- Puppet Labs
- Hytrust
- Catbird
- LogRhythm
Meet your VMware Product Experts
We get tons of feedback on how much our attendees enjoy meeting our product experts – we heard you loud and clear and are bringing in over 290 engineers from around the world to help make your lab experience a superb one. This will be an excellent opportunity to meet the engineers that put together and support your labs. As an attendee,you will gain insight and learn best practices when using our products and solutions. This is a great opportunity to come down and meet our product experts in one massive 45,000 S/F room. A huge thanks to Chris Romano for putting this massive effort together – it’s not an easy job.
Meet Sachin Sharma VMware Horizon Product Expert who will be on site to help.
VMware Hands on Labs Library – Workshops
We will be running actual Hands on Workshops during the event. The workshop topics cover Cloud Infrastructure, Hybrid Cloud and End User Computing. Attendees will be able to interact with the VMware engineering teams that put the labs together and walk through the labs – there will be plenty of time for questions and answers during each session. These sessions will be BYOD so do plan on bringing your laptop. These workshops will be in the main room Esplanade Moscone South – seating will be limited (20 max) and sessions will run 60 minutes in length.
VMworld Hands on Labs Hot Spots
We wanted to really defy convention and bring labs closer to you. This is a new concept for us with the idea that attendees will be able to take our labs closer to their sessions and locations. Product experts will support our VMworld Hands-on Labs Hotspots and we will also have our Chat Support enabled so you can have access to our broader team. Please do plan on bringing your own laptop and be sure to give a huge thanks to Annie Y. for bringing this to you. Hotspot locations will be at the Marriott Lobby, Moscone North, and Moscone West second floor. HotSpot hours will be the same as the regular HOL main room times.
Important: Supported Devices for BYOD
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) VMworld Hands on Labs Supported Browsers:
- Firefox version 22 +
- Chrome 28 +
- Safari 6+
- iPad tablets are supported for viewing the lab manuals only (Split Screen Feature)
About our infrastructure and applications
Project NEE
We will be taking Project Nee portal through its paces at VMworld. Project Nee is an in-house built application created by Mike D and Curtis P. who will be on site to answer any questions and maybe we can talk them into doing a Hands on Labs Workshop for us. To give you some sense of Project NEE’s massive scalability – since November 2012 we have delivered over 1.3 Million Lab Minutes Online! Project NEE is the #awesomesauce. The R&D team will also be at the VMware Technology Innovation Center if would like to chat with them during VMworld. To learn more about ProjectNEE visit http://labs.vmware.com/nee/
Infrastructure / Data Centers
The vAPP (VPOD) Architecture / Strategy
It always starts with the architecture. Bill C., Joey D. and Doug B. have done a tremendous job of putting together the architecture for our 2013 Hands-on Labs. This is a critical effort as our labs will be served up worldwide and have to go through massive torture both during and after VMworld. The toughest part of building a robust architecture is also keeping our VPODs lean and mean – this is not only a technical challenge but also a skill in negotiating with our product teams and saying no.
Quick overview of what our total vPODs look like (pretty amazing considering the amount of content these will generate)
- 271 layer 1 VMs
- 413 vCPUs
- 804 GB RAM
- 6.6 TB configured storage
Our Data Centers
We have two major datacenters providing the workload for our event. We are planning on 550 concurrent seats of capacity. Our primary data center is in Las Vegas / Switch. Our secondary data center is out of Wenatchee, Washington.
We have standardized for VMworld 2013 on Cisco UCS Blades, and for storage we are using EMC VNX 7500 and EMC XTremIO arrays. To give you a sense of capacity we are going to be using over 80TB of RAM, 2000 Cores of compute and 80 TB of super fast storage. Our Data Centers are run by our top notch team of Architects from our OneCloud Team who are working extremely long weekends to make sure our capacity is ready for you. A big shout out to Patrick N, Brian M. Joel K. and the rest of the team for making this happen.
About our Scale Testing
HOL scale testing was driven out of the need to scale for massive spikes and ensure our attendees have a superb user experience. Joshua S. is heading up our efforts we have successfully run our Hands on Labs service at 890 concurrent users. This is probably more than we will use at VMworld, but its always fun to plan for extra head room.
The Team
It goes without saying – all of this could not have happened without our team dedicated to making this a superb experience for you. A huge thanks to our newly-minted Program Manager Jeannette B who tirelessly keeps us going in the right direction and to the great folks in Corporate Event Marketing who make this an incredible experience for us.
Massive effort put together to bring you the very best in content.
Tons more to talk about but would not want to ruin the surprises we have planned for our attendees… be sure to stop by and say hello to our team.
