As VMworld season approaches, and the VMworld catalog is live, you may have some questions. You may ask yourself “Where do I start with so much material”? And you may ask yourself “Who’s session should I attend?” And you may wonder “How do I get into that party?” And you may ask yourself “Where can I get some water?”

The answers? Same as it ever was, you could start by browsing through the VMworld catalog, but that can be daunting, especially if this is your first rodeo.
As for the water, it is at the little market just before the conference hall; the parties, well good luck on that; but the content, Jack Handey can get you started.

As is the norm with VMworld, there’s a myriad of information; What’s New, Deep Dives, How-Tos, Meet the Experts and the Solutions Exchange to name a few. I’ve compiled a small list of thought-provoking sessions with industry leaders from the Storage and Availability Business Unit you should consider. Depending on your needs, there’s undoubtedly something on this list that will help you in your day to day operations and hopefully save you time in your job.

vSAN

vSAN Encryption Deep Dive [HCI2041BU]

Key management servers (KMS), VMware vCenter, VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN. Each of these play an important part of vSAN encryption. What are the KMS requirements, the host requirements, and so on? How is vSAN encryption set up and managed? How do normal tasks change (or do they)? Each of these items will be covered at length, so you can become a vSAN Encryption SME.

SPEAKERS
Dave Morera, Solutions Architect, VMware
Jase McCarty, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Level: 300

The vSAN I/O Path Deconstructed: A Deep Dive into the Internals of vSAN [HCI1473BU]

VMware vSAN manages I/O and places data in a much different way than traditional storage systems. Learn about the internals of vSAN, and how it handles data placement decisions, data rebuilding, performance, and integrity. You will find out how data moved from one host to another, and why. This session shares insight into the reasons behind the vSAN architecture, and how it provides data services to your environment.

SPEAKERS
John Nicholson, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Pete Koehler, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Level: 300

vSAN Data Placement and Availability [HCI1272BU]

Application uptime and resilience to failure are key factors with any hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) storage solution. It is important to understand an HCI platform’s ability to recover from issues such as drive, host, and even entire site failures. This session will focus specifically on how VMware vSAN distributes data across drives and hosts to ensure availability. You will get a quick explanation of how vSAN stores virtual machine objects such as virtual disks, as well as a look at storage policy-based management, which is the primary method for managing vSAN objects. Find out about RAID-1 mirroring and RAID-5/6 erasure coding and how these failure protection methods affect data placement. You will also get details on how vSAN fault domains and stretched clusters enhance virtual machine uptime.

SPEAKERS
Jeff Hunter, Group Manager – vSAN Technical Marketing, VMware
Pete Flecha, Sr Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Level: 300

Office of the CTO

The Power of Storage Policy-Based Management [HCI1270BU]

The world of software-defined storage moves at a rapid pace, and VMware is one of the biggest enablers. In this session, Cormac and Duncan will guide you through the world of software-defined storage initiatives at VMware and provide a primer to VMware vSAN, VMware Virtual Volumes, persistent cloud-native storage options (Project Hatchway), the VMware vSphere APIs for I/O filtering, and the binding factor in these cases: storage policy-based management. Be warned: We will bring demos!

SPEAKERS
Cormac Hogan, Director and Chief Technologist, VMware
Duncan Epping, Chief Technologist, VMware
Level: 300

Optimizing vSAN for Performance [HCI1246BU]

The VMware vSAN team gets many questions on performance. For example, does adding a second disk group improve performance? Does adding a stripe width to an object make things faster? Does increasing the MTU size matter? Does mixing SAS and SATA make a difference? Join this session for answers to these sorts of questions. Paudie and Cormac will discuss the results of various performance tests they initiated in their labs to reach these conclusions. You will learn about the benchmark tool of choice, HCIBench, as well as all the different nuances that can make a difference to your benchmarking results.

SPEAKERS
Cormac Hogan, Director and Chief Technologist, VMware
Paudie ORiordan, Staff Engineer, VMware
Level: 300

vRealize Operations

New Ways to Use vRealize Operations and Log Insight for vSAN Environments [HCI1477BU]

This session will give you practical examples of how VMware vSAN administrators can use the infrastructure analytics capabilities of VMware vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight to help make smarter operational and design decisions about their environment. Learn how the integration abilities of vSAN with the vRealize product suite provides an unprecedented level of visibility into the usage, health, and well-being of the vSAN environment.

SPEAKERS
Myles Gray, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Pete Koehler, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Level: 300

vSphere Core Storage

Core Storage Best Practices [VIN2416BU]

With all the different storage arrays and connectivity protocols available today, knowing best practices can help operational efficiency and ensure resilient operations. VMware’s storage global support service has reported some of the common service calls they receive. In this session, you will learn about some of the common mistakes made when setting up storage arrays. Find out the most common and most valuable configurations to maximize the value of your array and VMware vSphere.

SPEAKERS
Jason Massae, Technical Marketing Architect, Core Storage, VMware
Cody Hosterman, Technical Director, Pure Storage
Level: 200

Better Storage Utilization with Space Reclamation/UNMAP [HCI3331BU]

Most VMware vSphere customers use external storage systems in their deployments. Are you using the best practices around storage reclamation and getting most out of your all-Flash and traditional storage systems? Learn about VMware’s journey of providing UNMAP capability in various vSphere releases and how to maximize your storage utilization.

SPEAKERS
Shashank Rajvanshi, Sr. Product Line Manager, VMware
Level: 200

Site Recovery Manager

Architecting VMware Site Recovery Manager to Meet Your DR Goals [HCI1059BU]

You have a variety of options available when deciding how to architect your VMware Site Recovery Manager deployment. Optimal configuration of Site Recovery Manager depends on whether you are prioritizing speed of recovery or want fine-grained control of your disaster recovery plans. This session, which includes demos, covers the organization of protection groups and recovery plans, supported Site Recovery Manager topologies, and specific suggestions for improving virtual machine recovery time performance. If you are interested in making the most of your Site Recovery Manager deployment to meet your business’s disaster recovery needs, and you want to know how to get the most from the latest Site Recovery Manager capabilities, this is the session for you.

SPEAKERS
GS Khalsa, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Ken Werneburg, Group Manager, Storage and Availability Technical Marketing, VMware
Level: 300

VMC AWS

Storage in VMware Cloud on AWS [HYP2379BU]

VMware Cloud on AWS is redefining the rules around hybrid cloud. In this session, discover how VMware vSAN storage serves as a foundation for this groundbreaking service that enables customer choice and flexibility as they move to a VMware Cloud-based software-defined data center. Learn how you can run your applications both in your data center and in an AWS cloud with the same operational consistency, as well as how to enable relentless availability with vSAN Stretched Cluster for multi-AZ resiliency. You will learn about VMware’s storage vision for VMware Cloud, and the burgeoning set of services that will offer unprecedented integration for hybrid cloud storage.

SPEAKERS
Glenn Sizemore, Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Venkat Kolli, Director Product Management, VMware
Level: 200

Virtual Volumes (vVols)

Virtual Volumes Deep Dive [HCI2810BU]

VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) is a framework developed by VMware and partners in the storage industry to transform the way VMs are stored by enabling VM-awareness on arrays. Virtual Volumes eliminate static storage constraints by removing LUNs, filesystems, and volumes, and giving the array direct visibility and understanding of the VM objects they store. This enables a flexible policy-based approach to storing and managing VMs without traditional concerns about capability and capacity management bounded by LUNs on the physical infrastructure. Learn about this revolutionary change in the way storage is delivered to VMware environments, and how this industry-wide initiative will allow you an efficient and intelligent new way to use your storage arrays and control and orchestrate per-VM replication.

SPEAKERS
Patrick Dirks, Staff Engineer, VMware
Pete Flecha, Sr Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Level: 300

Leveraging vSphere Virtual Volumes to Simplify Storage Management [HCI2550PU]

Whether you are just thinking about how to leverage VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes or have been using them for a while, come hear directly from VMware customers on how they successfully deployed vSphere Virtual Volumes from proof of concept through production, deployment, and beyond. Panelists will present and answer questions on how they deployed vSphere Virtual Volumes in their enterprises. The session will cover why they chose vSphere Virtual Volumes, deployment strategies, and best practices for success.

SPEAKERS
Bryan Young, Group Product Manager, VMware
Cody Hosterman, Technical Director, Pure Storage
Paul Morrissey, Director of Product Management, Hitachi Vantara
Level: 200

VMworld Catalog Areas of Focus

AWS
SPBM
Storage
vSAN
vRealize
vVols

Hopefully, this gets you started and help to build your schedule. Good luck and see you at VMworld!