The Cisco Live conference has once again landed in a glorious splash of unicorns and bacon, this time at the Orange County Convention Center in sunny Orlando, Florida. Above the din of networking chats and other fun, geeky brouhaha that will be occurring, I will be floating around as a Roving Reporter, answering only to the one and only Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja)! This is my first time attending Cisco Live, so I will be breaking into new ground with a great group of folks – the Cisco Live US Tweeps list published by the Cisco Data Center crew – who you should absolutely keep tabs with, regardless of your location (at the event or abroad). I also read, and advice reading, this awesome post on “Cisco Live Tips” by Bob McCouche over at Herding Packets.
So, what sort of exciting events will be going on throughout the week? I’m glad you asked, because otherwise this would be a very short post. Here’s a list of interesting things that I will be covering.
Cisco Live US Charity Run
The second annual “unofficial” Cisco Live US charity 5K is a great way to show your support for the Wounded Warrior Project. This is an awesome way to show your support for a great cause with your fellow conference geeks. I first found out about this event when reading a tweet asking if you are “faster than an alligator” as detailed in this post.
The event kicks off on Wednesday morning at 8:00 AM EDT. Click here for event details.
The Packet Pushers Podcast
My heroes of layers 1 through 7, the infamous Packet Pushers crew (@PacketPushers), will be at the conference doing all of their amazing interviews and podcasts during the show. If you’ve not yet met Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks, you might even see them throughout the day or at various social events. I’ll also be sitting along with these folks in their mobile studio, along with others, at various events throughout the week, and hopefully can provide some interesting tid bits as various breaking news and announcements hit the wire.
Hint: mind blowing stuff is planned
Data Center Sessions
I do a fair bit of work with Cisco UCS and have picked out a number of interesting sessions that focus on providing the compute side of a Cisco powered data center, including orchestration with Cloupia. Here’s a good list of sessions to be on the look out for – if you can’t make them in person, make sure to check them out at Cisco Live 365 once the videos are posted.
[table]Date,Time,Name,Details
Monday,1:00PM – 3:00PM,BRKCOM-2003,UCS Networking – Deep Dive
Tuesday,8:00AM – 9:00AM,PSODCT-1004,Cisco Cloupia
Tuesday,3:00PM – 4:30PM,BRKVIR-2019,Hypervisors networking: best practices for interconnecting with Cisco Switches
Wednesday,8:00AM – 9:30 AM,BRKDCT-2370,Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC)
Wednesday,1:30PM – 3:30PM,BRKCOM-2007,UCS SAN Deployment Models and Best Practices
Wednesday,4:00PM – 6:00PM,BRKCOM-3002,UCS Performance Troubleshooting
Thursday,12:30PM – 2:00PM,BRKCOM-2014,Multi-UCS Management with UCS Central
Thursday,4:00PM – 6:00PM,BRKCOM-3004,VM-FEX and SR-IOV in 2.1(1) release
[/table]
In addition, Amy Lewis has written up an amazing post (which of course has the word Waffles in it) on all the various Data Center Theater Presentations that will be running at the event. Definitely work a look!
The vBrownBag Crew
My good friends and fellow vExperts Josh Atwell and Gurusimran Khalsa (we all call him GS) will be representing the vBrownBag podcast on site, and I’ve promised to sit down with them to go over a breaking announcement that I’ve been saving up! I would imagine that they’ll have some great technical content discussions on site – if you’ve not heard of the podcast before, it’s definitely worth a glance, especially if you’re working on any of the various VMware certifications.
Tech Field Day Roundtable
Could this get more awesome? The answer is – yes! Stephen Foskett‘s rag tag bunch of delegates will be on site, some fresh from the recent Tech Field Day 9 stint over in Austin, Texas. Join me and the rest of the gang as we get down to the gritty nuts and bolts of various tech. This particular Roundtable is sponsored by Opengear.
So Much More!
I’ll wrap up the post here, but this is just a tip of the iceberg – things like Amy Lewis’ Engineers Unplugged, Greg Knieriemen‘s Speaking in Tech podcast, various tweet-ups, and more.
As various events kick off I will communicate them through my evil empire of social media channels. Also, keep an eyeball on my twitter handle (@ChrisWahl) for my various ad-hoc contests to win free 30-day online training cards from TrainSignal!
