It’s that time of year again – VMworld approaches! Once again, I’ll be making the hike out west to get my geek on. If you’re out there, make sure to say howdy (because I live in Austin) and snag a sticker from me. I’ll also be presenting in the sessions listed below, and I hear that Pluralsight will be hanging around NET4976 to hand out free trials and high fives.
Note that while the content catalog officially opens on June 23rd, the scheduler builder isn’t slated to open until mid July. I’ll update with the dates and times when they are finalized.
NET4976: vSphere Distributed Switch 6.0 – Technical Deep Dive (US)

Check out one of the longest running and highest rated sessions at VMworld. Jason Nash (VCDX #49, DCV and NV) and I (VCDX #104, DCV and NV) are back in the saddle again to get nerdy about the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS). The legendary Starbucks cup will be there, too.
We will begin with an overview of the new features that have been made available with version 6.0 of the VDS. We’ll then crack open the new TCP/IP stacks to show how routed vMotion is made possible, discuss designs for ephemeral ports used by critical vSphere management workloads, and finally build out a multi-tenant switch configuration using the NIOC version 3 features found in VDS 6.0. By the end of this session, participants should feel confident that they now understand how to place critical workloads (such as vCenter) on a VDS. They’ll also walk away with actionable knowledge on how to use routed vMotion with the TCP/IP stacks introduced in 6.0, along with the use of bandwidth minimums and CoS marking for demanding workloads such as multi-tenant ecosystems, container VMs, and build environments.
A solid virtual network is absolutely essential to power your journey through the software defined data center. Begin by taking advantage of the amazing features baked into the vSphere Distributed Switch.
SDDC4593: Ask the Expert vBloggers (US)
The infamous Rick Scherer at VMwareTips has pulled it off again, building a moderated panel of expert virtualization bloggers answer your questions. I’m honored to be part of the panel this year. The other panelists are titan bloggers whom I have followed for many years: Duncan Epping, Scott Lowe, and Chad Sakac.

I’m open to questions covered in my many different deep dive series, the art of blogging consistently, time management techniques, leveraging a home lab for the blog, anything about Sponge Bob, or whatever you want. 🙂
STO6287: Instant Application Recovery and DevOps Infrastructure for VMware Environments – A Technical Deep Dive
I’ll be presenting with Arvind “Nitro” Nithrakashyap, Co-Founder and CTO of Rubrik. He started his career at Oracle where he worked as a Principal Engineer in the areas of Caching, Recovery and Real Application Clusters. While at Oracle, he co-founded the Exadata storage platform. Intrigued? Here’s the saucy details:
Are you tired of managing complex backup workflows? Are you confident in providing a successful recovery in the event of a failure? Is your backup infrastructure a black hole for housing dark data? Attend this session and learn how Rubrik’s next-generation, scale-out fabric can help you eliminate backup software and the associated data management hassles, recovery uncertainty, and scalability limits.
- Introduction to Rubrik: Transform a multi-tiered backup and recovery environment into a single, feature-rich and scale-out fabric.
- Benefits for VMware Users: 15-minute setup vs. 3-month deployments, ease of use with automated workflows for protecting/managing VMs, cost savings by using public cloud for long-term data retention, and cradle-to-grave data management that transforms your backup data from an insurance policy into a powerful business asset that can accelerate DevOps.
- Technical Deep Dive: Brand new distributed file system for managing and storing versioned data, agentless architecture, scale-out deduplication across flash and hard disk in a single resource pool, REST API-driven interface, and more.
STO6327: The vExpert Storage Game Show
The vExpert Storage Game Show is an entertaining and informative showdown between two teams of vExperts and bloggers in a “Family Feud” style battle where each team must confront questions and answers provided by you, the VMware community. Any storage related topic is fair game, including all-flash arrays, VVols, SPBM, SIOC, containers, OpenStack, app & VM backup, SRM and much, much more.
The Pure Storage VMware community survey provides crowd-sourced answers to questions around real-world use cases, challenges and technology adoption – we will test the vExperts on the survey results to see how well they know their business and how clearly they can explain some of these important topics to the audience! Join us to meet some of the most widely read vExperts and bloggers in the community in what is sure to be the most talked about session of VMworld 2015.