It’s that time of year again – VMworld cometh! As with 2014 and 2015, I wanted to highlight the sessions where I’ll be presenting so that you’d have an opportunity to either slot them into your schedule or remind yourself to watch them later. However, there’s a few changes coming.

For the past two years I’ve been really stoked to hit the VMworld Top 10 Sessions list due to the work I’ve done with Jason Nash to construct content for the VDS Deep Dive session. Sadly, we aren’t doing that session again this year (I’m doubtful if Jason is even attending). I believe someone else has picked up the session, so the torch has been passed!

Instead, I’m shifting my focus towards content that is automation-centric to better reflect the efforts I’ve been spending on PowerShell, continuous integration, and data center automation. Every session listed below is going to have a heavy focus on live demonstrations and prescriptive solutions rather than being “preachy” about the need to automate without any specifics on how. Additionally, I’m going to dish out some Rubrik amazement in a few technical-focused sponsored sessions! 🙂

Session List

Note: The scheduler builder opens on July 19th. I’ll update with the dates and times when they are finalized. I intend to offer all sessions at both the US and Europe conferences.

INF8036: Enforcing a vSphere Cluster Design with PowerCLI Automation

Co-Presenter: Duncan Epping – Chief Technologist, VMware

The amount of vSphere data center, cluster, storage, and network options available to an administrator are massive. Even specific features such as High Availability (HA) and the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) have a ton of different configuration settings provided to meet the needs of your specific virtualized workloads. It can be a challenge, however, to audit the settings and best understand why they were set in the first place – especially as other administrators join and leave your organization!

Join VMware’s Duncan Epping, author of the infamous Cluster Deep Dive series, along with Rubrik’s Chris Wahl, PowerShell MVP and author of Networking for VMware Administrators, as they take a look at how to abstract vSphere configuration settings into declarative configuration files. Learn how to audit, track, and enforce consistent settings – with notes and comments – to ensure the availability and standardization of your vSphere environment.

• Key Takeaway #1: Gain insights into how cluster configuration settings can be used for your vSphere environment
• Key Takeaway #2: Learn how to pull, inspect, and log any drift in your cluster configuration design versus reality
• Key Takeaway #3: See how automation can be leveraged to remediate drift in the declarative configuration using freely available projects

INF8038: Getting Started with PowerShell and PowerCLI for your VMware Environment

Co-Presenter: Kyle Ruddy – Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, VMware

VMware’s PowerCLI Module is one of the most complete, mature, and widely adopted extensions to the PowerShell framework. It includes a plethora of functions that abstract the vSphere API down to simple and powerful cmdlets for operating your vSphere environment. For those new to the concepts of scripting and automation, getting your feet wet into PowerCLI can be daunting. After all, no one wants to accidentally explode their data center with a few errant keystrokes!

Join VMware’s Kyle Ruddy, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, along with Rubrik’s Chris Wahl, Microsoft PowerShell MVP, as they arm you for success with PowerShell and PowerCLI. You’ll learn how modules, snappins, functions, and scripts relate to one another, how to install and configure your PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment, set up a profile, and begin writing PowerCLI scripts using safe, non-destructive starter code. We’ll also dive into exploring objects, extension data, and perform simple logic statements.

• Key Takeaway #1: Become comfortable and knowledgeable with common PowerShell scripting terms and file types
• Key Takeaway #2: Learn how to pick out safe, non-destructive cmdlets to pull data from your vSphere environment without risk of harming the cluster
• Key Takeaway #3: Understand how logic statements can be used to perform common tasks to simplify your daily operations

MGT8714-SPO: Creating Automated Self-Service Data Protection with Rubrik and vRealize Automation

Co-Presenter: Eric Shanks – Senior Solutions Architect, AHEAD

Many organizations have enjoyed the benefits from building a Software-Defined Data Center with VMware’s vRealize Automation solution. It offers an end-to-end cloud management stack for virtualized workloads that want to take advantage of on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Data protection, however, has long since lagged behind due to its legacy architecture and lack of a robust, RESTful API.

In this session, join Eric Shanks, Senior Solutions Architect at AHEAD, and Chris Wahl, Technical Evangelist at Rubrik, as they dive deep into how you can expose policy-driven data protection through PowerShell, vRealize Orchestrator, and vRealize Automation. We’ll show you how to make REST calls through simple and powerful workflows and on-demand scripts. Experience a series of technical demos that showcase how to seamlessly integrate backups, change management, and incident management solutions with your lifecycle management processes.

• Key Takeaway #1 : Get a technical view of how RESTful APIs work and how they form a “glue” for infrastructure operations.
• Key Takeaway #2: Learn how to use PowerShell and vRealize Orchestrator to automate your data protection workflows against SLA requirements
• Key Takeaway #3: Become versed on how to expose protection and recovery functions into vRealize Automation’s self-service portal

STO8718-SPO: Building Next-Gen Data Protection for VMware Environments with Rubrik

Co-Presenter: Chris Gurley – Senior Field Engineer, Rubrik

Imagine a data protection solution that uses a scale-out, shared-nothing architecture that was driven by simple and powerful policies instead of mundane and frustrating backup jobs. A solution that is smart enough to analyze your VMware clusters and workloads, automatically provide protection without having to be told what to do, and leverages a global search engine to find and restore data no matter where it lives.

Join the technical experts from Rubrik, a Converged Data Management solution, for an introduction achieving granular, SLA driven RPOs; near-zero RTO using restores that don’t require hydration; along with finding and restoring data using a global search in one infinitely scalable fabric that can archive to object, file, and cloud storage.

• Key Takeaway #1: Learn how Converged Data Management fits into a next-generation VMware environment
• Key Takeaway #2: Understand how declarative, SLA-driven policies can be associated with your workloads to avoid the headache of manual, imperative backup jobs
• Key Takeaway #3: See how a backup solution can provide a near-zero RTO using a flash-fueled recovery system to get your VMs back online in seconds