VMworld 2013 - Public Session Voting

The last few weeks have flown by for me. After returning from Japan to welcome warm weather here in North Carolina, now it would also seem the conference season is in full-swing! (creeps up on us every year).

A couple weeks ago, NetApp submitted abstracts for VMworld "Call for Papers". Now the abstracts have been released for public session voting. I have two sessions in the mix this year:

Session 5400 will be lead by Chris Gebhardt, my colleague on the VMware TME team. I will co-present with him on the Horizon Workspace integrations with NetApp. Here is the abstract:

Horizon View Virtual desktop deployments have traditionally been the most difficult workloads for storage. In this session attendees will learn how seemingly insignificant design decisions can have a great impact on end-user experience and solution scalability. Attendees will learn how VMware Horizon View & Workspace storage integrations can help customers reduce the size, cost, and complexity of VMware Horizon environments. We will demonstrate how desktop administrators can take advantage of these technology integrations without changing their existing desktop management workflows. We will also cover common storage pitfalls, and how to avoid them; proper solution analysis, architecture and sizing, and design decisions.

Session 5501 will be lead by Mac Binesh, Director of Horizon Performance at VMware, with me as co-presenter. The abstract for that session is as follows: 

This session will feature a technical deep dive into the architecture, deployment topologies and best practices for Horizon Workspace, from software to storage. Attendees will gain a better understanding of ways to deploy for best performance, data protection, efficiency and security. Attend this session to get a better understanding of the EUC solution and it's enterprise file sharing capabilities as the preferred solution in the industry.

Go out there and vote today... let your voice be heard. See you all at VMworld!

vBeers - Tokyo

I am in town for the first time in over a year. That makes it the
perfect excuse to do a vBeers! Please join me at a great place for
food and drink... Nakameguro Taproom. We'll get things started at 7PM
and go till the beer runs out (just kidding) ;) Hope to see you there
for good beer and even better virtualization, cloud computing and
storage conversation!

Location: Nakameguro Taproom
Address: Nakameguro GT Plaza C-Block 2F, 2-1-3 Kamimeguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo
Date: 4/4/13
Time: 7-10PM

Tokyo Adventure

My family and I are headed to Tokyo tomorrow. It's our first visit as a family since moving to the Carolinas in 2011. While they will be enjoying family time, I will be working remotely. I plan to meet with my colleagues at NetApp Japan and with our partner VMware to see how we can collaborate more globally with each other. We have a lot of cool things in the works in the area of technical marketing that I hope we can translate to the global market.

In addition, I'll be meeting with customers regarding their plans around virtualization & cloud computing and NetApp. We hope to gain insight into what works and what needs improvement as we move forward in the cloud computing space. It will be interesting to get feedback from that region on our progress.

Finally, I'll be planning a vBeers in Tokyo for sometime in the next couple weeks. I'll post an invite on the vBeers.org website shortly. If you are in the area and new to virtualization or a veteran technologist, please come. It should be a great chance for networking and like-minded industry conversation.

Hope to see you there!

Top Virtualization Blogs - #33

I am very happy to announce that the vSamurai blog has improved from #38 to #39 on the list of top virtualization bloggers! I am grateful to all who voted and humbled by the response to my content here.

I would like to give a shout out to John Troyer, David Davis, Simon Seagrave and especially Eric Siebert for announcing the list via the latest vChat. Unfortunately, I didn't crack the top 25, as did my colleagues Vaughn Stewart and Nick Howell, but hopefully I'll continue to move up the list by delivering better and more valuable content.

I have been hosting an RSS feed of the top 50 bloggers on the right sidebar of my site for a while now. Continue to look for the latest posts from the top 50 bloggers there. It will be updated with the current list once Eric posts the update to his vLaunchpad page.

Thanks for reading!

PEX Highlights

This was my 2nd straight year attending VMware Partner Exchange (PEX). Last year, this conference was the first I attended after joining NetApp, late in 2011. At that conference, I presented in the NetApp partner "boot camp", but this year, I had the privilege to participate in a "breakout session", co-presenting with VMware on Horizon Workspace & NetApp. 

The session was well attended and we provided some detailed information about system requirements, storage scenarios, and other useful information about implementing Horizon Workspace on NetApp as well as other reference architectures.

Here is a Speaker Deck of my presentation entitled: Sharing Enterprise Files Safely and Efficiently:

In addition to the session, I worked the NetApp booth where my colleagues and I had great conversations with partners and VMware alike. We discussed lots of ideas regarding how to better collaborate with VMware in the future as well as ways to spread the word about Clustered Data ONTAP.

Finally, the parties provided an informal atmosphere for furthering relationships with folks that I already know as well as developing relationships with new folks. At the vExpert/VCDX party, me and my colleague also had an opportunity to chat with Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, for a few minutes about NetApp and VMware's partnership and the great things coming on the horizon.

The environment at PEX is very different from VMworld. It gives partners the ability to talk with our partners and VMware on a more personal level; something that's very difficult to do at VMworld. It was great to participate again this year. It serves as a great way to kick-off the new year's conference season and the content that I will present throughout the year builds off this show. 

Now we look forward to VMworld, Insight, and beyond!