For the last couple of years I have been fortunate enough to be able to attend VMworld. Luckily enough for me my managers see the value in me attending VMworld. I know a lot of employers think employees want to attend for the after parties and all that, will be drunk most of the evenings, hungover in the daytime and attending barely 10 % of the sessions you said you want to attend.
But from the first time I have attended VMworld in 2012 I have come to realize some things: The total amount of money I spend for VMworld is way less than the costs for the offical ICM course which comes in at 3600 Euros + VAT in Belgium and at the same time, I do learn way more at VMworld than I do in any official course. The only drawback is that VMWorld attendance does not give me a pass to write an exam.
Now I face my yearly struggle again: selecting the sessions I want to attend. This never has been an easy thing to do for me because there have always been too many sessions I want to attend. However this year the selection on offer is too good to be true to me. That much in fact that I have a harder time than usual to make my final selection.
Here are the sessions at the top of my wish list:
Advanced NSX Troubleshooting: Tips & Tricks for Experienced Users [NET8680]
Tim Burkard, Senior Technical Trainer, VMware, Inc.
Stephen DeBarros, Senior Technical Trainer, VMware, Inc.
The average cost of a data breach in the US is $5.8 million. Knowing how to troubleshoot key NSX features can not only improve security, but also give you more control of your networking environment. Give us an hour and we’ll give you an overview of the Command Line Interface (CLI) with detailed steps and commands you can use in your troubleshooting process. Then we’ll share six troubleshooting tips for critical areas of your NSX environment including host preparation, bootbank and boot process, ESXi Agency Manager (EAM), system events and logs, Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and controller pool.
An Architect’s Guide to Designing Risk: The VCDX Methodology [INF9048]
Daemon Behr, IT Architect, Scalar Decisions
This presentation provides an architect’s perspective of how risk affects design decisions. Following the VCDX methodology, this deep dive looks at how a large number of variables can affect the logical design of an infrastructure. Anything that is unknown or unsure can be considered a risk. The criticality and probability of those risks can determine the likelihood of success or failure. Risk management is normally under the purview of security or compliance and comes down to the architect as a set of controls, which dictates the overarching parameters for the design. This presentation argues that an architect equipped with the knowledge and tools of the risk management practice can virtually guarantee the success (or foresee failure) of any design before it has started.
An IT Architect’s Guide to the Software-Defined Data Center [SDDC8472]
Kyle Gleed, Group Manager, Software-Defined Data Center, VMware
In the face of an ever-changing IT landscape, the reality is that businesses can no longer afford for IT organizations to design and architect their compute, storage, and network solutions independent of each other. To remain relevant, IT organizations need to embrace new technologies and adopt a holistic design approach. The good news is that it may not be as difficult as you think. VMware experts have been working hard to develop a comprehensive set of design guidelines and recommendations to help you architect a modern data center based on the VMware Software-Defined Data Center architecture. We cover both physical and logical design considerations across compute, storage and network, and equip you with the skills and knowledge you need to design, architect and implement a modern private cloud that will power your business, today, tomorrow, and well into the future.
Architecting High Availability and Workload Balancing for Tier 1 Mission Critical workloads using VMware Software Defined Storage and Extended Oracle RAC [STO7552]
Sudhir Balasubramanian, Staff Solution Architect – Oracle, VMware
Palanivenkatesan Murugan, Solution Architect, VMware
Running Extended Oracle RAC on VMware Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster delivers high availability, workload balancing, seamless site maintenace, stability, resilience , performance and cost effective hardware required to meet critical business SLA’s for running mission critical workloads. VMware All Flash Virtual SAN enhances the performance of Oracle workloads tremendously. Features like Erasure Coding ,Checksum, Deduplication,Compression etc provides the much needed resiliency, protection and space efficiency for runing mission critical applications. VMware vRealize Operations Manager (vROPS) and Log-Insight can be seamlessly integrated to effectively manage and maintain Oracle workloads on VMware vsphere and Virtual SAN.
Architecting Site Recovery Manager to Meet Your Recovery Goals [STO7973]
Ivan Jordanov, Sr. Manager R&D, SRM, VMWARE, INC.
GS Khalsa, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
VMware customers have a variety of options available when deciding how to architect their Site Recovery Manager deployment. The optimal way to configure SRM depends on whether customers are prioritizing speed of recovery or want fine-grained control of their disaster recovery plans. This session will cover organization of protection groups and recovery plans, supported SRM topologies, and specific suggestions for improving VM recovery time performance. If you are interested in making the most of your SRM deployment to meet your businesses DR needs and want to know how to get the most from the latest SRM capabilities this is the session for you.
A Real World Deployment of VMware NSX in the DMZ [NET9177]
Brian Hestehave, NSX Specialist Systems Engineer, VMware
How do you best secure your DMZ in an environment critical not just to your company but to your country? How do you best leverage your existing investments in network and security? How do you adapt your existing security model to match the capabilities made possible by VMware NSX? This session covers a real-world customer deployment and attempt to answer these questions. Learn why VMware NSX was chosen to secure the DMZ along with Palo Alto Networks, and how the existing F5 Load Balancers, Cisco Nexus network, and Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance firewalls are leveraged and integrated in this setup. Get a practical guide to how to get started with microsegmentation, and learn how to build the policies—and what works and what doesn’t—from a customer who has actually tried it.
Deep Dive on pNUMA & vNUMA – Save Your SQL VMs from Certain DoomA! [VIRT8530]
Rob Girard, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer, Tintri
Shawn Meyers, Principal Architect, House of Brick Technologies
There’s more to non-uniform memory access (NUMA) than physical boundaries in your server hardware. Putting the DEEP back into Deep Dive, Rob and Shawn will use this session to deliver everything you ever wanted to know about pNUMA & vNUMA settings within VMware vSphere, Windows, & SQL Server to aid you in getting the settings right to maximize performance. In addition to an overview on NUMA, we’ll discuss some nuances of NUMA that are not commonly known, effects of memory & CPU hot-add, selecting cores vs. sockets for your VMs, default calculation behavior, performance penalties for getting it wrong, and MORE!
Deploying Security in a Brownfield Environment [SEC8348]
Wade Holmes, Sr. Technical Product Manager, VMware
Stijn Vanveerdeghem, Sr. Technical Product Manager, VMware
This session will cover how VMware NSX can be deployed in an existing data center environment to address security use cases. The focus of the session will be on operationalizing the NSX distributed firewall and service insertion, best practices for creating a distributed firewall policy, and guidelines for migrating from an existing physical firewall to NSX.
Design Horizon the Easy Way with Help from the Horizon Sizing Estimator [EUC7799]
Graeme Gordon, Senior EUC Architect, VMware
Shengbo Teng, Solution Architect, Vmware
Take the complexity and mystery out of designing a VMware Horizon environment by learning the design methodology, concepts, and how-to approach for your project. Then see how the Horizon Sizing Estimator can be your assistant and aid you in designing and sizing a Horizon environment, maintaining current best practices and assisting with key design decisions. The team that develops the Horizon Sizing Estimator will show you how to try different scenarios and different design decisions. Get a fast view of the infrastructure, servers, and storage required and approach your Horizon deployment with confidence.
Designing a Business Continuity Solution in the Cloud [HBC8298]
Simon Momber, Product Line Manager, VMware
Andy Steven, vCloud Air Solutions Architect, vmware
Enterprises globally are enthusiastically embracing hybrid cloud as a way of both reducing costs and improving the quality of service IT provides to its end customers. To achieve this, enterprises are looking to VMware vCloud Air to help them deploy a disaster recovery and business continuity solution in a hybrid cloud model. Participants in this session will leave with a deep technical understanding of how to leverage the hybrid cloud to gain benefits of geographic diversity and agile scaling for growth, while continuing to use the tools in which they have already invested. This session is based on the reference architecture developed by VMware.
Extreme Performance Series: DRS Performance Deep Dive—Bigger Clusters, Better Balancing, Lower Overhead [INF8959]
Sai Inabattini, Member of Technical Staff, vmware
Naveen Nagaraj, Director, VMware
VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler has evolved over the years to provide effective placement and load balancing for your vSphere clusters. DRS has a rich set of statistics is tracked in a cluster to help keep your workloads from running short of resources. In this talk, we will discuss the various aspects of DRS that contribute to its performance and effectiveness of its placement decisions. We will also describe the different sections in the DRS Web client interface and how they can be used to customize DRS to one’s needs and maximize performance of the cluster. Additionally, we will introduce a couple of tech preview features that further enhance the performance and effectiveness of DRS. The goal is to use real-world scenarios to show how DRS can provide the best performance for any cluster. Some of the key highlights of the DRS tech preview feature:
– Much faster virtual machine (VM) management and provisioning operations,
– Optimized resource consumption,
– Highly effective and efficient placement of VMs,
– Highly optimized distribution of load,
– Considering network load for VM placement and load balancing, and
– The ability to predict VM load to resolve contention early on.
Extreme Performance Series: Monster VM Database Performance [VIRT7598]
David Morse, Performance Engineer, VMware Inc.
Todd Muirhead, Performance Engineer, VMware
Mission-critical applications represent the last hurdle to organizations looking to migrate their data centers to the cloud. Although IT administrators realize the benefits of virtualization, they may be hesitant to virtualize applications such as databases because of their resource demands, and may even fear that the underlying hypervisor will prevent the infrastructure from meeting the SLAs of these applications. VMware vSphere, the industry’s leading hypervisor platform, has been pushing the boundaries of infrastructure resources it can manage over various releases. With its superior resource management capabilities, vSphere can easily scale horizontally to support many virtual machines (VMs) or vertically to support large VMs. vSphere 6 introduces the ability to run virtual machines with up to 128 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4TB of RAM, allowing extreme resource-hungry applications such as databases to be run in VMs. In this talk, the speakers give an overview of key vSphere features such as CPU and NUMA schedulers, and memory managers that propel monster VMs. The speakers will share their benchmark results, experience gained, and lessons learned. A deep dive into Oracle and SQL Server scalability on vSphere 6 on a large, multi-core physical host (4 CPU, 1 TB RAM) will be presented. Finally, the speakers will provide best practices to the audience for undertaking such an exercise. This talk should alleviate any hesitation to migrate resource-hungry, mission-critical database applications to a private cloud.
Extreme Performance Series: vSphere Compute and Memory [INF8089]
Seong Beom Kim, Performance Engineer, vmware
In this session, the speaker will discuss the details of compute and memory schedulers focusing on virtual machine sizing and performance. The goal is to help you make the best decisions on provisioning, understand a performance problem, and resolve it. If you want to learn specifics about ready/co-stop time, virtual NUMA, virtual socket, or large page, you don’t want to miss this advanced session.
Getting the Most out of vMotion: Architecture, Features, Performance and Debugging [INF8644]
Arunachalam Ramanathan, VMWare Inc.
Sreekanth Setty, Staff Engineer 2, VMware
There are many trends influencing today’s data center environment, including the increasing adoption of the software-defined data center, geographically dispersed multisite enterprise environments, and the continued penetration of public cloud usage. As the scope of the virtualized environment continues to grow, the ability to vMotion freely and efficiently across this expanding environment will be a crucial value proposition. Each VMware vSphere release introduces new vMotion functionality and capabilities to address the emerging technology trends and enable new use cases. vMotion in the latest vSphere release also features significant performance enhancements that leverage innovations in storage (NVMe Flash) and network (100Gb Ethernet) space, enabling extremely fast migrations suitable for private cloud deployments. In this session, join engineers from the development and performance teams to get an insider’s view of vMotion architecture, cutting-edge features, newly added capabilities, and tools for performance troubleshooting. Performance studies and best practices will be presented for some of the hot topics, including monster virtual machine migrations and long-distance migrations. Finally, take a sneak peek into the future directions for vMotion, including encrypted vMotion and migration to public clouds.
How to Deploy VMware NSX with Cisco Infrastructure [NET8364]
Phil Davis, Systems Engineer, VMware
Paul Mancuso, Technical Product Manager, VMware
Many enterprises rely on both VMware vSphere and Cisco’s Nexus and Unified Computing System (UCS) to build the foundation of their data center infrastructure. Although NSX brings advanced network automation and security capabilities to vSphere on any network infrastructure, this session will cover the NSX design considerations specific to environments using Cisco Nexus 9000 for the physical network and Cisco UCS for the vSphere compute resources. This session will also show how to run NSX while utilizing the underlying functionality of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). The session will provide a review of the most important topics from the two VMware NSX-Cisco Nexus/ACI design guides already published and add lessons learned from real deployments in the field since those guides’ publication.
How to Manage Your Platform Services Controller Like Batman [INF9119]
Blair Fritz, Senior Technical Support Engineer, VMware
Emad Younis, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer, VMware
The Platform Services Controller is an integral piece of the VMware vCenter Server infrastructure. In this session we’ll make sure your utility belt is full of the latest and greatest tools for managing your Platform Services Controller. We discuss how to manage, build, and destroy replication partnerships along with troubleshooting and best practices for managing the overall health of your Platform Services Controller. We’ll show you the tools and demonstrate what it takes to make sure you’re ready to protect your vCenter Server infrastructure when the villains attack.
Implementing Agentless AV and IPS/IDS Security Solutions with NSX [SEC8022]
Hammad Alam, Solutions Architect, VMware Inc
Shahzad Ali, Solutions Architect, VMware Inc.,
If you want to implement a comprehensive security posture and profile for your application by protecting workload with Agentless Antivirus, L2-L4 Distributed Firewall and IPS/IDS then this session is for you.
This session will introduce you with the fundamental concepts first and then will show you how to quickly adopt them in your environment. We will share our experiences and best practices from implementations in production environments. This will be shown by using TrendMicro and Palo Alto Networks integration with NSX as examples.
Managing vSphere 6.0 Deployments and Upgrades [INF9047]
Dilpreet Bindra, Sr. Director, VMware
Bo Dong, Sr. Product Line Manager, VMware
This session will cover VMware’s best practices and recommendations for installing, configuring, and upgrading your VMware vSphere infrastructure components to best fit your environment. These recommendations are given based on size, scale, and future needs. You will learn all about installing and upgrading to VMware vCenter Server. We’ll also go over architectural changes, deployment models, options for migration, and design recommendations. This session will be of interest to administrators of all levels of expertise.
Maximizing Your Remote Site Infrastructure with vSphere and Virtual SAN [INF8383]
Scott Calvet, Global SDDC/Hybrid Cloud Evangelist, VMware
Sai Gopalan, Sr Product Marketing Manager, VMware
Managing a few data centers with thousands of servers is a relatively well-understood scenario, but try managing hundreds or thousands of remote office/branch sites with tens of thousands of servers distributed across the country or around the globe. This is a common challenge that many retailers, manufacturers, and healthcare providers deal with on a regular basis. During this popular session, you’ll learn about how features of VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN combine to give you the most solid, secure, and cost-effective remote site infrastructure possible. Explore vSphere and Virtual SAN ROBO site implementation best practices for deployment, lifecycle management, configuration/compliance, and monitoring/troubleshooting. Join us for an extremely informative, exciting, and interactive session.
Multisite Networking and Security with Cross-vCenter NSX—Part 1 [NET7854R]
Humair Ahmed, Sr. Technical Product Manager – NSX, VMware
Learn how Cross-vCenter NSX (Cross-VC NSX) enables logical networking and security across multiple vCenter domains/sites and how it provides enhanced solutions for specific use cases. No longer is logical networking and security constrained to a single vCenter domain.
We’ll step through an overview of the Cross-VC NSX feature and discuss architecture, components, and deployment models. We’ll also cover design topics and demonstrate how Cross-VC NSX can be used for multi-site solutions. A demo will be shown covering some of the discussion points.
Multisite Networking and Security with Cross-vCenter NSX: Part 2 [NET7861R]
Roie Ben Hain, Senior NSX Presale Architect, VMware
Cross-VC NSX enables logical networking and security across multiple vCenter domains/sites and provides enhanced solutions for multi-site deployments. In Part 2 of this session, we’ll discuss Cross-VC NSX Security, failure/recovery scenarios, and how automation can be leveraged in Cross-VC NSX environments for specific use cases/scenarios.
We’ll walk through examples of Cross-VC NSX security. Further, we’ll step through the process of automating Failover/Recovery and take a look at how automation using different tools can be leveraged to handle the process. A demo will be shown covering some of the discussion points.
NSX Brownfield Deployment Best Practices [NET7944]
Roberto Mari, Director Technical Product Management, VMWare
This session will cover design considerations of how VMware NSX can be incrementally and seamlessly deployed in existing customer data center environments. Specifically, the session will discuss how existing physical workloads, physical services, and Infrastructure can integrate with NSX. We will describe design options for consuming third-party physical firewalls and load balancers. Specific case studies concerning data center migration, security for east-to-west traffic, and operations will be also covered in detail.
NSX Operationalization: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Your NSX Software Defined Data Center [NET8082]
Hammad Alam, Solutions Architect, VMware Inc
VMware NSX empowers today’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) to run agile clouds supporting dynamic and challenging business requirements. Designing and deploying NSX for day 1 is well understood and extensively documented. The focus of this session is to introduce the operational leads and engineers responsible for day 2 and ongoing operations to the many aspects of NSX that are specifically geared toward managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting the SDDC. NSX brings more visibility and transparency to this distributed system than traditional environments ever offered. We will show you the tools and methodologies available for various levels in your organizations, such as Level 1 support, Level 2 network operations center, Level 3 senior engineers, and Level 4 architects. We will also share operational best practices, tools, and documents used by organizations running NSX to support environments scaling to thousands of virtual machines.
NSX Security for Horizon View 7—Deep Dive [SEC7593]
Akash Dodwani, Staff System Engineer, VMware
Bruno Germain, Staff System Engineer, VMware
This updated session will familiarize security architects and operators with the security features of VMware NSX 6.2.x and how they apply to the VMware Horizon View 7 environment. We will review in detail the use of virtual networks to provide network segmentation, distributed firewall, identity firewall, and Service Composer for policy automation. We will also take a look at multi-data center scenarios. We will then apply these services to our reference architecture and illustrate the automation of policies for different groups of users of the virtual desktop infrastructure environment.
Reference Design for SDDC with NSX and vSphere: Part 1 [NET7857R]
Nimish Desai, Senior Staff Technical Product Manager, VMware
This is the first part of a two-part session covering reference design for Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) with VMware NSX. This part covers best practices and design considerations for all NSX components. It starts with best practices in defining fabric topology, VMware vSphere cluster considerations, and deployment of each control plane component (NSX Manager, VMware NSX Controller). The next session covers compute and edge cluster design best practices with VXLAN Layer 2 tunnel endpoints (VTEPs) and Virtual Disk Service. The last part covers edge cluster components and distributed routing. The session ends with design best practices with Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) with equal-cost multipath routing (ECMP). Attendees are strongly encouraged to also attend part 2 to further their understanding of the NSX use case, design toplogies, and advanced security and services features. To assure you have the necessary background in NSX, try to attend these additional sessions:
– VMware NSX—A Technical Deep Dive
– NSX for vSphere Logical Routing Deep Dive
– VMware NSX Distributed Firewall Deep Dive
Reference Design for SDDC with NSX and vSphere: Part 2 [NET7858R]
Nimish Desai, Senior Staff Technical Product Manager, VMware
This is a second part of a two-part session covering reference design for Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) with VMware NSX. The session starts with best practices with all types of deployment: small, medium, and large. It then covers the enhancement and introduction of new features and its use case available in the latest release of NSX software, such as multi-VC, universal logical networking, and multi-instance TCP/IP stack. The session further extends the topology and use case covering multitenancy, design considerations for IT automation for IT, DevOps, and multisite design strategy. The session ends with best practices for security design considerations and use case enabling virtual desktop infrastructure and end-user computing.
Securing VDI with NSX [EUC8814]
Nick Jeffries, Senior Solutions Architect, VMware
Travis Wood, Senior Solutions Architect, VMware
What is microsegemention, how do you distribute a firewall and why do I want to introspect my guests? NSX has introduced amazing new technology and a rapidly growing use case is securing VDI. The ability to move desktops to the datacenter has been a massive security benefit provided by VDI and NSX can further enhance the security through it’s identity based firewall, providing the ability to setup firewall based on a user’s identity. NSX is going to become an essential skill for EUC Architects working in secure environments. This session will identify the VDI use cases that can be enhanced by NSX including the identity firewall, guest introspection and load balancing of Horizon and provide an overview how to architect these in your environment.
Software-Defined Networking in VMware Validated Designs [SDDC7587]
Mike Brown, Senior SDDC Integration Architect, VMware
VMware Validated Designs provide customers and partners with prescriptive guidance for creating and managing their Software Designed Data Center. In VMware Validated Designs, we’ve used VMware NSX to create new constructs for management applications and utilize the latest features such as universal objects.
Software-Defined Storage at VMware Primer [STO7650]
Lee Dilworth, Principal Systems Engineer, vmware
Duncan Epping, Chief Technologist, VMware
In this session Lee and Duncan will give an overview of the different VMware Software Defined Storage initiatives and how these fit in to the broader SDDC picture. They will cover Virtual Volumes, Virtual SAN and the vSphere APIs for IO Filtering. For each of these 3 they will explain customer use cases and go over some of the basic concepts providing you with a good understanding of how to apply this to your environment.
Successful ROBO Design with vSphere & Virtual SAN [STO8880]
Jase McCarty, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Christian Rauber, Solutions Architect, VMware
VMware Virtual SAN is radically simple storage for vSphere that is taking the IT world by storm. While it can scale up very easily, it is also a very good fit for Remote Office Branch Office use cases because it provides high performance and ease of management at a great cost. If you’d like to get to know more about how to design a distributed Virtual SAN configuration for a multiple site configuration, this is the session. This session will cover topics such as host sizing, network topology, and licensing from start to finish.
The Architectural Future of Network Virtualization [NET8193R]
Bruce Davie, CTO, Networking, VMware
Network virtualization is now deployed in the data centers of hundreds of enterprises and service providers. The technology has found a wide range of applications across use cases that range from automation to microsegmentation to data center pooling and disaster recovery. So what’s next for network virtualization? This technical deep dive will take an “under the hood” look at network virtualization, examining the underlying architecture and its ongoing evolution. We will look at how the system is becoming more scalable through the use of clustering and the division of labor between the management, control, and data planes. The Data Plane Development Kit and flow caching are being used to boost data plane performance. We will discuss the evolution of the logical routing architecture, which will allow more complex routing topologies. Throughout the presentation, we’ll tie the technical material to the expanding set of use cases that network virtualization is addressing and show how we will deliver networking and security services to any workload, anywhere—across hypervisors, across multiple clouds, and to a wide range of endpoints.
The vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller Guide to the Galaxy [INF8225]
Adam Eckerle, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Emad Younis, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer, VMware
VMware vSphere 6 introduced some significant changes to the VMware vCenter Server and VMware vCenter Single Sign-On architecture. In this session, we’ll navigate these changes and discuss best practices for architecting and deploying vCenter Server and the Platform Services Controller. We’ll also answer common questions about vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller availability, how to leverage Enhanced Linked Mode, and what design considerations need to be made when architecting your vSphere 6 environments.
Virtual Switches Across Multiple Hypervisors and Functions [NET8373]
Pushkar Patil, Product Manager, VMWARE
Justin Pettit, Engineer, VMware
VMware NSX everywhere supports multiple hypervisors. This session looks into various virtual switches on hypervisors like VMware ESXi, KVM, and Hyper-V in the context of public cloud integration, hybrid clouds, and containers.
VMware Certificate Management for Mere Mortals [INF8631]
Adam Eckerle, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Ryan Johnson, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.
SSL certificates have become essential in securing access to our data centers and infrastructure. As VMware vSphere has evolved, so too have the processes, applications, and management of SSL certificates. Gone are the days of simply relying on self-signed certificates and never having to validate, renew, or really manage those certificates. In this session, we will discuss and demonstrate the new VMware Certificate Authority to show how to deploy and manage SSL certificates in vSphere 6. We’ll also discuss upgrade considerations and how to evaluate the different deployment models for the VMware Certificate Authority in order to decide which is best for the user’s organization.
VMware Validated Design for SDDC: A Technical Deep Dive [SDDC8414]
Mike Brown, Senior SDDC Integration Architect, VMware
Ryan Johnson, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.
Let’s face it: It’s not easy to design and implement a Software-Defined Data Center. Think about all the elements from compute, storage, network and security, to automation and operations. There are a thousand ways to put those elements together to make something that works. But not all of them produce the best result for your business. What you need is a blueprint. Blueprints spell out exactly which elements you need, and the precise way to put them together to create the strongest, most highly available and resilient Software-Defined Data Center solution. That’s why we’ve established the VMware Validated Design, or VVD. We’ve done the hard work of synthesizing the elements into a standardized, streamlined, system-level design that reduces deployment risk, decreases time-to-value and makes it easy to manage the day-to-day operations. In this session we will discuss and demonstrate fundamental constructs and design decisions of the VMware Validated Designs. From the physical to virtual infrastructure you’ll gain a clear understanding of basis for all the designs and how it’s used to rapidly and repeatedly deliver a ready-to-run Software-Defined Data Center.
VMware Validated Design for SDDC – Operations Architecture Technical Deepdive [SDDC8423]
Mike Brown, Senior SDDC Integration Architect, VMware
Ryan Johnson, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.
Comprehensive and system-level operations is a key aspect of a Software Defined Data Center. Once an SDDC has been deployed, its ongoing performance, health and continuity must be continually and proactively managed. For example, administrators must be notified any time problems develop, or capacity constraints are reached.
In this session, you’ll learn how the VMware Validated Design for SDDC architecture achieves streamlined data center operations at scale and across regions with distributed deployments of vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight together with data protection and day-two guidance for control over performance, capacity, configuration and availability. You’ll learn how the key operations integrations are delivered with the use of management and content packs to create comprehensive dashboards, alerts and notifications for the entire Software-Defined Data Center.
vSphere 6.x Host Resource Deep Dive [INF8430]
Frank Denneman, Chief Technologist, PernixData
Niels Hagoort, Virtualization Enthusiast, Hagoort ICT Consultancy
Today’s focus is on upper levels/overlays (Software-Defined Data Center stack, VMware NSX, and cloud), but proper host design and management still remains the foundation of success. With the introduction of these new “overlay” services, we are presented with a new consumer of host resources. Ironically, it’s the attention to these abstraction layers that returns us to focusing on individual host components. Correct selection and configuration of these physical components lead to creating a stable high-performing platform, which lays the foundation for the higher services and increased consolidating ratios. This talk goes into details of physical host resource components, such as CPU (NUMA), memory configuration, and next-gen storage components. It also zooms in on how virtual networking and storage services influence virtual machine configuration and physical host design. Info provided in this talk allows you to get better grips on sizing your virtual data center for today’s high-demand workloads, network overlays, and next-gen storage services.
vSphere Core 4 Performance Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis, Part 1: CPU and RAM [INF8780]
Jon Loux, Senior Technical Instructor, VMware
Carl Paterik, Sr. Instructor, VMware
Is your virtual guest experiencing performance problems? In this two-part session, we will explore the proper tools to diagnose the problem in real time, whether it�s CPU, RAM, disk, or network resources. We will also teach you how to use ESXTOP and the VMware vSphere Web client to determine whether your issues exist at the virtual guest layer, the VMware ESXi host layer, or the physical resource layer. Part 1 will focus on intrahost compute resources (CPU and RAM). Part 2 will focus on I/O resources (disk and network) and how to determine if storage issues are inside or outside of your ESXi host. Session content is based in part on questions heard most often from vSphere administrators via the VMware training team.
vSphere Core 4 Performance Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis, Part 2: Disk and Network [INF8701]
Brett Guarino, VMware Education Senior Instructor, VMware
Jon Loux, Senior Technical Instructor, VMware
Is your virtual guest experiencing performance problems? In this two-part session, we will explore the proper tools to diagnose the problem in real time, whether it’s CPU, RAM, disk, or network resources. We will also teach you how to use ESXTOP and the VMware vSphere Web client to determine whether your issues exist at the virtual guest layer, the VMware ESXi host layer, or the physical resource layer. Part 1 will focus on intrahost compute resources (CPU and RAM). Part 2 will focus on I/O resources (disk and network) and how to determine if storage issues are inside or outside of your ESXi host. Session content is based in part on questions heard most often from vSphere administrators via the VMware training team.
vSphere Integrated Containers – Learn how you can run Docker Containers, in Production, Today! [CNA8717]
Karthik Narayan, Sr. Product Manager, VMware Inc.
The rapid adoption of cloud computing has transformed the way businesses deliver software today. Developers can run and deploy apps on the cloud quickly and easily without requiring significant resources from IT operations. However, the pressure to keep everything up and running without compromising security and compliance poses a new set of challenges for IT operations. Thanks to VMware vSphere Integrated Containers, you can have your cake and eat it too. Join us and learn how you can bridge these two worlds by allowing developers to instantiate Docker containers while allowing IT ops to leverage their existing skills, knowledge, and processes to run and maintain containers in production.
vSphere Encryption Deep Dive: Technology Preview [CTO8856]
Michael Foley, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Salil Suri, Group Product Manager, VMware Encryption has become more than just a “checkbox” in a security story. Current events have brought it to the forefront, and it is now becoming a mandatory requirement in business. In this session, as part of a Technology Preview, we will go deep into encryption of virtual disks and vMotion and most importantly, the managability of such solutions. Security isn’t helpful unless it’s easy to manage!
vSphere Identity: Multifactor Authentication Deep Dive[INF8858]
Johnny Ferguson, Product Line Manager, VMware
Michael Foley, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Identity is the corner stone of infrastructure management, and VMware empowers your VMware identities across the data center. Multifactor authentication used to be relegated to VPN login. Now it’s everywhere, from Facebook to WordPress. It is well understood now that username and password is not enough. This session will cover the new authentication options present in VMware vSphere 6 update 2. We will go over the setup and configuration of RSA SecurID and smart card authentication.
vSphere Platform Security Deep Dive [INF8850]
Michael Foley, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
Salil Suri, Group Product Manager, VMware
Security of the VMware vSphere platform has become one of the most popular topics at VMworld in the past couple of years. This session will introduce attendees to the authentication changes that have been made in vSphere 6 update 2 and provide a technology preview of new security features, including disk encryption, SecureBoot for hosts and guests, and hypervisor architecture updates.
Extreme Performance Series: DRS Performance Deep Dive—Bigger Clusters, Better Balancing, Lower Overhead [INF8959]
Sai Inabattini, Member of Technical Staff, vmware
Naveen Nagaraj, Director, VMware
VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler has evolved over the years to provide effective placement and load balancing for your vSphere clusters. DRS has a rich set of statistics is tracked in a cluster to help keep your workloads from running short of resources. In this talk, we will discuss the various aspects of DRS that contribute to its performance and effectiveness of its placement decisions. We will also describe the different sections in the DRS Web client interface and how they can be used to customize DRS to one’s needs and maximize performance of the cluster. Additionally, we will introduce a couple of tech preview features that further enhance the performance and effectiveness of DRS. The goal is to use real-world scenarios to show how DRS can provide the best performance for any cluster. Some of the key highlights of the DRS tech preview feature:
– Much faster virtual machine (VM) management and provisioning operations,
– Optimized resource consumption,
– Highly effective and efficient placement of VMs,
– Highly optimized distribution of load,
– Considering network load for VM placement and load balancing, and
– The ability to predict VM load to resolve contention early on.
VMware Validated Design for Microsegmentation Deepdive[SDDC8445]
Ryan Johnson, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.
Ryan Shondell, Director, R&D, VMware
The traditional model for data center security focuses on primarily on strong perimeter defense but it’s not enough. Modern attacks exploit this perimeter-only defense, hitching a ride with authorized users, then move laterally within the data center perimeter from workload to workload with little or no controls to block their propagation. Many of the recent public breaches have exemplified this – starting with spear phishing or social engineering, leading to malware, vulnerability exploits, command and control, and unfettered lateral movement with in the data center until the attackers find what they are looking for – which is then ex-filtrated or even held for ransom. Attempting to combat this these issues with hardware-based segmentation hasn’t been operationally feasible in traditional hardware-defined data center networks. Using the traditional firewall approach to quickly reaches two key operational barriers – throughput capacity and operations/change management. These barriers have been the demise of most security team’s best-laid plans to realize a comprehensive microsegmentation or “Zero-trust” strategy.
Until now. The data center has seen a software-defined evolution with segmentation that is operationally feasible — Microsegmentation.
In this session we will discuss how the VMware Validated Designs for Microsegmentation leverages the VMware NSX platform to offer several significant advantages over traditional network security approaches – automated provisioning, automated move/add/change for workloads, distributed enforcement at every virtual interface and in-kernel, scale-out firewalling performance, distributed to every hypervisor – even across data center regions.
Best of Both Worlds: Achieving Ultra-Low VM Network Latencies and Extreme Bandwidth Without Compromise [CTO8519]
Liran Liss, Distinguished Architect, Mellanox Technologies
Adit Ranadive, Senior Member of Technical Staff, VMware
In the physical world, network-intensive applications within the domains of high-performance file system access, distributed databases, financial trading, Big Data, and High Performance Computing (HPC) are adopting Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) as a way of significantly increasing the performance of the networking subsystem while decreasing CPU utilization. Today, RDMA can be used only in a virtual environment via Virtual Machine (VM) Direct Path I/O or Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV), both of which disable the use of vMotion and snapshots, two key features of the VMware virtual platform. To fully leverage RDMA in the virtual world, VMware is developing an innovative Para-virtual Remote Direct Memory Access (PVRDMA) technology. PVRDMA provides VMs with an RDMA interface, enabling virtualized network-intensive applications to utilize the full potential of RDMA and fast interconnects, while retaining the benefits of vMotion and snapshots. With PVRDMA, VMs in a cluster can communicate with latencies close to those of non-virtualized operation systems and bandwidths identical to those of the physical RDMA hardware. This is achieved by leveraging the transport services of physical RDMA devices with low overhead while maintaining the consolidation and isolation provided by virtualization. In this session, we provide a technical deep dive of the design and use of PVRDMA, and showcase the performance achievable with this exciting technology.
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